Dragon Warrior III — The Princess Has Been Kidnapped… No, Wait, She Hasn’t.

Are you a boy or a girl?

Not that it matters, since most people won’t know the difference.  But I’m getting ahead of myself.

Wow!  [Hero] Is A Woman?

The further into the Dragon Warrior series one gets, the more players will begin to recognize certain elements of the modern RPG.  NES games were fine examples of experimentation and exploration into games and the nature of fun, and it shows.  And by the time the SNES came around, much was known and understood about how RPGs were supposed to work, but the evolution of the genre wasn’t over.  Not yet.  Not by a long shot.  But once more, I’m getting ahead of myself.  Too far ahead.

When Dragon Warrior III came along for the NES, it fixed some of the problems that were present in the previous iteration of the series.  For instance, a final boss fight where the boss can instantly heal itself with no repercussions (he wasn’t given an MP stat, therefore his HealAll spells were infinite) acts more to frustrate the player instead of encourage her, and so in the third installment, the final boss was declined use of the spell.  Also, the final area of III can more easily be traversed without being hit by endless waves of instant death spells.  Some would say that this game is therefore easier than the last game, but what was removed merely makes way for other challenging tactics that the final enemies and bosses can use against you.  Also, even the wizard character seems to be able to survive a little better (although in a Dragon Warrior game, who can tell?).  But in a party of four, that just means that there’s a slightly less chance for the enemy to go after the Squishy Wizard.

Many of the things that were added into III were very innovative for the time.  At the beginning of the game, Enix chose to do something that had rarely been seen in video games up until that point.  They gave you the ability to enter your gender at the beginning of the game, but it doesn’t seem to make a difference.  You are still identified as the son of Ortega, even if you’re a girl named Sara.  There are rare exceptions (your grandfather seems to know the truth, even if few other people do).

Before leaving your hometown, you’re given the opportunity (and strongly encouraged… after all, this is a Dragon Warrior game made during the days of Nintendo Hard video games) to recruit a party at the beginning, made up of characters you create on the fly.  Although this means the characters won’t develop according to the story, it’s not like the player would have any difficulty coming up with individual traits for each of them, especially if you name them after friends.  Players had no problems coming up with traits for the characters from Final Fantasy I, after all.

I Am Doing This While I Wait For Day To Break

Game play follows suit from the last two games: you have to explore the world on your own and figure stuff out, but it’s a little easier since this time around, the world resembles our own Earth.  Still, a world map feature in the game would’ve been nice.  It did seem easier to get around, though, even though very little had changed in the way you navigate.  You still walk around on the world map, getting into battles every ten steps.  But battles are improved in that there are four characters in battle, so like I said before, the squishiest characters don’t necessarily die as easily as they did in the previous game.  Other than that, battles flow exactly the same as they do in most 8-bit RPGs.  You input your commands, they execute, then you input more commands until everyone on one side of the battle is dead.  Hopefully not your side.

I don’t think there’s any music that will be as memorable as the music from the first game, but this one still had some pretty good tunes.  The best thing about emulation is that you can mute the sound if you’re just going to battle for a few hours, and listen to podcasts.  Inform yourself and level yourself up.  Of course, like most Dragon Warrior games, there will be plenty of battles to earn experience in.  More than plenty, so enjoy your podcasts!

Between this series and Final Fantasy, most gamers consider Final Fantasy to be the great innovator, and Dragon Quest to always be true to its roots.  Such a viewpoint completely ignores all the innovation that has occurred during each installment of the Dragon Quest series.  In II, parties were added, and with III, job classes were added, and as a result, Dhama (Dharma?) Temple was added as well.  For those players who can’t get enough of the game, they can visit Dhama Temple and change the character’s class, which bumps them back down to level 1, but they keep half their stats and all their abilities they’ve gained so far.  It will take forever, but a super character can result from such a feature.

Speaking of innovation, and spoilers will crop up from here on out, once you defeat the final boss and are about to celebrate, suddenly another final boss makes himself known and you’re once more thrust into adventure.  With what happens as a result of this revelation, it doesn’t feel at all like the developers tacked on another dungeon at the end to keep gamers occupied for ten more hours.  You see… when you pursue this new boss, a wave of nostalgia hits and you find yourself in Alefgard!  Not only is the music from the first game present in a remixed form, but the world is presented in much the same way as it was in the first game, but most of what is present in the first game is still being developed in this one, making it a prequel to the other two adventures!  The tunnel underground connecting the two continents that make up Alefgard is still being dug, walls are still being put up around towns, and towns that were destroyed in the first game are still around in this game.

This Is Carrying A Joke Too Far, Wouldn’t You Say?

All my nostalgic feelings evaporated when I got the ship and could travel around Alefgard.  Here’s an annoying limitation: you can only navigate within a set boundary around the continent.  What this means is that you’re not allowed to fully explore the new world you’ve found yourself in.  This is a good thing, though.  With how much the second game sucked, I wouldn’t want to relive such a complicated and convoluted map.  In II, I got lost so many times without the aid of a map someone posted on-line that my characters were probably far higher in stats than they needed to be by the time I got to the area I was supposed to be in.  In III, I don’t seem to remember having that problem quite so much, especially when I acquired my flying mount and could bypass all the monsters on my way around the world above.

And by the time the game ended, I was left with a lot of questions, the biggest of which was: when everything becomes light and the worlds are saved, and suddenly you can see the sky… what happened to the original world?  Did everyone and everyth
ing in it dissolve and disappear before your very eyes, leaving Alefgard behind?  If so, then why did you spend so much time trying to save the original world when it was just going to cease to exist anyway?  I hope that Alefgard was just sent away to became a new world elsewhere, and that the world above still exists.  Unfortunately, you can’t teleport back to your hometown, which would hint that the teleport spell can only work within the atmosphere of a single planet.  I’ll probably have to return to this line of thinking later, since IV plays with the teleport spell a little (a monster tries to use it in a lighthouse, begins to rise up, then hits his head on the ceiling and falls to the ground unconscious) and seems to make canon the rising and falling action that the teleport spell causes, or at the very least it validates it, which is probably why the spell doesn’t work inside buildings.

I think in the end, III was too good to let minor details of the ending drag it down to the levels of II, and after playing it, I was optimistic that IV would be just as good or even better than III was.

Well, I was right.  One more minor spoiler: I only needed a month to beat IV, after spending a year in each of the first three games.  But that is a story for another time.

To be continued…