If you touch that slime I will bust you up somethin' brutha
And because it was inevitable, the lack of internet HAS made me go crazy, so I am currently at a nearby library typing some good stuff down. And because I am slightly insane to begin with I have been abusing my eyes and ears with a good old game of Dragon Warrior III for the Game Boy Color, which is about as fun as a booger on a toothpick. Except that I happen to like toothpicks, and that really sums up DWIII. Excellence, but it comes at a few prices.
Dragon Warrior III is an old game, and playing on the GBC you can really tell. I mean, the graphics look god awful, the sound will make your ears bleed, and the writing has been simplified for the GBC's screen. But through all of this, what really shines through is a good old fashioned on-the-ball RPG that will whip your butt and take your name (I think I've lost my name about seven times to various bosses). In the end, you'll have nine black eyes and several other physically impossible and painful symptoms, but you'll be as happy as a dude who just beat a 30-hour RPG. And that's saying something.
The game looks niceish...sorta...for the GBC. I mean, the monsters animate plentifully, the sprites are nice and colorful, and the world has charm that can't be denied. For a GBC game, it's got it going on. But then again, this is a GBC game. In 2000. Remade from a game that came out in the early 1990's. So of course you will have to unplug your sensory body parts to get to the good stuff, but who ever said that getting to gaming perfection would be easy? It simply adds even more to the charm, and gives you additional bragging rights. "Back in my day, when we played portable games, we had to close our eyes and ears and play the game based on nothing but the sense of magnetic particles in the GBC's screen!" Burnt; take that, youth of the future.
Sound, as well: ouch. MIDI really does hurt the ears after you've been playing the DS for three years, and the GBA for five before that. There is a little bit of orchestration talent shown here, but it's usually the typical fantasy fare that you might just want to shut off. I personally use RPG's as my podcast listening entertainment, but that's just me.
The game itself is magically awesome RPG game-ness that plays very much like Final Fantasy III for the DS, except with none of that dumb 3D that plagues all the games these days. I know a lot of whiners on the original Nsider thought FFIII was hard: fools, you ain't seen nothing yet. The first boss will take a good hour to prepare for, studying the strategies and finding his weaknesses. Even going from one town to the other can lead to a painful murder of crows pecking your eyes out while your jester decides to sing and dance. It may be a GBC game, but this is not those dastardly Pokemans.
If you like that kind of RPG thinking, though, you have a very large, expansive world out there for the taking. From a nice set of classes to choose from to a large gallon bucket of minigames to pull out of the water, you've got an entire world on that monolithic GBC cart there. Again, it's easily compared to Final Fantasy (more like the first three than anything else) but Enix's effort shines through and you really see the love put into every area. If only they had made it a little more accessible to the GBC's standard bunch, because this game is purely excellent and worth playing.
Everything really has that "Role Playing" depth to it, as well. To some gamers (me included, depending on the game) find the boss preparation to be tedious and dull, others see it as the real role that you are taking on. You have evolved beyond those scary nerds playing out of a Dungeons and Dragons book; you are experiencing an entire fantasy world in which you must cope with. All is not fun and games, and there will be many problems that just appear out of the mechanics of the game. Poisoning is horrendously annoying, and in some dungeons, it's guaranteed to happen in almost every random encounter; you reload and play it again, taking 50 antidotes with you. Difficult? Yes. Gratifying? Absolutely. This is no walk in the park, but that's where it finds its niche.
The game is huge, long, and every battle will be a kick in the privates once you go farther into the game. Dragon Warrior III isn't for everyone, but it is a very fun romp that will entertain a lot of people who are still too wussy to get a DS. If you missed out, grab it used, and enjoy it. You don't get a game like this every day.