Dragon Warrior III took me about 20 years to beat. My savegame started that day when I came home, slapped it in the NES, and went to town creating a party, and wantering around beating up ravens for the next few hours. I don't know what but there was something awfully intimidating, larger than life, about Dragon Warrior III. Something that made me feel a little overwhelmed in my ability to beat it.

See, I started on Dragon Warrior IV, that game was, despite being huge, very linear, and very good at using it's storytelling to guide you through the process of playing the game. Dragon Warrior I was also very much like that but a bit more open-world like a modern RPG is with a lot less hand-holding comparitively. I had not really given II much time yet on emulation. But this felt like Ultima III: Exodus to me almost, except the whole getting eaten alive by Balrons on level 5 bit because you still had not hit the lost continent of Ambrosia to bump your other stats.

So through the course of my 20's, I'd slowly meander my way through Dragon Warrior III, usually grinding till I fell asleep on my Everett WA futon. I was not unusual for me to wake up, probably in a semi maniacal state, because I'd been listening to the overworld music for the last six hours on repeat after falling asleep while roaming around grinding, usually confused on where to go next....how do I get into that Eigerbear castle? How do I find the sailor's thigh bone? How do I obtain the book of Sartori so I can turn that useless wench at the back of my party into a productive sage!?!?

Dragon Quest III was released in Japan in 1988 to highly anticipating audiences and was a tremendous hit. The new game was pretty much the perfect merger of the western style open-ended RPG, with the guided, linear, JRPG style started by it's two prequels. This was pretty much the game that cemented Dragon Quest as a cultural Icon in Japan.

In America, however, by grand contrast, Dragon Warrior III was released in 1991 without much more than a whimper and a sigh at best. By this point, as the Super Nintendo was about to come out, or already was out by that time, attention was on the SNES and Zelda: A Link to the Past, and Super Mario World, not on the next Dragon Quest release. So it just sort of showed up for a time, sold it's share of $45 copies, and then faded off into the sunset forgotten until more recent times when Dragon Quest has gained more relevancy in our culture in the states.