“Behind the new paint job is a frustrating experience that shows it's true age at every possible turn"
PC | PS5 | SWITCH | XBOX SERIES
HOW I PLAYED: I played on PS5. I bought a physical copy.
STORY — 10/20
INTRO (2)
The game starts off with a brief character creation. You can select your appearance as male or female and the difficulty of the game. You then gain control of The Hero in a random forest after awakening from an apparent dream. You hear a voice and are drawn towards it. This leads you to a personality quiz from a disembodied voice.
CUTSCENES (3)
The cutscenes do a fine job of moving the story along. The cutscenes use the main game engine and rely on flashbacks a fair amount.
WORLD BUILDING (2)
There's not much going on to make you feel connected to the world. NPCs have their basic dialogue and will make comments about events or items in the game which is very standard for this genre. This might have been groundbreaking in 1988; news flash - we have Elden Ring now.
You can collect books in bookshelves throughout the town and these books have the ability to alter your party member's personality. I didn't find a use for this. I guess, you could say the monster collecting and battling -which we'll touch on it a bit - is adding to the game's world, but this side content was just fascinatingly underwhelming that I wouldn't say it counts. The world feels cohesive enough but not bubbling with life.
OVERALL STORY (3)
The Hero is on a journey to follow in his father's footsteps and beat the main villain. You collect some orbs along the way. The majority of progression will have you going from town to town, meeting someone in distress, finding a cave or hideout nearby and beating the bad guy to help the person in distress. It's a tough sell in 2025. It's super fetch-questy too. I also loathed the fact that your entire party is given to you within the first 5 minutes of the game. WHERE"S THE FUN IN THAT!? Where are the characters I meet along the way who's destiny is intertwined with my own? Where's the adventure? I rent them, as it turns out, and can just deposit them back at the Tavern like borrowed power tools. Fuck, this was dull. This resulted in a complete lack of any sense of real emotion, camaraderie and character building which are all staples of this genre. The party members also have zero dialogue and just follow you around like sheep. This really irked me. Did I mention the Hero is also a mute?
GRAPHICS — 13/15
CHARACTER MODELS (4)
These are still pixel animated sprites at the end of the day. They look great. If only we could admire them in combat too!!
ENVIRONMENTS (5)
I should come as no surprise that the graphics are the game's main selling point. Like driving through a French countryside; just achingly pretty. The juxtaposition of the pixel character models only serves to elevate your surroundings as well. There's so much variety, from dark caves to brightly lit castles, adorable villages and glowing shrines.
SPECIAL FX (4)
Battles have a "pop" to them. They're exciting to watch. The FX of your spells and enemy death animations all look really awesome. There's a really obvious level of polish here.
AUDIO — 9/15
AMBIENCE (3)
Only because I know the great Koichi Sugiyama has better tracks under his belt (Dragon Quest VIII just to name one) that I didn't give this a 5. That being said, the tracks that do hit are really stellar. They transport you to another place. I did find there to be a lack of variety, however. I was hearing the same tunes over and over in a lot of different types of locales which felt a bit lazy. A handful of these tracks I also recognized from other Dragon Quest games, too.
BOSS MUSIC (2)
I counted two total boss themes in the game; the final two bosses have their own themes. The rest of the boss battles use the same music as the random encounters. I don't need a FromSoftware: new song for each boss; more variety would definitely have been welcomed, though. At least give us a different tune for standard bosses than what we've already hear 9000 times battling random encounters.
SOUND DESIGN (4)
Pokémon Shining Pearl had the worst sound design I can remember in recent memory. Navigating any text or menus in that game was like stepping on glass for your ears. It made me really value good sound design in games. Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake is the complete opposite. The sound design fits with the game so perfectly that you don't really notice it - to me that is a good sign that it is done right. It just gels with the vibe of the game. Spells sound really powerful and voice acting was overall really good. I especially liked that different parts of the world had different accents for the NPCs; they often spoke with broken english and poor grammar which was really charming.
PERFORMANCE — 9/10
FRAME RATE (4)
You can switch between performance and graphic mode and see the change instantaneously which was pretty cool. Those are the only graphic options.
STABILITY (5)
The game performed and responded really well. I don't know if it's worth mentioning, but at the time of writing this review, the game is still on version 1.0.0. Nice work.
GAMEPLAY — 22/40
CONTROLS (3)
You'll start on foot, then acquire a ship and eventually be able to fly over the whole map. Walking is good, the boat is alright, and flying sucks. It's so clunky! The controls for flying are unnecessarily rigid and the location of your character to your location on the map was always off which felt super janky and unfinished.
MECHANICS (3)
The ability to "optimize" equipping the best gear from your inventory is nothing new and it was a welcome addition here. In the game, you have a certain amount of slots for each character to equip items from your party's main Bag. The Auto-Equip mechanic pulls directly from Bag which was a nice time saver. There's also a function called Handy Heal All, which instantly recovers the entire party as effectively as possible.
Each of your characters has a basic class like Priest, Warrior Mage etc. Mid way through the game you have the option to essentially change classes at the tradeoff of going back to level 1. Changing classes however allows you to learn new abilities while retaining all your old ones. So you could create a powerful Warrior who also heals or casts spells, for example. This can lead to some really powerful combinations if handled correctly.
PACING (3)
The game will tell you you need a certain item to progress. Sometimes you will simply go to the location and the item is given to you with no resistance or expectation. My god... Just give me the fucking thing next time instead of making me cross half the continent. At least put it behind a puzzle. Anything.
For the most part, the pacing was pretty good, as the map has an indicator of where to go next at almost all times. I did get stuck a few times when there were no more spinning icons on my map to follow. You have hints in your menu but they can only get you so far.
I read quite a few people online complaining about the frequency of random encounters. I didn't have a real problem with those as much as I did with the overall difficulty tuning. The game comes with 3 difficulty options which you can adjust at any time. The standard difficulty was too hard for my taste - I was getting absolutely wrecked at certain points when I felt like I had definitely done sufficient grinding. So I switched to the lowest difficulty which I still found to be challenging, but, ended up staying there for the rest of the play though as it offered one key feature: this level prevents any party member from dying and leaves you with a minimum of 1HP no matter what. The battles in this game were painful enough so I this allowed me to just coast through for the story and the visuals.
The final third of the game is offensively over padded and drawn out. It really felt like they tried to "make it feel epic". Holy crap you do a lot of battling. I was getting frustrated and just wanted to see the credits. I guess the dungeon designs were pretty cool, though. I think I had lost perspective by this point.
UI/UE
The menus and things of that nature work really well and I found they elevated the experience. The UI in combat however is about as useful as wet Kleenex. What kind of experience do you expect me to have if I'm not given to tools to succeed?
*Note to developer* I get that this is a 36 year old game at it's core and you were trying to be as faithful to the original as possible but gaming has come a LONG way in that time and there are certain things that are just non-negotiable if you're making a game. The status ailments in combat for a JRPG has to be right at the top of that list. The decision to omit that information is absolutely baffling to me. I have no idea who is poisoned, asleep, confused, paralyzed, dazzled. Nothing. Only at the end of each turn for a few seconds when the camera pans out do I get to see the status ailments or buffs for the party. I essentially have to memorize them at this point. But wait, if the status of anyone changes during this time I still can't see shit until the next turn! The rest of the battle its just the names and HP.
There's hardcore and then there's Dark Souls Soul Level 1 broken sword hilt No Hit. You don't need to make it harder for yourself on purpose. I feel like that's what they did here. To make it retain the "old school" feel. Look. We just want to enjoy ourselves. If you're going to make more games like this PLEASE do us a favour and give us the decency to have at least the bare fundamentals! It would be like making a first person shooter and not seeing how much amo you have at any given time. Or a platformer but the floor might be there. I might not. I have no idea because I CAN'T SEE IT.
BOSS QUALITY
Really basic. I don't know, there't not a lot to say about the bosses. They felt like visually bigger enemies I was finding in the random encounters. There's also a couple of them that you fight more than once which I'm never a fan of. One of them you fight three times - four if you count it finally changes forms! They do the job of making progress checkpoints for you.
ENEMY VARIETY
The underworld should have its own set of new enemies. I'm fine if there are reskins within the underworld but it should not contain the same enemies I've already been seeing the whole game for 20+ hours. The rest of the enemy design wasn't bad. Seeing monsters from other DQ games was endearing.
GAMEPLAY VARIETY
Aside from the turn based battles which is going to the vast majority of your core gameplay, there are minimal puzzles to solves throughout the world (I can only remember one or two throughout the entire game, come to think of it). There's a monster arena where you can battle monsters you collect throughout the world. This was a lame distraction which inevitably led to the same style of combat I had already doing in random encounters. This is just a straight up illusion of diversity.
REPLAYABILITY
I think there's actually an OK amount of content here to experiment with a few times over. You could try to mix and match different classes for your party each time and make more of an effort recruiting monsters to battle in the arena. Actually, I take that back. Battling in the arena was dumb.
The game offers some additional content once you've beat the game the first time. There are optional superbosses, weapons and armor to unlock and new areas to explore.
BONUS — 0/4
OVERALL — 63/100
FAIR
[Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake] I've been a fan of this genre since I was a teenager (early 2000s). I'd even go so far as to say that this is the genre that made me fall in love with gaming. This past year I played through all six of the Final Fantasy pixel remasters and found myself immersed, engaged and entertained. I can't say the same for Dragon Quest III HD-2D. I actually gave up after my first half hour because of how disgusted I was with the lack of a party and the design of the battles. I couldn't have imagined pouring 20-30 hours into such a soulless game. I ended up waiting a couple of weeks and tried again. I found ways to appreciate the game that allowed me to get to the end and write about it.
It's really hard to recommend this game especially because it's already been remade once before as Dragon Quest III: The Seeds of Salvation (2014). We're judging a game that is over thirty years old at this point. I'm not mad at it but I'm also not going to handicap it for qualities that it lacks. On top of that this isn't even the best Dragon Quest game. Not even close. This is not a good entry game if you're new to the series, either.
To sum it all up, I feel like this game should really have just been left alone. It doesn't belong in this world. It doesn't stand a chance. I'm curious about the past but I don't want to drive to work in a horse and carriage even if it has Apple Car Play and heated seats - It's still a horse and carriage. Behind the new paint job is a frustrating experience that shows it's true age at every possible turn.
TLDR: 63/100 Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake delivers stunning visuals and solid technical performance but fails to modernize its gameplay and narrative for today’s standards. While the environments are beautifully rendered, the gameplay lacks depth, with repetitive turn-based battles, frustrating controls, and uninspired pacing. The story feels outdated, with dull fetch quests and party members who lack personality and emotional connection. Audio design is decent but repetitive, and the absence of key modern JRPG mechanics like visible status ailments hinders the experience. Despite its nostalgia factor and some class customization options, the game struggles to justify its remake status and remains a frustratingly outdated experience.
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