Dragon Quest III is easily one of the most beloved Japanese RPGs of all time, and has accordingly gotten numerous updates, ports and remakes over the years. HD-2D Remake is the latest iteration of the legendary title, giving it not just a visual upgrade, but adding in plenty of new content so that long-time players can enjoy it too. But is this yet another worthy iteration of a legendary title, or is this remake more of an unmaking?
Dragon Quest III, even among western gamers, is regarded as one of the best 8-bit RPGs ever crafted. With a captivating story, an enormous world to explore and working in a bit of Final Fantasy style custom party building, it has a lot to offer for any genre fan. It's also one of the most rereleased games in the series, seeing iterations on Super Famicom, Game Boy Color, Wii, 3DS, numerous mobile ports, and even a prior release on the Wii (based on one of said mobile ports), and it's continued to sell well across all of them.
HD-2D Remake is of course yet another iteration, codeveloped by Artdink (who also worked on Triangle Strategy) and updated to use Square Enix's trademark "HD-2D" style - 2D sprites on 3D-rendered backdrops. I've been pretty critical of it in the past as being overdesigned and honestly pretty ugly (though they did manage to make it look mostly decent in Live a Live's remake). For my money, though, Dragon Quest III is the best looking game to use the style so far; there's no too-close blurring filters or harsh lighting covering up the beautiful spritework, and the 3D backdrops don't have massive pixels the size of dinner plates that just end up being enormously distracting. Even the little details like birds flying off as you approach, each character visibly wielding whatever weapon they have equipped on the battle screen and the hero's shadow being off to one side in dungeons (as they carry the lantern in their right hand) are immaculate. The music (composed by the late Koichi Sugiyama) is now given an orchestral remix and continues to sound fantastic, lending an epic feel to the whole journey.
The game works in many elements of later Dragon Quest games, as well as most of the later iterations of Dragon Quest III itself. One such addition is the Personality system; as the game opens, you're asked a series of questions that determine your character's Personality, which gives bonuses and penalties to their stats (a bit reminiscent of the Virtue quiz from the Ultima franchise). Recruited characters likewise have randomized personalities when created. One can find books along the way to permanently change a character's Personality to another, or temporarily change it by equipping them with certain accessories. A new element to this version is the fact that you have two accessory slots, and only items equipped to the Primary slot will affect a Personality change; equipping it to the secondary slot just gives any stat bonuses and ignores the Personality swap (unless it's a cursed item, which will always cause the change until the item is removed). Stats are also reworked and rebalanced now, with Wisdom actively increasing the power of your spells and Luck now factoring into critical hit and random drop chances rather than just granting a miniscule chance to avoid status effects, so finding a particular Personality to match your character's abilities is now a more careful balancing act.
Another addition are two new classes. Thieves were seen in most of the prior remakes and mostly serve as speedy party members who inflict statuses and cause more frequent random drops from foes. New to HD-2D (but not the series as a whole) is the Monster Wrangler - a class that learns new skills as you find friendly monsters, and indeed has a skill to tell you if such monsters can be found in (or near) the current area. They have average-to-mediocre stats across the board, but also gain an early party-heal skill and can equip whips and boomerangs, making them a relatively versatile class. Some of their later skills are very powerful, like Boulder Toss (hits all enemies for physical damage) and Wild Side, which effectively gives them two attacks per turn. Other classes like the Fighter and Martial Artist likewise have MP and Skills added from later entries in the franchise, letting them use signature moves like Flying Knee or Leg Sweep to give them more combat options.
Friendly monsters lend themselves to another new element to this game (though again, not the series as a whole), the Monster Arena. In the original game it was largely just a game of chance that one could earn money from; that's still true to a degree here, but it's been significantly expanded and now resembles the one from Dragon Quest VIII, letting the player choose a team of three monsters to fight for them and awarding prize bundles should they manage to win a series of matches. The player can give them vague commands, but not take direct control of them, so while there is an element of strategy to it, there's also still a large component of luck. Still, the prize packages are quite nice and can give you a pretty big advantage if you win them as they come, so it's a worthwhile endeavor. As mentioned, the Monster Wrangler's unique skill can help you to locate recruitable monsters, but talking to NPCs will often give useful hints as well.
Exploration has been made a larger component of the game in general, too. The map is now much larger to traverse and it's now dotted with plenty of small hidden areas to explore, often containing treasures, recruitable monsters and NPCs that give various clues (as well as the occasional important item like a Mini-Medal). Numerous "sparkly spots" (as the game's achievement tracker calls them) appear too, giving you a small cache of items and equipment each time you find one, and a trophy for finding at least 100 of them. There are several instances where one is visible but not reachable until much later in the game, though, so you'll have to do a fair amount of exploring and backtracking if you want to collect them all.
Many newer RPG features are added. One is that you can transfer characters between saves, which works as a somewhat limited New Game Plus as you can only transfer one character per file; however, they will retain all of their experience, stats and any equipment you give them, though they cannot gain more experience or transfer their equipment to other characters. Another addition is the Memory system, which lets you 'record' up to 30 NPC lines for later reference so you can keep track of important clues you want to investigate, and an optional map pointer leading you to your next objective. There are also three difficulty settings now; "Dracky Quest" is effectively a story mode; your party cannot die and you deal more damage. "Dragon Quest" (normal difficulty) is the standard setting for DQ3 - fairly leisurely to start, but it ramps up quite a bit in difficulty as the game progresses. Draconian Quest is a much tougher challenge, with tougher enemies that give much less experience and gold, your party inflicting less damage per hit and bosses regenerating health every turn, making it much more difficult than even the original NES release. There is of course also a preorder bonus, giving you a few in-game items available from the start in the form of a few stat-boosting Seeds and some Elevating Shoes. The latter are a mostly-useless endgame accessory that give 1 XP per step taken in hostile areas, but getting them at the start of the game does allow you to gain a few of your starting levels much more quickly, finally giving them some merit.
HD-2D remake may be yet another iteration of a game that's approaching four decades old, but I dare say it's easily its best one yet, keeping everything that made the original great while adding plenty of new content, tweaking some of its annoying quirks and of course giving it a gorgeous presentation, finally proving that HD-2D style to be a worthy one. There's enough here to satisfy modern RPG die-hards as well as long-time franchise fans who have already played through the game multiple times, and of course Dragon Quest itself's immaculate level of polish and simple, yet captivating design returns in full force here. A classic that only got better.
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