Dragon Quest 3's 2024 remake is certainly proof enough of the game's quality, but during its development, designer Yuji Horii believed that in order for the game to be successful, it needed to be multiple times better than the first two games in the series.
In an interview conducted the day before Dragon Quest 3's initial 1988 release, originally featured in BEEP Magazine and now available on Shmuplations, designer Yuji Horii, along with director Koichi Nakamura and composer Koichi Sugiyama, spoke about the process of creating the game, including the challenge of improving on Dragon Quest 1 and 2.
"DQ2 had to be twice as interesting as DQ1," Horii begins, concerning how Dragon Quest had changed across its three titles. "Otherwise people wouldn't say it was fun; in fact, they'd say it was boring if it was just the same. And in that sense, DQ3 had to be four times as interesting as DQ1."
While the difficulty of iterating on the previous two titles was an issue for the team, they maintain that it was easier in many senses as players were now used to many of the game's concepts. "I think it's easier now that it's a series, a known entity. Players understand a lot of the underlying conventions and ideas of the game without us needing to explain anything. For that reason I think the first Dragon Quest, in which we had to establish all those rules, was probably the hardest development of the three," Nakamura explains.
To this, Horii adds that "We took great care in DQI to make sure the players understood the whole idea of leveling up and getting stronger. That meant we had to be very careful about the speed at which you level up, and make sure that when you bought a better weapon you would clearly feel the difference. Those kind of subtle balancing things were a big challenge back then."
