Similarly, a lot of the quality-of-life updates to this remake appear to stem from saving your time by making sure you don’t get quite so lost as you would in previous versions of Dragon Quest III, something I personally appreciate. The first and biggest such feature is an optional objective marker. Coupled with you automatically receiving maps for any location you’re currently in, the objective marker saves you from wandering around and potentially losing your way by straight up saying “Go here” or “Talk to this NPC”. This might be too hand-holdy for some, so it’s optional for a reason, but the objective marker knows when to ease off. In one town, the objective was just to “explore” until I organically stumbled into something that moved the story along. In another town, it told me which specific pot in a house full of pots I had to interact with to continue. In ultra-specific situations like that, I’m glad the marker had my back. Once the story opens up, multiple objective markers pop up on the world map, letting you reach them in any order you like. You still need to look for secret treasures and dungeons by yourself, so even with the marker active, you gotta put some legwork in. 

Another interesting feature is Recall. At any point out of combat, you can press a button (Options on PS5) to save the dialogue of the conversation you last had, or are currently having, into the Recall menu, including major cutscenes. You can then access these convos to remind yourself of hints that NPCs frequently dole out about optional quests, or the main plot itself if you choose to play without the objective marker. Recall is a fantastic way of keeping notes, but the fact that you can only store 30 conversations at a time means if you rely on it, you’ll be spending some time deleting them one by one. Also, you need to remember to quickly press the button during or after conversations you only see once, including important scenes, or else you’re never going to see them again.

While this remake has many exciting additions to the original game – including brand new mandatory bosses that help flesh out the story – what this remake highlights is that Dragon Quest III already had many mechanics and story beats that inspired giants in the genre, but there’s even more cool mechanics that haven’t been pillaged by its peers (yet!). Switching classes resets you to level 1 but only halves your stats, so you’re stronger than ever. You can find monsters just chilling around the world who you can befriend, but they’ll run away if you’re too stinky, noisy or visible. These monsters can then be used to fight for you at a monster-only coliseum, plus there’s a class that learns abilities from these monsters. Your protagonist and party members all receive a randomised personality that dictates their stat growth and what classes are a good match for them. These personalities can be changed temporarily with accessories or permanently with consumable books. These mechanics don’t feel old, they’re still delightful to play around with and have your options shaped by.

The AI system from later games is reverse-engineered into this remake, where you can just let your party handle regular encounters on their own, according to the AI presets you choose. Helping fights go even smoother are battle speed settings, Normal, Fast, and Ultra-Fast. For all but the first couple of fights, I went with Ultra-Fast during my time with the game, for one unfortunate reason.

My guess as to why the HD-2D Remake of Dragon Quest III is coming out before its two predecessors, “chronological order” aside, is that this is the best game of the three. It’s the most feature-rich, it commits the most to a story, and other things the first two games flirt with, but never fully commit to, due to the growing pains of being early entries in a now-enormous genre. Still, even though the marketing for this remake spoils its connection to Dragon Quest I, the game itself begins to hint at it in the second half, but doesn’t say it outright until after you beat the final boss.