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)	Akira Toriyama
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.

New features

Scenario additions

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.

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 at any point in the game.

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

The T'n'T boards added in the Super Famicom remake have been replaced with new content dubbed the "Battle Road" (バトルロード), which has not been shown to the public prior to launch.
New vocation: Monster Wrangler.
Stat modification: Resilience now determines base defence power instead of half of the Agility stat, with the new Stamina stat controlling HP growth as Resilience did in the previous versions of the game; Agility only influences turn order and evasion. Wisdom now determines the growth of spell power instead of each spell being fixed to a static range.
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 ^[1]. 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).