izigame.me

I have mixed feelings because at the end of the day this is an overpriced (at the time of writing this) NES game remake with a lot of stuff slapped on to make it feel more "modern". It's not an awful game but the small scope and changes of mixed quality make it hard to justify the cost over emulating the older versions.
This version of the game is a bit more mindless and predictable, warping costs 0 MP and level ups fully heal characters, you can see full area maps with a press of a button and random boss enemies not in the original are slapped on various chokepoints. As a series veteran, it's not bad, but it feels like they undermined the original game's design, especially the dungeons. They did a sort of middle ground approach to the story that you'd see in stuff like the Pokemon remakes where characters say more things, but the new things are of little substance and everything plays out the same way anyway. They should've remade Dragon Quest V first so they wouldn't need so much exposition to tell you why Dads are awesome. Funnily enough I think a significant amount of the voice acting otherwise is a new random boss enemy showing up saying "Hahaha, I am a bad guy", "oh no, you killed me!". It didn't take long for me to just fast forward all that shit.
On the flip side, this is still Dragon Quest in it's purest form and I had more fun with this than every previous version of DQ3. The DS remakes are my overall favorite in the series and this felt like a secret 4th DS remake in spirit. The relaxing exploration with occasional hard bosses sprinkled in felt like a good balance although I would've preferred something closer feeling to the original. They give you a ton of room to figure out things on your own still, especially with the class system. The midgame is still an extremely huge unlinear treasure hunt full of lock and key puzzles that require attention and awareness to solve. DQ if nothing else does an excellent job at preserving the feel of the original games, but that also loops around to the first observation I gave in this review.
There are two reasons I'd have for buying this, either because you're a big fan of the series like me, or you're voting with your wallet for what kind of games you want to see. Generally, the latter is an unpredictable gamble. Before release I assumed they chose DQ3 because it more or less obsoletes DQ 1 and 2, knowing how the game plays out. Then after a few days of playing, they announced DQ 1&2 HD-2D remakes and it didn't make me excited. I voted thinking they'd do 4 and 5 remakes next, which are larger and fuller games more worthy of being full price. If you're curious about this series, I'd recommend emulating the SNES version of this game instead before buying.