When you meet someone for the first time, you don’t tend to start by revealing their personality and revealing their deepest flaws, but Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake doesn’t hesitate to talk you down and get right to the point. . This is an old-school JRPG where it matters how you approach your stats and won’t be holding your hand to guide you through it. There are dragons. There are missions. And there are many deaths.

To be fair Square Enixlike that to try Holding his hand a bit as he starts a party and travels the world to fight the archdemon Baramos. You’re given difficulty options and combat pacing adjustments, but it also stays true to the core combat and story systems of the original Dragon Quest III. Being a remake of a game originally released in the late ’80s, it feels inherently dated despite all the changes. It boldly tries to walk that fine line of appealing to nostalgia while adapting to modern conveniences, but it often stumbles as it leans more towards the side of the original game.

The HD-2D revision is stunning. Blocky sprites were replaced with ones with much higher detail, and they were placed on 3D backgrounds with a camera tilt that still retained the proportions of the old sprite style. It looks like how you remember the old games playing – nostalgia spectacles come true – but the new autosave feature more generally adds a greater number of locations to save, objective markers to help guide you, and an easier way to teleport between visited locations. There are also a few new features like some extra story chapters, monster battle arenas, and even a new Monster Wrangler class that you can add to your team; this allows you to learn different monster attacks and turn them back on your enemies. However, once you start a few fights things start to look a little rusty.

An old-fashioned turn-based RPG, the fights involve throwing attacks and spells etc. before watching them crush a crowd of monsters. involves choosing. It’s a lot like Square Enix’s past Final Fantasy games, but Dragon Quest has never really tried to reinvent itself over the years by adding more advanced systems or new twists on familiar concepts. Instead, it’s just the age-old exchange of blows, and in Dragon Quest III in particular, you fight a lot more monsters than you’re used to in other RPGs.

Of course, since there are more enemies attacking you at once, they deal more damage in the process, and healing is a real issue in this entire HD-2D Remake. To save time entering commands yourself, you can let each of your party members choose their own attacks, and even try directing them with tactical profiles like ‘conserve MP’ or ‘do everything’. But ultimately, you’ll either have to switch to entering everything individually to keep everyone alive, or do a lot of level grinding to have any chance of completing battles unscathed.

I tried lowering the difficulty from the normal ‘Dragon mode’ to ‘Dracky mode’, but this did more to prevent me from dying than to actually change the difficulty of the fights. It’s no fun knowing that the only reason you get through battles is because you can’t get below 1 HP – although grinding and barely making it would still be preferable to endlessly grinding EXP just to get through a difficult path safely. Open the part of the world map to the next town or dungeon. Sure, it might be easier, and maybe I’m a coward, but I certainly enjoy the illusion of a fair fight rather than being dragged by my hair.

It also doesn’t make much sense – why add a mod where you can’t die as an option but can’t turn off random encounters? Just as wearing shoes makes walking easier, I cannot claim that compromises have been made to make things easier. But it also seems like an oversight not to take things further. Square Enix’s latest Final Fantasy Pixel Remasters and Switch release Final Fantasy IXFor example, you did this very well; You can enjoy the pure version if you want, but you can also oil the wheels a bit by adding a bunch of options to speed things up, avoid random encounters, and make sure all your hits land a lot of hits. damage. Everyone can enjoy the view even if you take the maximum hit with the cable car to get there.

I still can’t understand how much patience it takes to master these types of games as a child; Is it ever fun to struggle to get ahead? I understand that Dragon Quest is all about keeping things as they are, but adding more options doesn’t negate the success of the stripped-down approach.

Luckily, exploring the world is a joy, even if you’re dragged into a fight every 30 seconds. The story that guides you may not be particularly complex (you’ll often be asked to go to specific locations to retrieve an object or fight someone), but the sense of adventure remains strong throughout, as every nook and cranny is packed. with secrets. The map is covered with hidden spots and treasures of shiny items, and the towns are full of loot and hidden monsters to recruit for the new battle arena. There’s still nothing quite as satisfying as that old-school feeling of breaking into someone’s house and ransacking their closets for herbs and armor.

Once you get a boat, the world really opens up and your adventures may require a more free-form approach, but HD-2D Remake’s lack of a guiding hand is felt even more keenly here. In this part of the game, you’re tasked with collecting orbs from around the world, but each one usually requires you to retrieve an item from somewhere else first, and it’s never explained where that is. Even with all the objective tokens available, the temptation to get a guide to the original game is extremely strong. Even then, there’s still a lot of backtracking and teleporting around the map to find what you’re after. It’s like a puzzle where you have to put partially completed sections together and hope that the next spot has the missing piece you need to put it all together. Admittedly, there’s a very satisfying twist that makes all the nonsense worth it, but the game will test your patience to get there.

Other additions, such as the remastered music, are lovely and add an extra, soaring layer to that sense of adventure and discovery, but others feel unnecessary. Key sections of dialogue are now fully voiced, which sounds nice in theory, but they rarely add anything to the experience. It also leads to some pretty awkward situations with accents. Alefgard is loosely based on our world, with different areas based on places like a research town full of Americans and a glorious city of Florence where everyone speaks with cartoonish Italian accents. There’s also a town full of white people who speak with thick, stereotypical Indian accents; This will definitely raise some questioning eyebrows despite the source material being over 35 years old.

Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake left me with very mixed feelings. It dazzles as a remake of a classic; this game does a great job of capturing the feeling of nostalgia and fitting it into a modern screen. His story may be old and simple, but there is comfort in it. I may no longer have the patience for random encounters, but even if I was regularly muttered by monsters, it was still mostly fun to play with such a wide range of weapon types, class types, and stat-affecting personalities.

This sense of preserving its history is both the game’s blessing and curse. For every change that improves on the original, there are points where it doesn’t improve enough and gets left behind in the process. There’s still a good game to be discovered here, and if you’ve played the original you’ll definitely enjoy this new version. If you’re a more casual Dragon Quest or JRPG fan looking to check out a classic, you may well find yourself bouncing off the game when the battles start to feel a little challenging.

A copy of Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake was provided for review by publisher Square Enix.