Dragon Quest is the comfort food of JRPGs. It's a safe, reliable, and enduringly classic franchise that constantly toes the line between being creative and feeling incredibly safe. It's easy to call it generic, but Dragon Quest is the template for everything else. To this day, Dragon Quest III is one of the most enduring games ever made, with multiple remakes and re-releases over time. Dragon Quest III: HD-2D Remake might be the latest remake, but it's also arguably the best, creating an excellent blend of modern and old-school. However, it's not quite able to escape the fact that it's an old game with a new coat of paint.

Dragon Quest III: HD-2D Remake puts you in the shoes of the child of the great hero Ortega, who left years ago to defeat the evil monster Baramos but was lost to a volcano during a fight. Now, years later, you've taken up the sword and have decided to set out and defeat Baramos. Along the way, you'll meet a variety of weird and silly characters and save multiple kingdoms from danger. You know, classic RPG stuff.

"Classic RPG stuff" sums up Dragon Quest III's plot really well. Your protagonist is entirely mute, and your party is comprised of similarly mute create-a-characters. You'll go to towns with basic problems and solve them primarily through beating up colorful but cartoonishly evil villains. This is RPG plots at their absolute most basic and by the numbers. That said, it's somewhat amplified by having charming and funny characters and towns, and there's enough humor to keep the game from feeling dull. This is a game to play for the sense of adventure, not the plot.

Dragon Quest III's basic structure is pretty much identical to the NES original. You'll follow the same basic plot beats and structure, which involves traveling between towns and talking to NPCs to find clues about where to go next. It's a fairly linear game but eventually does branch out, and you're encouraged to figure out where to go rather than being directly told. It has a very different kind of pacing from modern RPGs, where you'll often go hours without a single boss encounter or dungeon.

The game adds some new features to make things easier. You can now save and revisit NPC dialogue, so you can better keep track of details. If you dislike that, you can also activate an objective marker that shows the location of the next plot point. This saves you from having to talk to NPCs (and invalidates things like the Echo Flute) but won't show side-quests, so you'll still need to poke around if you want to find quests.

For the most part, the side-quests are similar, but several of them have been significantly expanded. For example, the Sword of Kings has gone from being fairly trivial to obtain to something that requires completing several individual tasks. There's also a large collection of new optional objectives. This includes collecting monsters, who can fight in the Monster Arena and power up the new Monster Wrangler class, as well as a huge selection of new secret spots and special item locations that reward you with an absurd amount of equipment and items.

The secret spots are odd in that they make hunting for medals — the previous game-spanning optional objective — feel pointless. I got all but the very highest end of medal equipment from random spots on the map. If you spend time poking around the map, you can find multiple copies of very rare items. For example, I found multiple copies of Garters and Guns N' Buns magazines, which provide the valuable Vamp personality, even one of which was considered valuable enough to be a rare end-game item. There are also a couple of new bosses, which add some bonus spice to the game.

Dragon Quest is functionally the granddaddy of JRPG combat, and HD-2D Remake doesn't really change that. You have the absolute minimum of a JRPG combat system. You select actions, ranging from regular attacks to using items to casting spells and abilities that cost MP. Once your actions are selected, both allies and enemies attack, and this goes on until the fight is over. There's nothing more complex than that, and Dragon Quest III occasionally straddles the line between charmingly straightforward and feeling bare-bones, depending on your tolerance for classic gameplay. Your party is comprised of custom-created characters whose personalities determine their stats, but you can freely customize and swap party classes.

HD-2D Remake attempts to increase the complexity by adding abilities, which are separate from spells. Every class unlocks abilities as they level up. Some abilities were spells in previous versions of the game, like the Padfoot skill, while others are brand-new combat spells. This means every class now has a real use for MP in combat, and you'll probably only rarely use the regular attack option beyond the early game. The addition of abilities is a straightforward buff to all of the non-magic classes. Just about every physical class becomes a lot better. Mages still have access to powerful AoE attacks and potent support spells long before the physical classes do. Basically, the entire cast is significantly stronger. Even the lackluster Gadabout has some incredibly useful abilities, like a low-cost Slap that removes most status effects. I don't think there's a bad class now, beyond Gadabout's occasional random chance to waste an action.

These new abilities also throw off the balance a bit. Perhaps nowhere is this more recognizable than the new Monster Wrangler class, who seems above and beyond better than anything else in the game. It gains access to a lot of extremely useful skills, including an extremely potent AoE heal early on in the game, as well as some absurdly powerful low-cost multi-hit attacks. One attack gets stronger with the more monsters you collect, and by the endgame, it was able to out-damage the entire rest of the party because it was doing 500+ damage at a time.

One weird element of the combat, which is true of some older Dragon Quest games, is that the auto-battle feature is usually an improvement over manually electing abilities. When auto-battling, the AI gets to break the rules of the game and select actions during its turn instead of beforehand. This means that if your healer is set to auto-battle, they will be able to instantly heal and respond to an ally who was hurt before their turn comes around, or they can use an attack spell if nobody needs healing. Likewise, the AI is extremely good at picking the most efficient and useful attacks for most scenarios, which means that allies set to AI will be better at targeting enemies than manual ones. They'll even use items your characters have in the inventory!

The result is that, beyond occasionally manually controlling a magic-using class to do buffs/debuffs, it's optimal to keep your characters on auto-battle. The new abilities and actions only make this more so, as it means the characters tend to choose the exact moves and abilities needed to kill enemies with a minimal MP expenditure. This can make the game's combat feel a tad bland since you end up watching the computer fight more often than your actual guys. You can choose to play this yourself, but it feels weird for that to be a negative.

There's something still very addictive about Dragon Quest III. It's a bizarrely charming old-school game with a lot of weird little details and ideas. Each new area you explore is distinct, whether it involves finding a hidden mirror to reveal a secret monster or proving your worth by hunting down robbers. A lot of the scenarios can feel clichéd, but it's different when they've invented the cliché.

HD-2D Remake's biggest problem is that it is a really shiny coat of paint on an NES game. It still feels like the NES original, with somewhat convoluted objectives, an incredibly simple plot, basic boss battles, and everything else you might expect. This isn't a criticism because it is exactly what the game promised to be, but it does feel like a missed opportunity to flesh out and improve some of the ideas. It's a very loyal and faithful remake, but it means you're going to approach it as more of a user-friendly, old-school game and not something notably more modern.

The graphical updates are quite nice. The HD-2D style makes this easily the best-looking version of Dragon Quest III to date, with large and colorful sprites and beautiful environments and backgrounds. Some of the animations are rather simple, but they do their job well, and it's a massive step up from the visuals of the other recent Dragon Quest III remake. The soundtrack consists of strong remixes of Dragon Quest classics, and it does its job well. The addition of voice acting is mostly positive, but sometimes, the incredibly exaggerated voices are more annoying than charming.

Dragon Quest III: HD-2D Remake is a charming and well-made update of one of the most classic RPGs of all time. It doesn't reinvent the mold and is too safe for its own measure, but at the same time, it's easily the most accessible and fun version of the game to date. You'll need to have some tolerance for dated design choices, but if you've ever wondered why people love the classic Dragon Quest so much, this is the game to play.

Score: 8.0/10