Dragon Quest III: The Seeds of Salvation is the third game in the JRPG series. It was originally released for the NES, and was later remade for multiple systems after. While the GBC remake was released in North America, this port for smartphones was the version that was released worldwide. Just as Dragon Quest II vastly improved upon the first game, Dragon Quest III does the same thing to II. Your party is now comprised of four members, and you can immediately recruit all four upon the beginning of the game. Furthermore, the game really embraces the RPG aspect. Not only is there a “personality” quiz at the beginning to determine how the stats of the hero will be slanted towards, but you get to decide on the classes of the other three members.
The class system can be overwhelming at first but this is only because you’re required to decide and select immediately what classes you want. Should you go for the traditional 2x fighters, 1x mage who focuses on healing and 1x mage who focuses on attack magic? Or do you opt for something more unorthodox and try out the other classes such as merchant and thief? Ultimately, you can progress the game by using any class but it does make a difference on the difficulty. If you’re not happy, you can always create and recruit new party members so you won’t be stuck with anyone except the hero.
The battle system is turn based but it is slightly different to what you’d expect. The default control scheme is that you can only control directly the hero. For the other three party members, the default is that you set their tactics and the AI does the rest based on those. While it makes for quicker battles, it cannot ever beat being able have more control over all actions. Thankfully, there’s an option for just that and it returns to you being able to select the actions for all party members.
During a battle, your options are fight, using magic, use an item, defend or try to flee. Not all of these options are available for all classes, and this is what gives the game quite a bit of variety in terms of party composition and thus, the strategy is defeating enemies. Just like the previous game, there’s no point in trying to flee from battles. You will most likely fail. This makes the whole reason of fleeing pointless, since you’ll probably only flee to either save on time or your party is too damaged.
There are definitely some cheap monster encounters where they get to attack twice, or spam party wide status effects (sleep being the worse). The early game is harder since your combat options are limited. Later on, when you have access to a decent array of spells, the bosses and enemies are a lot easier. Dying doesn’t mean a game over but you do lose half your money upon returning. The port has a quick save option so you’ll never ever lose much progress if you save often, and it also allows you to play in bite sized chunks at a time.
There are a few quality of life improvements like when you’re selling an item, it stays in the sell menu afterwards. It may be small but it makes things so much more bearable. The port goes even further still by providing you with a portable bag, so there is now no need to worry about running out of item space upon your characters during exploration. The game has a massive world map. Once again it is bigger and better. However, it feels like it restricts you a bit more in terms of where you can go early in the game due to the mountains and high leveled enemies. It opens up a lot once you get the ship and the world is filled with secrets. Unfortunately, like previous games, it only gives you vague hints of where those things are and how to even get them. It has a heavy reliance on using a special unique item once to reveal a location. There is a basic day night cycle that is based upon the number battles, and affects the monster encounter rate as well as the NPCs in towns.
The rate at which you’ll move from one town to the next, and thus, the rate of which available equipment improves, far outpaces your ability to make money. With four party members, there is no way without hours of grinding that you will be able to keep up with all the new weapons and armor. It can be frustrating when you’re grinding to get the top tier equipment at one town, only to find out that the next town which was literally less than a minute away, has even better equipment.
There are a lot of little bits and pieces of the game that make it frustrating and annoying to play. The game has big dungeons with a lot of traps and sections hidden from you, it’s like the maze at the end of Dragon Quest II but this is every dungeon in III. There are high encounter rates at times making it very painful and lame. The final dungeon almost rivals the one from Dragon Quest II in that it expects you to grind there for a few hours in order to gain a few levels to easily dispatch the enemies and ultimately, the final boss.
There is an unexpected twist near the end of the game, where just when you thought you’ve done it, it throws a curveball. It’s something that other games at the time wouldn’t have tried. Ultimately it leads to the ending which ties into the previous two games. Thinking back, that last portion and the connection can feel forced and tacked on, but at the same time, it is a nice surprise.
Also for the first time ever in the series, there is post-game content. Upon finishing the game, you gain access to the bonus dungeon. The bonus dungeon reuses a lot of the same map layout from previous dungeon but there are new sections to it, and it has an extremely hard boss at the end.
Overall, Dragon Quest III: The Seeds of Salvation is yet another monumental leap from the previous game. Everything is bigger and better. The class system adds a lot of variety to the battle system, while the various quality of life improvements are welcomed. The world is bigger, the dungeons are more complicated and the game is longer, clocking in at around 15-20 hours. While there are still difficulty spikes towards the end of the game, they are not excessively unreasonable and Dragon Quest III is still fun in this day and age.
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