Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake

Main series games Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake Developer(s) ARTDINK & Square Enix (Team Asano) Publisher(s) Square Enix Designer(s) Yuji Horii Artist(s) Yoshiya Fujisaki Composer(s) Kōichi Sugiyama Series Dragon Quest Platform(s) Nintendo Switch, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, Steam Release date(s) Nintendo Switch
^INT November 14, 2024
PlayStation 5
^INT November 14, 2024
Xbox Series X/S
^INT November 14, 2024
Steam
^INT November 14, 2024
Genre(s) Console role-playing Mode(s) Single-player Rating(s) ESRB: Everyone +10

Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake is a full remake of Dragon Quest III. It was originally announced as part of the 35th series anniversary celebration on May 27, 2021.

Unlike previous remakes of Dragon Quest III, the HD-2D remake offers a modernized vision of the original title with additional scenarios, voice acting, new vocations, and modern Dragon Quest series features such as battle tactics or faster battle settings. The graphics are completely redone in the "HD-2D" style popularized by previous Square Enix published games such as Octopath Traveler and Triangle Strategy. With the passing of Akira Toriyama on March 1 2024, artist Yoshiya "Fenyo_n" Fujisaki was brought on to the project as the chief illustrator with Naoki Ikushima providing the game's box art.

New features

Scenario changes

• New scenarios and characters supervised by Yuji Horii.
• New story segments that features Ortega, the heroes's father.
• The monster arena has been totally revamped to allow players to enter their own recruited monsters instead of relying on the arena's stable.
• T'n'T boards added in the Super Famicom remake have not been reimplemented after their removal in the 2014 android/ios port.

Presentation

• Re-imagined locations and HD-quality sprites.
• Certain areas have been slightly modified to account for the perspective changing from the classic top-down view to the pop up book style found in other HD2D titles.
• Orchestral soundtrack.
• Increased language support: English, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, European Spanish, and Latin American Spanish.

• Dragon Quest III had not yet been translated into most of these languages prior to this remake.

• Voice acting support: English and Japanese.
• Fully animated monsters.
• Faster battle settings, as seen in recent Dragon Quest titles like in the Nintendo 3DS release of DQVIII or in the international releases of DQXI.
• The player can customize the party's appearance by eight options per vocation with four for each sex.

• The new character Healizah can modify a character's appearance between the four options, along with his or her hair colour and voice upon reaching Alltrades Abbey.

• Characters now speak in battle: shouting while attacking, yelling the names of spells while casting, grunting while being attacked, etc.
• The camera pulls back to reveal the party while the player is selecting actions for a turn.

• Equipped weapons are visible during this period.

Gameplay adjustments

• New vocation: Monster Wrangler.
• Certain stats have been modified to modern standards:

• Agility is no longer divided by two to calculate base defence, now only determining turn-order and evasion
• Resilience now determines base defence power instead of HP growth
• Stamina has been added to determine HP growth, using the same formula as Resilience in previous versions
• Wisdom now determines the growth of spell power instead of each spell being fixed to a static range, in addition to MP growth

• New spells, such as Moreheal, Zapple, and Zin.
• The inclusion of skills for melee vocations, such as Double-Edged Slash, Mercurial Thrust, Pressure Pointer, and Cop Out . The battle menu lists lists Spells and Abilities separately.
• Boomerangs and whips can now land Critical Hits, though less frequently than single-target weapons.
• The inclusion of additional monsters, such as the frostburn, a new variant of it, and Garboyle, who originally was an unfightable monster in the game's SNES and Game Boy Color intro.
• Battle tactics, available for the first time in Dragon Quest III.
• Three modes of difficulty: Dracky Quest (Easy), Dragon Quest (Normal), and Draconian Quest (Hard).
• Monsters either have skills added to their repertoire or spells changed. (For example, Seaslimes use Soothing Song and Handsome crabs use Assassin's Stab, while Cumauluses cast Dazzle instead of Frizz)

Censorship controversy

The game has been strongly criticized for the censorship of the female Gadabout, female Warrior, and the male Monster Wrangler's clothing prior to its release, altering the classic designs to expose less skin in order to comply with the Japanese CERO ratings board. The ratings board has grown increasingly strict in its regulations in the decades since the original release of the game in 1988, with the censorship being mandated in order for the remake to secure a rating of B and be legally sold to children. Fans noted the censorship of the boss troll's lip colour in preview footage shown on June 18 2024, wherein the giant's lips were changed from pink to green and it's nose was altered to be significantly smaller, though the change in the colour of the lips were already present in its appearance in Dragon Quest Monsters: The Dark Prince.

The removal of gendered language during the character creation process has also been criticized. This was first revealed during June 2024 in the 32nd issue of Weekly Shonen Jump where the Hero and Heroine's full art was revealed, referring to the two as "looks A" and "looks B" despite the artwork clearly depicting the two as a man and woman respectively. Matching voice actors were cast for their battle dialogue as well, with Nobuyuki Hiyama and Yūko Minaguchi for the Japanese dub and Toby Laurence and Jenna Sharpe for the English dub. A trailer shown on August 27th would show this peculiarity extending to the party members as well, where their sex was replaced with "appearance A/B". The change was further criticized when it was revealed that the English script still uses proper terms when referring to characters in-dialogue, such as the appearance B Thief Samantha being referred to as a woman by Healizah when giving her a makeover, making the alteration totally pointless.

On September 28, an interview between Denfamico Gamer's NAZ CHRIS and Yuji Horii and Kazuhiko Torishima would be held commemorating the 2024 Tokyo Game Show, with Horii and Torishima representing radio station Tokyo M.A.A.D. SPIN through their radio program "Yubo & Mashirito 's Koso Koso station". The interview pretained to the HD2D remake of III, the ongoing scandal regarding the game's censorship prompting NAZ CHRIS to ask Yuji Horii about the changes directly, specifically for the female Warrior. Horii revealed that the changes were due to the strict age ratings regulations, stating that even just showing too much skin would raise the game's rating and prevent the game from being sold as an all-ages product as Dragon Quest had been in the past. NAZ CHRIS replied by saying the game is simply a work of fiction for the players to immerse themselves into, to which Horii agreed and stated that he doesn't understand what the problem is either. Torishima followed Horii's statement up by pointing out that ratings regulations vary greatly between different nations. Torishima strongly criticized the forced compliance to these regulations to conduct international business in American and the UK, going so far as to call them an "evil disguised as good", and pointed out that it is simply impossible for there to be content that offends no one due to everyone having different perspectives; Torishima asserts that so long as certain absolute taboos are not broken then creative freedom should be unfettered.

Torishima drew comparisons between the narrow-mindedness of modern-day age regulations to the religious zealotry of the Puritanical mindset of the past, and highlighted the difficulties of selling Jump magazine in America as an example. The content that was deemed perfectly suitable for eight year old children in Japan was mandated to be marketed as strictly for teenagers and older in America or legal action would be applied Torishima declared that doing business with America was infuriating and even damaging to Japan itself by forcing the smaller nation to comply to such ridiculous laws, which Horii explained as being the reason for the removal of gendered language during the character creation process. Foreign meddling mandated the censoring of the words men and women and forced Horii to utilize the awkward workaround of appearance A/B, despite everything else in the game acknowledging the common sense differences between the two sexes. Horii wondered aloud who on Earth would ever complain about the use of such common words in the first place.

This interview would be catapulted into the international news cycle thanks to X.com user Valute News clipping the portion of the interview concerning censorship and providing English subtitles. The ripple effect of the post would draw significant attention from beyond the game industry's own news channels, leading to outlets such as Forbes magazine and Elon Musk commenting on the situation and drawing even more attention to the censorship of Dragon Quest III.

On October 3, Tokyo M.A.A.D. SPIN released an official statement regarding the viral interview, stressing the mistranslation performed by Valute News that turned Torishima's use the English word "puritanical" into the phrase "sex education". An English counterpart to the statement was also announced, but was formally delayed later the same day. Valute News would also release a formal apology for the error, and deactivated the account. Additionally, the Denfamico Gamer youtube channel has since been privated the video.

External links

• Official website

Gallery

Illustrations

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  US boxart.

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  Artwork of the Erdrick Trilogy HD-2D Remakes by Naoki Ikushima.

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  Japanese logo.

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  The Erdrick Trilogy logo created for the game

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  The party planning the next day while monsters look on

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  The party takes flight with Ramia, paying homage to the box art of the GameBoy Color version

Promotional images

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  Healizah giving Samantha a makeover

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  Preorder bonuses.

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  Collector's Edition.

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  Preview spread in issue 32 of Weekly Shonen Jump, 2024

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  Preview spread in issue 36 of Weekly Shonen Jump, 2024

Characters

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  The Hero

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  The Heroine

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  Ortega

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  Healizah

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Official statements

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  The response of Tokyo M.A.A.D. SPIN to the viral interview

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  Page 2

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  Valute News' apology post