Dragon Warrior III

Vitals:

Year – 1988

Developer – Chunsoft

Publisher - Enix

Genre – RPG

Life – 15 hp

Lives – 1

Dragon Warrior was one of my favourite series back in the day.  It started with my obsession about beating the bad guy in the original and moved on from there.  I love RPG’s, they are just my favourite type of genre.  What I remember most of DW3 was the introduction of the class/job system that Final Fantasy had already coined.

When I turned on the game the backgrounds and sprites jumped out at me, from the corny tiled floor to the silver ‘inside’ of buildings that you can’t see until you go inside.  There is where it all started for me, and I think I’m going to love every minute of diving back in to it.

The action menu!  How could I have forgotten, pressing a button to bring up the available actions.  None of this ‘click a button and stuff automatically happens’.  If you don’t know what action to take you don’t get to do it.  The ability to use your brain in a console game instead of running around pressing the action button every 2 steps to see if something happens … what a novelty.

As the game gets started I find out my father apparently died on his quest, and that the King is allowing me to follow in his footsteps and kill the main evil bad guy that’s causing all kinds of trouble.  I’m also not supposed to go on my own, so I should hire some mercenaries at the local brothel down the road.  No problem.

Since I’m playing the game for fun, and not necessarily looking to optimize anything I started out with: Soldier, Pilgrim, Goof-off.  I kind of ignored everyone telling me not to bother with a Goof-off, because that sounded exactly like the kind of character I wanted included in my party.

The game is pretty linear to start, you have to go to a tower to get a key, then start exploring.  I did quickly rediscover why carrying around an inventory full of antidote herbs was a good idea – stupid babbles.  What is a green pile of slime doing with eyes and a mouth anyway?

 I love the monster arena.  I don’t think I won much money out of it, but betting on a long shot sometimes pays out.  The odds counter guy I found to be a waste of money, usually I’d ask him then bet the opposite way because it never seemed like the ‘smart money’ won.

I did discover why I seemed to recall that DW was a big grind fest for a lot of the time.  Gold is pretty scarce.  You aren’t killing stuff to get experience, you’re killing it to get money so you can buy the equipment that will let you survive when the bigger stuff starts beating on you.  Of course my game experience might have been compromised by my Goof-off … most of my battles went something like this:

T slaps monster around

Monster beats the crap out of Beef

Cutie casts a helpful spell

Genius flashes a big smile!

Monster pounds Cutie into the ground

Genius is assessing the situation

Beef pokes monster really hard!

Monster slays T

Genius does a little dance!

Cutie attempts to flee and is stopped

Genius cheers her companions on!

… and so on

I had just begun to bemoan the lack of mini-bosses when I ran in to the first one!  It seems like RPG’s nowadays you’re fighting a mini-boss every other fight.  This took quite a while before I ran in to one here.  He wasn’t anything special or fancy of course, he was just had really strong attacks and a whole ton of HP.  No patterns to learn or really much strategy involved.  It felt kind of anti-climatic.  In the end it also wouldn’t let me summarily execute him, I had to choose the option to ‘let him go’.  Psh – I was so ready to knock that guy’s head off.

I was even excited when I ran into the crazy hydra in the cave as the next mini-boss.  It happened so quickly too.  I ran through this deserted town with a dead guy in a bed upstairs (where they all come back to life at night) and had a nice pleasure cruise, then blamo ‘save us, save us’ – just what every hero wants to hear right?  Well I tried to save them, but the scary ass hydra beat the crap out of me.  I just couldn’t take him down, he hits too hard and gets too many attacks per round.  I did get to see the game over screen for the first time though!  Which is more like a scolding screen where the king tells you to stop disgracing your father.

I ended up at this castle where an old man wants to become a young girl and everyone wants to be something they aren’t – and there is this guy on a pedestal that can revert you to level 1, but change your character class.  Kind of cool idea actually, so I ran a quick test and you keep about ½ your stats, which is nothing to sneeze at starting back at level 1 with a huge benefit.  I was getting pretty tired of my Goof-off at this point, so I figured I’d change her to something else, maybe a wizard or something.  Then I saw this ‘Sage’ class that apparently only she has access too.  So the idiots are actually the smartest guys in the world?  How cliché … awesome for me though, all that work I went through and now I’ve got this kick ass magic user out of it.  Nice trade off.

Not many stories after this point – I didn’t quite get to the end of the game this week, I’ll probably keep playing in the future just to get the coveted ‘you have completed the game’ feeling.

The Good Stuff:

Tileset RPG?  How can you go wrong with that?  Being able to save the game whenever I wanted was a big bonus.  Also not having to start over when I died was also great.  I didn’t even have to go back to my last save game, just my last save point (with everyone dead) after I lost a battle.  Progressive thinking or what?

The monsters kept me busy, gaining a level or so every area generally kept me in good stead – I didn’t have to spend a lot of time levelling up to get through the story (which is really the important part) until quite a bit later in the game.

Talking to everyone is really a must – after you do something, go back and talk to everybody, and pay attention when they mention some random thing because that’s probably the clue you need to go to the next place.  As long as you’re paying attention and listening you don’t really get stuck with the story, it leads you to where you need to go.

The return spell – pure gold.

The Ugly Stuff:

Boss battles that seem impossible.  I ended up reading around after spending a day trying to kill one of them to find out that they have a hidden ‘regen’ attribute every round, which is why battles can seem to go on forever, if you aren’t doing enough damage, you’ll never win.  Knowing that would have saved me a lot of time – something new RPG’s do great is show you the enemy health meter so you can at least gauge your progress.

A Boat with no map for a confusing world does make.  Especially when you’re trying to find some random shoals in the middle of the ocean.  At least the whole map is based on tiles so if you do some grid work you can create a search pattern … but who does that anymore?

No spell explanation made things pretty difficult, the spell names aren't even very useful.  What is more powerful, bang or boom?  A gun bangs while a bomb booms ... thats the best I can do.  

Overall:

I had a ton of fun, I love RPG’s so I have some Bias in this area, but this is definitely one that I would go back and play again and again.  While it is a bit thin in storyline, I always feel like I’m doing something important to the progression of the game.

I love the party system, and being able to re-build characters after level 20 and bump their stats and stuff?  That was great, especially trading in my Goof-off for a wayyy useful character.

Breakdown:

Fun - 9/10

My Bias shows

Gameplay – 8/10

The controls are easy to get used to – having the cursor save your last battle commands would be really great (something I love from new RPG’s).  Sword and Sorcery is all you really need for a good RPG, no special skills for each character type or anything fancy.

Story - 7/10

While there was a story behind the scenes the dialogue wasn’t the best.  I felt kind of a disconnect from the story in a lot of cases.

Audio – 6/10

Really starting to remember why I muted a lot of NES games.  While the music was entertaining for a while, the repetition was more than I could take long term

Visual – 8/10

Don’t judge the tileset by its tiles.

Arbitrary coolness – 75/?

Overall Score – 18/10