Dragon Quest III

Dragon Quest III is noted for greatly expanding upon the gameplay of the original Dragon Quest and Dragon Quest II. The game uses basic role-playing video game conventions such as leveling up by gaining experience points and equipping items. The battle system is turn-based like the other games in the series, though the remakes incorporate various interface changes from later titles. These include simpler door opening, a bag to store items instead of keeping them at a bank, quick item sorting with "Tidy Item" and "Tidy Bag" command, and a "Full HP" command to automate the process of casting healing and status restoring spells.

And while earlier Dragon Quest games were non-linear in structure, Dragon Quest III featured an even more open-world experience. It also allowed the player to freely swap characters in and out of their party and introduced the day/night cycle in which certain items, characters, and quests are only accessible at specific times of the day.

The game starts in the castle town of Aliahan. Like the rest of the Dragon Quest worlds, this castle is set in a medieval-like time period, complete with knights and magicians. The party explores several caves, ruins, and castles during the adventure. The geography of Dragon Quest III largely corresponds to the actual geography of Earth, and many towns correspond to their real-world cultures, including "Romaly" for Rome, "Portoga" for Portugal, "Assaram" near present-day Iraq (derived from "as-salamu alaykum"), "Jipang" for Japan (where the hero fights Yamata no Orochi) and even a "New Town" in eastern North America that experiences a revolution against an overbearing ruler (derived from the American Revolution against the United Kingdom in 1776).

Dragon Quest III is set many years before the original Dragon Quest in a world separate from the first two games. A wicked fiend named Baramos threatens to destroy the world. The story revolves around the Hero, son or daughter (the player can choose to be either male or female, with few gameplay changes) of the legendary warrior Ortega. On their sixteenth birthday, the Hero is summoned to the castle and is given by the King of Aliahan the challenge to rid the world of the evil archfiend Baramos, which Ortega attempted in the past but seemingly perished in a volcano. The Hero then is able to recruit up to three traveling companions to help fight Baramos.

As with the other main games in the Dragon Quest series, Dragon Quest III's scenario was designed by Yuji Horii, whereas the artwork was done by Akira Toriyama, of Dragon Ball fame. Koichi Sugiyama composed all the music for Dragon Quest III. Chunsoft president Koichi Nakamura, co-creator of Dragon Quest, stated he contributed about "10%" of the games programming. The game was released a year after its predecessor, which was finished only five months after the first installment.

This reflected an ever-lengthening game development process of the series according to series creator, Yuji Horii. In a 1989 interview, Horii said that developers had perfected the series' game structure in Dragon Quest III, and this was reflected by the transition from one character's quest to a party of heroes. The password system used on the first two Dragon Quest titles was dropped in favor of a save slot due in part to Horii's dislike of the long codes that players needed to memorize or record . Horii had a policy of removing any features from his games that had been used elsewhere, which turned out to be unworkable during Dragon Quest III's development when the game's world map concept was used first by another game maker in Mirai Shinwa Jarvas, but Horii's team was too far into development to change anything.

Dragon Quest III sold over one million copies on the first day, with almost 300 arrests for truancy among students absent from school to purchase the game. It set sales records by selling 1.1 million game cartridges in Japan within a day and 3 million in a week, and grossing ¥20 billion ($143 million at the time, or $389 million adjusted for inflation) within a month. It topped the Japanese sales charts from February, through March and April, to May 1988. It became the best-selling game of 1988 in Japan, with 3.8 million units sold, and the best-selling game in Japan between 1986 and 1989, grossing $230 million at the time. The original game sold a worldwide total of 3.895 million copies, including 3.8 million in Japan and 95,000 in the United States, grossing several hundred million dollars by 1993 ($820 million adjusted for inflation).

It is often mistakenly thought that in 1988 the game's success caused the Japanese government to outlaw further releases of Dragon Quest games on school days. In truth, Enix themselves decided to hold off the release of future Dragon Quest games until weekends. The North American release of Dragon Quest III did not meet nearly as much success. The North American release's poor sales are partly due to the fact that the game was released after the release of 16-bit gaming systems, making it seem archaic to gamers.

The male Hero from this installment appears in the Japan-exclusive mobile game Dragon Quest Rivals. He also appears as a guest character in the 2018 crossover fighting game Super Smash Bros. Ultimate via DLC and is officially voiced for the first time by Nobuyuki Hiyama. The game's director, Masahiro Sakurai, explained that the Hero's inclusion was originally meant to include just the two protagonists from Dragon Quest III and Dragon Quest XI, but the number would ultimately be doubled to four, including the protagonists from Dragon Quest IV and Dragon Quest VIII.