Dragon Warrior III

ReviewedbyMichael Sherron

Dragon Warrior III• Developed by ENIX

• Released for NES in 1988/91, many remakes

• RPG, “similar” in style to FF

• Price: variable

• Comes packaged with an incredible manual

• Emulation is viable alternative to using an NES

• Remade for SNES and GBC

The Story• Father, Ortega, goes after evil being

Baramos, but never returns, fancy cutscene! Dead?

• Son must go on a quest to save the world from the Archfiend

• King gives you a few gold to start your journey, recommends you take some allies, and then it’s up to you!

• Possible team members: Soldier, Wizard, Fighter, Pilgrim, Goof-Off, Merchant…. Sage!?!

Gameplay• Learn objectives by talking with people

• Start you adventure. For example, first quest is to find the “Theif’s Key”

• Buy gear from shops and find it along the way

• Random encounters with monsters lead to turn-based battle

• Choose each party member’s action one by one, then after all actions have been chosen, the battle is enacted.

• Upon winning, you receive experience to level up and get stronger, as well as gold

Graphics and Sound• Simple graphics, relatively no battle

animations (screen flashes, text changes color)

• Sound is amazing, large number of tracks, some famous

• Plenty of sound effects as well

• One of the greatest RPG Songs of all time, revolutionary for the NES, “Hero’s Challenge”, composed by Koichi Sugiyama (contains “crescendo”, first in video games, and last until PS1)

Youtube Version

Bugs?

Nearly bug-free, nothing that interferes with gameplay

• Incentives to save the world

• Solid storyline, complete with extreme plot-twist near “the end”

• Amazing sound

• Difficulty self-scalable/very replayable

• Manual can help you if you get “stuck”

• Balanced characters

• Diverse towns, plenty of NPCs to immerse you in the game

• A few optional side-quests

What makes this game great?

• My opinion is probably Biased because it’s one of my favorite games of all time

• Battles don’t have a lot of “action”

• Lacking an in-game world map

• While you can definitely relate to the Hero, the rest of your party has very little interaction in the story; basically mercenaries

• Much of this resolved with remakes

What makes this game not-so- great?

DW III vs Final Fantasy• FF NA in 1990, DW III NA 1991

• Dragon Warrior has superior storyline, complete with introduction

• Better sound

• More relatable with the “Hero”

• Both have many equipible items and “save the world” scenarios

• FF has battle animations, however

• Both solid games

• Enix “absorbed” Square to form Square-Enix on April 1, 2003

Summary• Dragon Warrior/Quest is an

awesome series, and this is the shining gem of it all

• Worth purchasing, or at least “borrowing” through emulation

• Most “necessary” improvements are done in the remakes, although I still prefer the original

• Sold 3.8 Million copies with good reason, 7th best selling NES game, only counting purchases in Japan