Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake (Switch) review "A remade classic offers 50 hours of bliss with some unfortunate grinding at the end. Is it worth your time?"

A few weeks back, I saw someone asking how Square Enix could justify charging full price for Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake when it is just a remake of a really old NES game. The person who asked the question didn’t stick around for the answers anyone gave, no doubt convinced they had just dropped some wisdom for the ages. Their job was done. But in case anyone else wonders, here’s the answer: Artdink and Square Enix have produced a truly ambitious remake that balances the old with the new in delightful ways that are more than equal to any brand-new game made from scratch in 2024. Well… mostly.

Originally released on the Famicom in 1988 in Japan and finally localized in North America four whopping years later under the title Dragon Warrior III, Dragon Quest III represents a high point for the series that it has only occasionally matched. Since then, that early triumph has been revisited on the Super Nintendo, Game Boy Color, and iPhone, among other platforms. And of course, there is this newest jaunt on current hardware, which was built in Unreal Engine and which brings the series just about as close to 3D as you can probably get without actually being three-dimensional.



Towns now feel like wholly individual places, rather than remixes of simple tile sets the series had by the time of DQ3’s originally release used in three games. The game was always ambitious, but now each destination is truly distinct. You enter a new town and there is a camera flyby, so you can see what attractions are on offer. Multi-level buildings line dingy streets. Towers rise above rocky shorelines. Snow piles in drifts around the base of pine trees. Crossing towns takes longer now, but the journey feels more like a proper experience.

In the world outside towns, flat tiles have given way to rolling forests, mountains, marshes and deserts. I actually quite liked the old style presented on the NES. Truly, I did. I wish the developers had included a version of that original game here. But the new visuals work nicely, too. The wilderness feels rugged and dangerous. You have new landmarks at your disposal, such as a hillside where you might go to battle metal slimes, or a vast swath of forest that in the original release lacked the personality it now possesses. Helpfully, the game also has a built-in map you can easily consult to learn where you are, whether you’re strolling across a prairie or venturing through a dungeon.

Dungeons also deserve a special mention. They’re not the straight corridors that for a time were so popular in Square Enix games. They’re not exact duplicates of the NES game layouts, either. Some of them are fiendishly clever, with repeating corridors, floor tiles that change up the direction you move when pressing a button, and so forth. You’ll have to really explore to find all the treasure they contain, even if you choose to consult the handy maps. There’s a nice balance of accessibility for newcomers and old school dungeon design for genre veterans.



Random encounters and scripted battles still take place from the first-person perspective seen in the series from the very beginning, and they remain strictly turn-based. The monsters were originally designed by Akira Toriyama and presented as static drawings. Here, those original images have been tweaked and animated, so that you’ll see monsters visibly suffer from damage when hit by one of your spells. There aren’t a lot of animations beyond just funnels of air rushing across the screen, or flames rising from the ground to lick at your adversary’s feet or whatever, but the effect works. Color palettes change to reflect the time of day, as well, which I thought was a nice touch. If you’re battling at night, the same monsters look a bit darker and more fearsome than they do by broad daylight.

Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake also features a variety of handy convenience features beyond just the maps. If you should fall in combat, you often have choices about the point from which you resume your adventure. Sometimes, you can immediately initiate a rematch with the fiend who fell you. Other times, you might choose to restore the last autosave, losing only the briefest of progress. This is a good option if you want to stay in the dungeon but have realized you’re not quite ready to vanquish the boss. And, of course, you can return to the last place where you saved your progress with the clergy. It’s also possible to change the difficulty setting from a menu while playing the game, with one of three settings available. On the lowest of settings, it’s not even possible to fall in battle. On the default setting, monsters may put up quite a fight, particularly some of the bosses you face near the end of the campaign. I’ll circle back to that in a moment.

A lot of today’s newer players don’t like video games that are just games in video form. There’s increasing demand for an involving story to rival Hollywood’s best efforts. I don’t share that preference, so I never minded when older games didn’t have incredible lore or a lot of dramatic twists and turns. In an apparent nod to the newer generation of players, the developers have used this newest remake as an opportunity to flesh out the original story. There was always the tale of the noble Ortega, but it used to surface very briefly. Now, we get to see more of his character and his reasons for embarking on a quest while leaving his child behind in Aliahan. The effects of the Archfiend Baramos on the land are felt more keenly, as well. There are some tragic side stories that explore love, heroism, and even the recurring adventures of some petty thieves. The writers didn’t use a heavy hand. They mostly worked with what was already there, fleshing things out a bit. I felt they got things mostly right, and they kept the tone consistent with other more recent installments in the series.



Honestly, I like almost everything about Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake. I like the way it lets me drop into a familiar game world that thrilled me as a teen, but now with greatly enhanced visuals and a load of new nooks and crannies to explore. I like collecting monsters to battle in the arena, finding medals in out-of-the-way vases and urns. I enjoy hearing the classic compositions without 8-bit compression. There’s a lot to love, and I have no hesitation recommending the game both to fans of the original and to newcomers who want to experience the best version of the experience that is likely to ever exist. But the endgame and post-game do end things on a sour note, at least for me.

I already mentioned that there are some monsters capable of putting up a fight. And I mentioned they mostly come around near the end of the game. My problem isn’t that they’re difficult. I actually like the fact that unless you choose to consult the maps or drop the difficulty setting, Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake is difficult in familiar ways. The problem is that it sometimes outdoes the original version in that regard. Certain bosses use several area attacks in a single turn, demolishing an ill-prepared party. If you equip exactly the right gear for a rematch, you’ll almost certainly do much better. But there are a few foes that also throw in nasty status ailments. For instance, one monster in the final stretch might put your party to sleep nearly every turn. Even common mobs can cast instant death spells that slay half your party in a single turn. Equipping the right gear can’t block these effects reliably, unless you also have sufficient luck as part of your character builds.



Basically, the game requires you to grind like nobody’s business. I reached the final boss with my hero at level 46, and that encounter did not end well for me. I finally looked around online and found I was under-leveled. The abilities that help with the campaign’s later battles aren’t even learned until your characters reach level 50 or so. The original game did require some grinding, but I don’t remember it ever being quite this bad. And then there is the post-game content, which is basically just one big excuse to continue grinding until your characters hit the maximum level of 99. Throw in class changes (which reset your characters to level 1) and you can see how the grinding might become a total slog. The fix, if you run out of time to deal with that nonsense, is to lower the difficulty setting. But then you go from “too hard unless you grind for hours at a time” to “impossible to lose.” There’s no in-between.

Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake is one of the greatest remakes I’ve ever played, despite the fact I’ve played quite a lot of them over the years. But the difficulty miscalculation in the home stretch is a serious bummer for players who aren’t prepared to get down to the business of grinding a lot. I still recommend the game, because it does so much right up to that point. But if you want to see its closing credits and make the most of the post-game content, set aside some time to wander around in circles fighting metal slimes and such. Much like we did in the old days, I suppose… except now our free time is at a premium because we all have day jobs. Ah, well. Nothing in life is perfect.

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Staff review by Jason Venter (December 30, 2024) Jason Venter has been playing games for 30 years, since discovering the Apple IIe version of Mario Bros. in his elementary school days. Now he writes about them, here at HonestGamers and also at other sites that agree to pay him for his words.