When you first meet someone, you don’t tend to start by eviscerating their personality and pointing out all their deepest flaws, but Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake doesn’t hesitate to insult you and get straight to the point. . This is an old-school JRPG where how you approach your stats matters and it won’t hold your hand to guide you. There are dragons. There are quests. And there are a lot of deaths.

To be fair to Square-Enixthis is the case to try to hold your hand for a bit while you form a group and travel the world to fight the archdemon Baramos. You have difficulty options and combat speed adjustments, but the game also stays true to the core combat and story systems of the original Dragon Quest III. Being a remake of a game first released in the late 80s, it feels inherently dated even with all the changes. It valiantly tries to walk that thin line of appealing to nostalgia while adapting to modern conveniences, but it often stumbles as it leans more toward the side of the original game.

The HD-2D redesign is stunning. The blocky sprites are replaced with much more detailed sprites, and they are placed on 3D backgrounds with a camera tilt that still retains the proportions of the old sprite style. It feels exactly like you felt playing old games – the nostalgia glasses made real – only everything is a little smoother now thanks to its new autosave, more places to save way more generally, objective markers to help you orient yourself and an easier way to teleport between visited locations. There are also some new features such as additional story chapters, monster battle arenas, and even a new Monster Wrangler class to add to your team, which allows you to learn different monster attacks and turn them against your enemies. However, things start to look a little rusty once you start to get a few fights under your belt.

Being an old-school turn-based RPG, combat involves selecting attacks, spells, and more. before watching them crush a crowd of monsters. It’s a lot like Square Enix’s old Final Fantasy games, except Dragon Quest has never really tried to reinvent itself over the years by adding more advanced systems or new twists to familiar concepts. Instead, it’s just age-old exchanges of blows, and in Dragon Quest III in particular, you’re often fighting many more monsters than you might be used to in other RPGs.

Of course, with more enemies attacking you at the same time, the more damage they deal in the process, and healing is a real issue throughout this HD-2D remake. You can let each of your party members choose their own attacks to save time by typing in the commands yourself, and you can even try directing them with tactical profiles like “conserve MP” or “do everything.” Ultimately, though, you’ll either have to move on to grabbing items individually to keep everyone alive, or complete numerous levels of work to have a chance of emerging from battles unscathed.

I tried lowering the difficulty from normal “Dragon Mode” to “Dracky Mode”, but all that did was prevent me from dying rather than actually changing the difficulty of the fights. It’s no fun knowing that the only reason you survive battles is because you can’t get below 1HP – although being beaten to a pulp and barely succeeding was even more preferable than constantly searching of EXP just for making it through a fight safely. an open part of the world map until the next town or dungeon. Sure, maybe it’s easier, and maybe I’m a wimp, but I would certainly appreciate the illusion of a fair fight rather than being dragged along by my hair.

This also doesn’t make much sense: why add a mode where you can’t die as an option but can’t turn off random encounters? I can’t pretend that concessions were made to make things easier, in the same way that wearing shoes makes hiking easier. But it also seems like an oversight not to go further. Square Enix’s recent Final Fantasy Pixel Remasters and the Switch version of Final Fantasy IXfor example, did it very well – you can enjoy the pure version if you want, but you can also grease the wheels a bit by adding lots of options to speed things up, avoid random encounters, and ensure that all your shots do a lot of things. Shame. Everyone could enjoy the sights, even if you took a cable car at most to get there.

I still can’t get over the patience it took for us as kids to complete games like this. Has progress for the sake of progress ever been fun? I understand that Dragon Quest is about preserving things as they are, but adding more options doesn’t take away from the purist approach.

Fortunately, the world is a joy to explore, even when you’re drawn into combat every 30 seconds. The story that guides you may not be particularly complex (you’re mostly asked to go to certain places to pick up an item or fight someone just because), but its sense of adventure remains strong all around. throughout, because every nook and cranny is filled. with secrets. The map is covered in hidden locations and treasure troves of sparkling items, and the towns themselves are full of loot and hidden monsters to recruit for the new battle arena. There’s still nothing more satisfying than that old-fashioned feeling of wandering through someone’s house and rifling through their cupboards for medicinal herbs and armor.

The world really opens up once you acquire a boat and your adventure can take a more free-form approach, but the HD-2D Remake’s lack of a guide is felt even more here. In this part of the game, you’re tasked with collecting orbs from around the world, but each of them usually requires you to get an item somewhere else first, and it never explains where. Even with all the objective markers present, the temptation to consult 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 looking for. It’s like a puzzle where you have to put partially completed sections together and hope that the next place will contain the missing piece you need to put it all together. There is, admittedly, a very satisfying twist that makes all the mumbo jumbo worth it, but the game will test your patience to get there.

Other additions, such as the remastered score, are beautiful and add an extra, dazzling layer to that sense of adventure and exploration, but others feel unnecessary. Significant sections of dialogue are now fully voiced, which sounds good in theory, but they rarely add anything to the experience. This also leads to a lot of tricky situations with accents. Alefgard is loosely based on our world, with different zones based on locations, like a prospecting town full of Americans and a lavish Florentine town where everyone speaks with cartoonish Italian accents. There’s also a town full of white people who speak with thick, stereotypical Indian accents, which is sure to raise some quizzical eyebrows, even though the source material is over 35 years old.

Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake left me with such mixed feelings. As a remake of a classic, it’s stunning – this game does an incredible job of capturing that feeling of nostalgia and adapting it for a modern screen. Its history may be old and simple, but it exudes a certain conviviality. I may no longer have the patience for random encounters, but playing with such a vast array of weapon types, class types, and stat-affecting personalities was still mostly fun, even if I was regularly harassed by monsters.

This feeling of retaining its history is both the game’s blessing and curse. For every change that improves on the original, there are points where it hasn’t evolved enough and ends up holding itself back in the process. There’s still a great game to be had here, and if you played the original, you’ll no doubt enjoy this new remake. If you’re a more casual Dragon Quest or JRPG fan and looking to experience a classic, you might just find yourself bouncing when the battles start to feel like a bit of a chore.

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