Dragon Quest III: HD-2D should be the blueprint for pixel-JRPG remakes
Note: The following is from my personal website https://vidyathoughts.com/.
Time for a bit of an embarrassing confession. I don’t have a lot of experience with Dragon Quest. Despite having this website dedicated mostly to old-school turn-based Japanese RPGs, I had only beaten two titles from the old-school turn-based Japanese RPG franchise. Those two games are DQ VIII and XI. I’m an outsider, a tourist in an unfamiliar land.
When it was announced several years ago that Dragon Quest 3 would be receiving the HD-2D treatment, I was pretty excited for an excuse to play a certified classic. DQ3 has quite a reputation, it’s almost like a Final Fantasy VI where people from all walks of life who are into all sorts of different game genres have an affinity for it. It’s a special title. And it was time to try it for myself.
As a first-time player in 2024, my takeaways are probably pretty common. “This game has a pretty barebones story, the battle system is pretty simplistic, the difficulty can be a little unfair at times and there is an expectation for grinding.” In short, it feels old. It feels like a game from a bygone era. I wouldn’t expect to pick up Dragon Quest XII and have it feel like this game.
Does that sound negative? Because it’s not. That is exactly what they should have done with this title. By keeping all of the dated elements, this feels like a title true to its roots. It feels like I got to play Dragon Quest III like people back in 1989 got to play Dragon Quest III. The sense of discovery, the difficulty, all of that stuff is still there. It just depends on how the player wants to interact with it.
I spent a lot of time looking at the Final Fantasy Pixel Remasters on this site. In the very first one, I made a note about how it’s imperative that players at least try out the original NES version of the game. The ‘aged’ mechanics are what gives that game an identity. Final Fantasy I wasn’t a game you beat for the story, it was a whole adventure about item conservation and discovery.
The Pixel Remasters sanded off a lot of edges to the old school experience. There was a lot less grinding and it felt like a lot of battles that I remember being slightly unfair, uh, weren’t. It felt like they were altering things so people who were into later entries of the franchise could boast ‘I have finished all the Final Fantasy games.’ And that’s fine, I think those are solid ways to experience the classics for people that just want an idea of what they were like.
But playing those games in 2024, it didn’t feel like I was teleported into the past. All of the changes to how the game feels are shoehorned into the game itself. I had never cleared any version of Final Fantasy III prior to writing my recap of the Pixel Remaster version and even then, something about it felt modern to me. I could see the soul of the original in what I was playing, but it would feel too ‘advanced’ if I were to somehow port it back in time.
DQIII HD2D doesn’t feel like this to me. Everything that I associate with old-school JRPGs is still there. That’s not to say they just prettied up the graphics and shipped it out, there’s definitely some QoL features implemented. You have difficulty modes, waypoints and autosaves for instance. If you don’t WANT that grindy experience, just turn on easy and go for more of a ‘point A to point B’ thing like you’d get out of a grindy JRPG.
Want to be lost for ages and rely solely on NPCs to figure out where to go? Want to experience the frustration of walking through a dungeon only to get blasted by the final boss and lose all your progress? You can do that because the game gives you multiple options on how you can play. You can turn off waypoints, you can go for an immediate rematch after losing, you can reload an autosave, you can respawn at a church and lose half of your money or you can just reload the last save you made. It’s a more customized experience, but you can basically fine-tune your immersion. How much do you WANT this to feel like an old ass game?
This feeling extends over to the boss battles. While the combat system feels very simple, the bosses are an endurance test that really make the player think about each and every action. Should I take a turn off of my offense to buff everyone up? I think I have maybe one or two turns left alive, if I go all-out on offense now, can I win? Every major boss encounter after a certain point feels like a major trial of what you’ve learned to that point. It never feels like ‘well here’s a boss because there’s supposed to be a boss at the end of a dungeon.’ That’s impressive.
And I will be straight up with you, some of these bosses are unfair. King Hydra, one of the final bosses in the game, is straight up bullshit. It has three actions per turn in combat and can often disable your party (via sleep or fear), which prevents them from acting or healing for prolonged periods of time. You can equip accessories to ward off things like sleep, but it’s not like a modern game where you’d equip an accessory and it just always does what it says, sometimes your rousing ring won’t prevent you from falling asleep.
And when I say sometimes, I mean damn near 50% of the time. In this fight I had a strategy – the main character and my warrior would attack for as much as they could while my healer and other magic would focus on buffs and keeping the party alive. Seems basic, right? The inability to prevent sleep 100% of the time resulted in healers falling asleep when I needed heals, which required my combat units to shift into healing roles.
The boss would also heal up after every round of combat, so the player needs to constantly cause damage in order to make any progress. So I had to constantly change tactics in battle based on what felt like random status effects. And to make matters worse, the boss had an ability to just completely shut off magic after a certain point. So when this happened, it was important that I had items that could heal the whole party AND items that could damage the boss just so I could tread water until I could use magic again.
It felt completely unfair at times. It’s one of the most tedious bosses in the game, but you know what? Every single attempt at it was exciting. As my HP and MP trickled down, I could see the boss slowly weakening and each turn I was asking myself ‘how much more does this mother fucker have left?’ I was both enraged and enthralled. And when I finally won, it felt like I had overcome a major obstacle. It was a cause for celebration.
This isn’t the only boss in the game I felt like this about either. There were several encounters where I had no idea how to continue, but through looking at the mechanics of the game and just experimenting in fights, I was able to come up with strategies and persevere over what felt impossible. In a lot of re-releases of classic games, they tone this stuff down. But here, it feels like they celebrate it.
If I wanted to just get on with things and finish the game, I could have turned the difficulty down to easy mode. I think having options like that in games like this is important, because in a modern sense people expect to finish their games. It’s less about ‘overcoming a challenge’ and more about ‘seeing everything there is to offer.’ And there’s nothing wrong about that approach. But that’s not what I’m looking for, so I’m glad this game gives you options instead of making the ‘casualized’ experience the main way to play.
They even added things for experienced players. There’s voice acting for specific important scenes and there’s a harder difficulty mode that lessens gold and exp earned from battle and there are also additional little story elements placed into the narrative. It’s not anything game changing, but it’s a little bit extra for people who have played this game for 30+ years.
I think the picking-and-choosing when to use voice work is an exceptionally good call because it makes ‘larger’ moments in the game feel that much larger. Since most of the rest of the game is just text, you get a bit of a mix of old and new with that. The authentic text-experience most of the way with a little touch of something new. Do you know how cool that would be in a game like Final Fantasy IV?
I’m inexperienced with the original Dragon Quest 3. I played a little bit of it on Gameboy way back in the day but I bounced right off. After playing this version of the game, I feel no need to go back and play the original version of it to see what’s different, what edges were sanded off. It feels like they took the original game, made it absolutely beautiful, and embraced what made it work in the first place.
Here is hoping there’s something to those HD 2D Final Fantasy VI rumors.
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