I’ve gotten to the point in DQ3HD where everything has opened up and now, to me, the entire earth is one big orb to search for orbs in. It’s fun to suddenly go from a super linear single quest to this whole wider world of little separate adventures you have to seek out yourself.
I found Fantasy Brazil, and thank god, they don’t have Mexican accents. I don’t know what the heck accent they do have, but they’re at least pronouncing their Portuguese words correctly.
I’ve reclassed my thief to a monster wrangler because I find monster wrangling and the monster arenas to be the most compelling stuff in this entire game.
For a little bit, I was playing through DQ 3 HD and DQ3 on GBC simultaneously just to see how they compare and contrast. It’s impressive how much is there on the GBC minus screen space, though that’s not really necessary for a story that was told fine on the NES.
Damn, did not expect the ending of 2 to get me feeling things but damn if the death of the Prince in Beran didn’t get some tears . Good job game. Though now I guess there is a post-game so not sure how I feel about that.
Do I need to be careful about anything with the jobs / party composition in DQ3HD? I naturally gravitate towards trying the weirder classes but I’m worried I may make the game too difficult/grindy. Should I just stick with the default party for now? How hard is it to change later?
It’s pretty easy to change later, and probably ideal the closer you get to maxing your jobs out.
As I understand it they nerfed the Monster Wrangler’s best ability, but near the end of the game I had most everyone dabble in it to get the best abilities.
There’s a location you’ll run into about midway where you can change jobs, so I wouldn’t worry too much.
Just make sure that when you get to the town that needs a merchant from your team, that you recruit someone fresh for the job and give them to the town, and not one of your main crew. They never come back, so that’s the only job thing I could really see biting you if you’re not careful.
the game is relatively easy to win with any party. some classes are more naturally late game (eg martial artist which only learns dispel and double attack at like level 40 and is otherwise very geared to big single target boss damage; and sage, obviously, since you can’t get one until later) and some are relatively easier to switch away from after certain breakpoints (eg oomph at level 21 or so for a wizard, or monster wrangler once you have wild side), but even if you have those guidelines in mind you still have a lot of room for flexibility.
when last I played I did monster wrangler → martial artist, pilgrim → sage, and wizard → thief. this is still very imperfect — notably, rotating off of pilgrim for sage means you might not have insulatle for Garboyle which makes that fight brutal, and even though I’m partial to thief, that 4th character’s damage and healing eventually fall off and they become more of a utility player, which is kind of fine for DQ anyway since magic damage is always borderline irrelevant late game — but these tradeoffs work as well as any. it only gets kind of grindy at the very end and in annoying ways like how every late game claw weapon is equally hard to find.
also I think I’m mixing and matching localizations here because I’ve played several different versions of this game but you get it
honestly garboyle and the collapse of the relatively smooth leveling curve pre-final boss are my two biggest complaints with DQ3 in general, the other difficulty spikes like the pyramid or theddon or Gaia’s navel comparatively rule
i do still like the speedrun strat of going thief to 20 so you have all of the useful stuff including padfoot (lower encounter rate) and that being the character who switches sage
i’m playing normal difficulty but i just rolled baramos in one shot with hero, priest → warrior, mage → sage, thief → monster wrangler so i think it’s all pretty chill. the Th/MW did beef it to one of his final attacks tho
they did nerf Monster Pile-On from launch (iirc it used to scale damage per individual captured monster, now it’s a damage bump per every 5 mons i think) but that combo still makes for a swiss army knife group physical attacker who acts quick and has tons of utility outside of combat.
fwiw i don’t recommend MW as a first job because of the recruiting mechanic, they’re basically a physical attacker with worse equipment options until you can explore enough of the map to get 20-30 monsters. better to change into midway and either stay there or head for martial artist to give them better single target abilities
So I did the additional post credit story stuff in 2 Remake. I kinda still don’t like this (when the credits roll in a game, the story should be done, one would think), but it was mostly alright in terms of what happens and the final fight is hilariously over the top, fighting on the back of the giant bird against a big evil being. The dungeon leading up to this just lets you powerlevel ridiculously without even trying, so I was at about 80 by the time I got to the big end boss, which was really funny because it meand I wrecked Hargon in like 2 rounds. There’s apparently another optional non-story thing after that, but I think I am good on that for a while, so I am gonna start 7 back up soon.
I’ve started DQIII HD-2D. Ok I can stop being a HD-2D hater. This is stunning. DQIII is the best and all the changes rock especially monster recruitment.
I’m also appreciating the quaint humor of Dragon Quest more as I get older. I think DQ is just fundamentally for old people. It’s the videogame equivalent of Columbo reruns
Combat’s still pretty mid though. DQ has always been touted as this extremely well oiled machine combat-wise but I don’t see it.
About 3 skills out of 4 seem useless. The encounter rate is too high for us to get cute and bother to use status effects or something. It’s just brute force all the way (I think the only DQ with random encounters where this doesn’t apply is ironically DQ2 which everybody else hates)
There’s also no reason why like the mage gets outclassed in every single way by a thief with a boomerang. On paper they should trade lower defense, the need to use MP, lower agility, for something like higher damage right? They don’t even get that
Anyway the personality quiz at the beginning gave me « Vain » for not pushing a rock enough times and I just fundamentally disagree with the execution of that quiz. 5 minutes later the game switched my personality to Contrarian. Fair enough.
I’ve started with Hero / Monster Wrangler / Gadabout / Mage. I’m happy that the protagonist’s toolkit allows me to choose any kind of loser I want for my team.
Upon reaching a new continent I decided to ditch my Monster Wrangler to get a thief instead just to catch one rabbit. I’ll just class change back to MW later
Boomerangs weren’t in the original game (there was basically no way for non mages to deal multi target damage) which actually explains a lot, since magic damage in DQ is almost only good for random encounters
many bosses are vulnerable to status effects, especially in the first half, you can often lock them down (sleep, paralysis, fuddle) or otherwise turn off their more dangerous attacks (fizzle)
