You set out as a customizable protagonist on your 16th birthday, having decided to follow in your father's footsteps and seek to find the Archfiend and restore order to the world. After choosing an appearance "A" or "B" (which is minimally different), the game tells you whether that means you're playing as a male or female protagonist (this has minor implications for equipment later). You'll then take a personality quiz which determines your starting style and growth rates, though you'll have plenty of chances to change it later.
After setting out, you'll stop by Patty's Party Planning Place and recruit allies (unless you're doing a challenge run). You have plenty of customization options for these too, picking their class and gender (no classes are gender-locked) and influencing their starting stats and personalities. Set out with your squad of 3, and you can drop off allies and recruit new ones later if you change your mind about your party composition.
DQ3 HD utilizes a turn-based combat system. You can choose to issue commands directly to your squad, in which case you'll lock in all your commands for the round before you see how any of them play out, or you can choose from presets like "Fight Wisely," "Focus on Healing," or "Watch My Back." While your instinct might be to take full control, the AI is very good, and importantly, will evaluate the immediate state of the round, for example, switching to a heal instead of an offensive spell if someone has taken heavy damage since you started the round.
Winning requires carefully understanding the best way to manage your resources like HP and MP and when to go offensive vs defensive. There are over 100 unique enemies in the game (plenty are just palette swaps, though they have unique move sets, this stays faithful to the original), with most dungeons featuring around 10 different ones, plus unique challenging bosses.
There aren't side quests in the traditional sense, but there are two game-long collection quests. More on those in a later section.
The HD-2D art style continues to impress. The original game here was released on Nintendo's original 8-bit hardware, completely a top-down 2D view in the limited color palette of the time. And while the original soundtrack was good for its time, it was also limited by the hardware. While you can't hear the pictures below, you can check out some of the other posts for this game that have videos with sound.
As a remake, the challenge is to recreate the original in a modern era, adding new aspects and improving things that haven't aged well, while still being faithful to the original. In the latter category, it's extremely faithful -- the overall scenario has not changed, you still go from point A to B to C like you have in every prior version; but what you'll find is sometimes things aren't exactly what you expect. New bosses have been added, and then there's the entirely new character class which could change up all your strategies. Besides the new class, non-magic classes now get "Abilities" at certain levels, giving them something to do besides just hit things with a sword/axe/claws/etc.
It's hard to say what "faithful" really means -- this game has had many previous releases and editions, from NES, to SNES, to GBC, to a Mobile version, and a Switch version -- every version tweaking something. But all the familiar Dragon Quest series monsters are here, from slimes to green dragons and everything in between.
I mentioned earlier there are two game-long collection quests. One of those is to find hidden mini-medals, the other to recruit friendly monsters. These were a little tedious, but some of that relates to my party choice at the beginning of the game. Had I taken a thief and a monster wrangler (the new class), I would have learned a free ability by level 10 to tell me how many treasures were left on the current floor of the dungeon or town, or if there was a monster nearby (even if it's not available at this time of day). I did not pick up these abilities until much later, meaning I had to retread a lot of ground with a checklist. Still, completing both of these, besides just being for the platinum trophy, will unlock the way to the final post-post game challenge, where you can really test your mettle in extremely difficult fights.
The game features 3 difficulties, "Dragon Quest" is the normal mode, "Dracky Quest" (a dracky is a recurring enemy in the series) is the easy mode, and "Draconian Quest" is a hard difficulty. There's no fine-tuning, and that's a shame, because some players might find normal just a tad too much if they're not used to this style of game, but Dracky Quest makes it literally impossible to lose, as attacks will never reduce your HP below 1. Personally, I played on Dragon Quest except when I wanted to grind some levels for post-game, at which point just doing it on Dracky Quest made it go faster, since I easily could beat the enemies and heal up and go back to the spot where I was grinding, or I could just skip having to leave because I didn't care about running out of HP. Even on the higher difficulties though, the game auto-saves after every encounter, making a game over far less painful than it was back in the old days.
While some players not familiar with the series may be put off by things like random encounters and a turn-based strategy instead of a more modern action RPG style, fans of the classic game will delight in seeing it come to life in this modern take with gorgeous graphics and a full orchestral soundtrack. With 9 playable classes besides the hero, you've got plenty of choices for how you'll tackle the enemies in your path. Highly recommended for anyone looking for a classic JRPG feel.
