YMMV / Dragon Quest III

• Awesome Music: "Hero's Challenge", the theme that plays during the final boss fight after the Sphere of Light is used to dispel Zoma's barrier of darkness. It was even brought back for the True Final Boss of Dragon Quest XI.
• Broken Base: For the NES version, which is the "better" melee class: Fighter (later localized as Martial Artist) or Soldier (later localized as Warrior)? There's a significant divide between the two camps, because they both end up becoming good in their own regards.
• Demonic Spiders: The chest monsters. Man-eating chests can kill your party in one or two attacks when you first meet them, while Mimics have a One-Hit Kill spell that will try to kill your party members.
  • Wizard enemies in general are nasty, but the Leger-de-men in the final dungeon not only love pelting you with succesive Kaboom spells, they can also revive each other to full health, dragging the battle way more than recommended (on the other hand, they can also revive slain Liquid Metal Slimes for even more experience).
  • Any kind of enemy capable of using Scorching (paralysis) or Sweet (sleep) Breath attacks, since they can leave your entire party unable to act for multiple turns if you're unlucky. They're thankfully rare, but it certainly doesn't help that one of those enemies are the Morphean Mushrooms you're likely to encounter near Noaniels/Norvik, an area which is already a fairly heinous Difficulty Spike if you're not prepared.
  • Kragacles in the Alefgard oceans. They can attack 3 times and have 450 HP, almost twice as much as the next strongest enemy in the ocean. And you can encounter 3 of them at once, meaning 9 attacks in a single turn.
• Ensemble Dark Horse: The warriors in general, though the female warrior most distinctly. She appears as various NPC's in future installments of the series. The male martial artist has likewise gone on to appear in future games, as well.
  • Being the first game that lets the player change the Hero's gender, the Female Hero in this game has a pretty special place in fans hearts, particularly with contemporary audiences.
• Fan-Preferred Couple:
  • In Japan, it is all but a sniff from universally accepted fanon that the Male Hero and the Female Sage are an item and are the couple who start the trilogy's legendary family line. The only quibble in this is what Sage starts off as — there's far less agreement over whether she begins as a Jester, Cleric, or Mage. Enix^note and later still after merging into Square-Enix has given nods to this since then, using the Female Sage in virtually all depictions and references regarding this series entry.
  • This is further reflected in the DQIII-influenced Dragon Quest: The Adventure of Dai where the Hero Dai's love interest Leona is a Sage.
  • Dragon Quest XI brings this to a kind of level of Ascended Fanon, since the heroes who reference the DQ3 cast are formed around a male hero and female sage who start the legendary line of that game... and the bonus ending shows that Erdrick is descended from those heroes, meaning that a male Erdrick falling for a female Sage would be a case of History Repeats, which the wider cycle has as a bit of a theme.
• Game-Breaker:
  • Depending on when your Mage or Sage gets it, the Transform spell can qualify as one. Having two or more of your best ally? Yes, please! Not much gear though, until the remakes threw in quite a handful. (The best is the Rubiss Sword, which has a colossal + 160 attack bonus, casts Thordain for free when used as an item, and everyone can use and equip it with no penalties.)
  • Somewhat oddly, the Golden Claw of all things, especially in the remakes. By itself it's powerful but not super game-breaking; in the original release, it can't even really be used as a weapon, practically. However, getting out of the pyramid with it puts you in a ton of fights...which is the point, right? Except it puts you in a ton of fights, which means if you pull it off, you just came out of a hypercharged grind session and are swimming in money and experience even without selling the damn things. It's far worse in all remakes, where you have the "bag" and can bring dozens of cheap healing herbs along, and conceivably get the claws out very soon after reaching the Pyramid initially. Pull that off, and not only does your Fighter have a weapon better than anything store-buyable but you've just pulled off a speed-grinding session that gives you all the money you'll need for a large chunk of the game and probably gave your entire team several levels in the space of two dungeon floors.
• Genius Bonus: The Jipang quest is full of them:
  • Jipang was a real exonym for Japan as a result of a garbled misunderstanding from Marco Polo.
  • Himiko was semi-mythical shaman-queen of ancient Japan.
  • So, for that matter, is the Orochi, at least in folklore.
  • Yayoi, whom you basically rescue from getting sacrificed to the Orochi, is a possible reference to the Yayoi Period from Japanese history, during which the real Himiko reigned.
• Genre Turning Point: While the game has aged very well, it was groundbreaking upon its release. It is the Ur-Example, Trope Maker, and Trope Codifier of many, many JRPG tropes. To truly cement this in one's mind, consider the following — Dragon Quest III came out a scant 2 months after Final Fantasy.
• Good Bad Bugs:
  • The Dream Ruby/Item glitch. You can create a party of all dead characters by using the Numb status (which the Dream Ruby can cause). Go to the overworld and just take a few steps and watch your inventory go nuts. This can quickly become a Game-Breaking Bug because this also screws with the flags for the Return spell and you can find yourself in a bad location and sorely underleveled.
  • In the NES version, if you have the first three characters select "Parry" and then cancel all the way to the first when it is time to select the fourth character's command. This will allow you to attack normally, but your characters will take damage as if they had parried. This was only in the North American version and was fixed in subsequent remakes.
  • NES version- If you recruit the maximum number of companions, the hero will learn the first 8 spells (Blaze, Heal, Expel, Ironize, Firebal, Return, StopSpell, Sleep) in their spell list. The problem is, Heal and Return will not work outside of battle. You can avert this by learning Heal and Return first, then activate the glitch.
  • NES version again- By creating a copy of the 1st save file and playing with the message speed on the copy file, you can manipulate the first battle of the 1st save. This shows its true power around the Shrine of Dharma- if you can get a Metal Slime encounter as the first encounter, you can guarantee that EVERY first encounter will be with Metal Slimes upon saving the game and reloading. This makes it possible to level up quite quickly around the Shrine.
  • NES version- if you use the Silver Harp in the Monster Arena, it causes one of the monsters to become a blank space. If it is a fight only between two monsters, select the blank spot and you will get an automatic victory and your payout will be the blank spots odds. If there are multiple monsters and you bet on the blank spot, then if the next visible monster wins, you win with the blank spots odds. Using this method, 60,000 gold is not an impossibility.
• Growing the Beard: The first two games certainly weren't unpopular, but it was DQIII which set the franchise's place in history and the collective consciousness of Japan in marble. It was a lot more polished than the first two, far broader in scope, and however many arguments might be made for exactly how much influence the game had on JRPG's as a whole, the game's influence on its successors is absolutely humongous, as each one more or less tries to live up to the standard it set and mix up the formula it established, for good or ill.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: The game's almighty influence on JRPGs also tended to affect the Light Novel and Web Novel scene of the New Tens, especially the Trapped in Another World/Reincarnate in Another World subgenre of stories that were popular then. That tidbit is very funny in hindsight, given that ultimately, Erdrick himself is also a hero from another world who saves the realm.
• It Was His Sled:
  • While frequently referred to as part of the Erdrick trilogy nowadays, three quarters of the game's length try to present it as independent of the first two titles.
  • Baramos is a Disc-One Final Boss.
• Memetic Molester: The male Jester among the Japanese fandom.
• Sacred Cow: In Japan, Dragon Quest III is considered one of the canonical classic video games, and is one of the most frequently-referenced games in its pop culture.
• Self-Imposed Challenge: There are several of them that have emerged over the years:
  • Solo Hero Challenge, where you can't recruit anyone except the Merchant for Immigrant Town.
  • All Goof-Offs/Jesters/Gadabouts, considered the hardest class to level due to the vocation's abysmal stats across the board besides Luck and lackluster gear selection.
  • No Magic Challenge is also a popular challenge. Until the final dungeon, your only source of healing are from Inns and Medical Herbs.
• Tear Jerker: Has its own page here.
• That One Attack: Expel/Blasto is found on only a few enemies and usually misses, but if it hits it knocks the character out of your party^note the hero is immune to this spell, and not just for that fight. You have to go all the way back to the first town to get them back. One of the "few enemies" to have it are Hades Condors, which are ridiculously common in the North American area.
• That One Boss: See here for examples from the franchise.
• That One Level: The cave to the Necrogond. Not nearly as frustrating as the Road to Rhone in the previous game, but tough nonetheless.
• They Changed It, Now It Sucks!: Many fans did not react well upon finding out that the iOS and Android versions of the game left out the popular Pachisi / Treasures n' Trapdoors and Monster Medals sidequests and decided to pass on them. That disappointment made a comeback when it came out that the Switch version would be a port of the mobile version.^note Particularly viewed as egregious, considered the definitively-viewed first remake was on Nintendo hardware, for a system Nintendo has archived games of on the Switch.
• Values Resonance: The fact that you can have any playable character be any gender in any role. Want a full team where everyone is an Action Girl, including the main character? You can do that. This was certainly a very forward thinking feature, especially considering this is from an NES game released in The '80s, where most girl characters in games were relegated to the Damsel in Distress role (though even then there were exceptions).
• Visual Effects of Awesome: The Game Boy Color re-release of the game faithfully recreates many of the visual effects of the SNES release, including a complete remake of the opening sequence, the battle over the volcano included.
• Woolseyism: The original English translation for the NES was an astonishing piece of work, particularly for the time, displacing the innate silliness of the franchise with a dead-serious, European epic feel, at times approaching the gravity and drama of something out of the King James Bible. Taken together, it is far more mature and immersive than the original two games and their hamfisted attempts to sound Medieval.
  • Take, for instance, the name of the avian monster, "Elysium Bird." In the original Japanese, this was "極楽鳥," literally "Bird-of-Paradise." But because the Elysium Bird's sprite looks like nothing of the sort, the translators took a reference to paradise — that is, Elysium, from Greek mythology and applied it here.
  • In the later versions, the English name of Xenlon goes quite well with the character, as she's basically a Lawyer-Friendly Cameo of Shenron of Dragon Ball Z. They even look similar!

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