Crapsto

The lack of an option not to use AI is what almost everybody cites in agreeing with your assessment about the NES versions of III vs IV. On all the new versions of everything for DS, the tactics and AI are all still available but there is also an "obey orders" tactic in which everything is input by hand and is 100% under your control. It improved the chapter 5 DQ 4 experience immensely. Brey and BiKill is the other one that drove me nuts waiting for in the NES days.
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Yes, my DW3 goal is insane.

I have an enormous topic that's almost a year along and over 300 posts on the DW3 Game Boy Color version board. The GBC DW3 adds a very extensive post-game; there are many more hours of gameplay after the defeat of Zoma.

One of the key components of said postgame content is the collection of monster medals. They're a random drop from every single monster in the game; they drop at 1:16. They come in bronze, silver, and gold, and you need at least two bronzes to have a shot at getting your first silver, then you need at least two silvers to have a shot at your first gold.

Well, almost a year ago, in a completely different forum (DS DQ5's actually), a guy claimed to have gotten them all. Mind you, not just all 165 at least one of each colour, but every single possible one. Every single medal, all 165 monsters, all three colours, the medal book maxed to 99 of all three of all 165.

He was immediately branded a liar because the sheer number of hours it would take to do THAT MUCH GRINDING....well, it would take thousands and thousands of hours. The 1:16 odds mean it's possible to get a few per hour but probably not more than maybe 6 or 8 in a given hour unless you're lucky. So to get 49,005 monster medals would probably take somewhere in the neighbourhood of 10,000 hours to do at least, and that's just the starting point, as the silvers and golds are actually rarer drops than 1:16.

Anyway, in what started out as a purely tongue-in-cheek thing, I said, "I'll give that particular insane windmill a go!", figuring the attempt wouldn't last and soon I'd move on to other things. However, for whatever reason, I've never quit on it. I've been at it and every day now for almost a year (it'll be the one-year anniversary on January 27), I've played at least a little bit of DW3 GBC version on my GBA SP and ground at least one monster medal. I did the math, and figured out that if I average five per day I'll finish in the year 2035. I'm just below 2,300 right now.

The whole thing has been light-hearted and tongue-in-cheek all along, though the attempt is certainly serious, and I refuse to cheat with any sort of codes or devices or by fabricating medals using copying devices and a link cable to a second cart, with the exception of that I actually had a memory glitch a few days ago and will need to clone about 40 medals to recover them, but otherwise it's ongoing. The topic has a few followers, and it's all in fun.

Go to the GBC DW3 board if you want and read some of it; the topic is long enough now that it would take a VERY long time to read it start to finish, and many of the posts within it are just long-winded statistical updates, but the topic has also evolved into kind of a GBC DW3 general catchall topic, though nothing new is covered in it that isn't covered much more succinctly in other dedicated topics.
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Yes, my DW3 goal is insane.

Warning: very long detailed novel of information in two parts because of length with some generic spoilers about GBC DW3, just because the topic creator expressed some interest in learning more. Skip this if you don't want to read a very long post or don't want to know the detail differences between NES 3 and GBC 3.




spoiler space





DW3 GBC has in it not present in the NES version:

Five "pachisi" boards, which are these pathway board-game type things from which you can acquire some interesting equipment. These are a sidequest only, and are completely optional. the first one is between Romaly and Kazave.

A personality system in which your characters' personality type (the happy type, the lewd type, the sexy type, the solitary type, the alert type, etc) gives stat bonuses at level up. The GBC DW3 is the only place in the entire series they experimented with this idea. The concept is kind of dumb, as who wants a DW character who is "the weepy type", but at the same time it's important enough to read about a little if you should ever play the game, as the difference between a character leveled up 30 or 40 times in a very bad personality with negative bonuses versus a good personality that boosts all stats can be stark. The personalities never come into play in actual gameplay, just at level-up with the stats, and a small handful of times in NPC dialogue somebody might refer to a character's personality. So the way to handle this is to get a character into a good personality for stats either from the start or via an accessory and then just forget about it.

The monster medals, which are pesent the entire game. You'll probably get your first one within your first few battles right at the start.

The incorporation of the TinyMedals, or small medals. These first appeared in the NES 4, and have been in every one since, including being added to GBC 3. In the NES 4, they're spent like currency, as you well know. This happens a couple other times in the series, including the DS 5, but the other way they're handled sometimes is on a threshhold basis. Get to 30, you get a certain prize, then 40 is a different one, etc, and they're all fixed. This is the way it's done in GBC 3, and some of those prizes are very powerful weapons, armour, or accessories.

A number of additional bits of equipment and accessories, some of which are only available either in the postgame content, on one of the pachisi boards, or as a TinyMedal prize. Most of the accessories affect the personality type, e.g. a female character equips the garter accessory and becomes a sexy personality, which happens to be the best personlity type for females in terms of stat growth.

One additional vocation class available right from the start of the game: thief class, which at the beginning in low levels isn't much to write home about but once you get a thief up to levels in the 40s, 50s, and beyond, they steal items all over the place from all monsters, making stat seed acquisition and rare item drop acquisition much much easier.
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Yes, my DW3 goal is insane.

Half #2 of the very long novel about the different versions of DW 3 with spoilage.



A little more spoiler space




And, of course, the thing that was specifically asked about is:

Ample post-game content, and lots of it. Once Zoma is defeated, the NES version is done. Once Zoma is defeated, the GBC version has another long, difficult dungeon leading to a city in the clouds (vaguely conceptually linked to the Zenithian idea of DQ 4-6, I suppose), then once there yet another dungeon past that leading to another super-boss you must defeat multiple times, one of the times of which leads to yet ANOTHER dungeon that initally only the lobby of is unlocked. To get into this last dungeon, all bronze medals from all monsters up to that point must have been collected. A ways into this dungeon is a point at which accessing more of this final bonus dungeon requires having collected all SILVER monster medals up to that point, but the good news here is that if you're missing a bunch of silvers but have multiple bronzes that door's guard actually lets you trade them in 2 for 1 bronze for silver. Once through the silver door is one last final super-boss to fight.

To go back thoughout the game collecting any missed medals to go through these doors is potentially hours of extra play depending on how thorough a medal collection had been gone after throughout, not to mention the new monsters in these bonus dungeons and the super-bosses require levels and equipment much much higher and stronger than that necessary to defeat Zoma. So the DW3 GBC bonus content could easily add another 15 or 20 hours or significantly more to the game, depending on how far you want to take that medal completionism. Also, playing those five pachisi boards can be a long time, too, and only one of those five is in the actual postgame, so the first four are actually bonus content during the main game, too.

There are topics on some of the various DW / DQ forums on here where people have open discussions ranking the games. The GBC DW3 is often at the top of people's lists, and it's rare for it not to be in people's top 3. I've played NES 1-4, DS 4-6, GBC 1-3, and PS 7. I've never yet jumped into 8 or 9. For me, the two at the top of the heap are the DS 5 and the GBC 3. And yes, if you don't mind playing an RPG on a handheld rather than a TV, the DS 4 improves on the NES 4 specifically because of that AI thing, and that's the only way to play official versions of 5 and 6 in English. Meanwhile, GBC games can still be played on a regular big TV via the GameCube's Game Boy player.

The NES 3 was not at all broken the way the NES 4 was with the AI flaw, but the GBC version of 3 has a lot more interesting bells and whistles to it than the original NES version did, and the GBC version is generally regarded as the definitve version of the game. It took an already fantastic game and added a LOT of extra fun stuff. The beauty of it is, though, that virtually all the extra stuff is totally optional. You can go as crazy with trying for a 100% completionist file with all of it, the medals and pachisi boards and post-game dungeons and everything, or you can ignore ALL of that. Player's choice.
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Yes, my DW3 goal is insane.

Darkwing and Slartifer, that's true. All of it, all of what both of you said. The addition of thief class also makes GBC significantly easier, and if you manipulate the personalities for the best stat gains, same thing. No question, it is easier.

That said, my style of play renders that particluar issue kind of moot. Even without the medal grind and just playing through the NES versions, I tend to very carefully keep track of my number of monsters defeated and my old quota systems tend to yield me always being quite overpowered and several levels above where I would need to be at any given juncture. It pleased me that the big book of beasts in DS DQ4 had a significance to killing 20 of each thing, because I've actually been in the habit of killing 20 of each thing in all DW games all the back to DW1 in 1989.

Obviously my crazy devotion to playing the GBC version every day for the past year and theoretically for many years to come would indicate some bias, but there is actually none. I love old school games and consoles all the way back to the Fairchild Channel F, which I own two different working consoles of and the complete set of carts, so I'm certainly not coloured by any sort of "newer is better" type thinking, I just love the additions to the GBC version. I love the pachisi boards, I love the medals, I love the stealing, I don't really love the personalities though I at least know how to manipulate it as well as is possible, and I love the postgame stuff.

There is a sense of lighthearted cartoon goofiness to the DQ series as a whole, and the additions in the GBC version evoke that better for me than the original version does. Big board games in the middle of the wilderness, medal collecting guys living in houses down wells, all-powerful postgame monsters that aren't out to destroy the world but are just out to have a good time with a high level hard hitting fight; I eat all this stuff up.

RedScarlet makes it perfectly clear in her FAQs that she prefers the SNES version of DW3 the best of all. There's certainly nothing wrong with different people having different opinions and the last thing I'll ever do is take you guys to task for yours. I'm hoping TUnit10 finds a way to play the GBC one sometime soon, and makes up his own mind now that he's heard from each camp. Either way, this is certainly a worthwhile discussion amongst people who in the broader picture all love the same thing: Dragon Warrior games. And by the way, I tend to post most often on GBC 3 and DS 4-6, but I lurk the four NES boards, too, so I'm on all of them. As clearly evidenced by where this particular thread is located.
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Yes, my DW3 goal is insane.

RedScarlet: I found her TinyMedal FAQ for GBC DW3 very useful. If she's long gone from these boards, I wouldn't know.

And here is a perfect example of the differences of opinions where no one's any more right than anybody else and it's all personal preferences: I like the light-hearted goofiness, apparently much more than you do.

So how about I amend my statement that created this discussion to:

"Some people regard the GBC version of DW3 as the definitive version, while others prefer the original NES version; this is a matter of personal tastes".
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Yes, my DW3 goal is insane.