Square Enix has released a patch for its gorgeous Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake today, and it's live to download on Switch right now. (Thanks, RPG Site!)
The patch, detailed on Steam, includes adding the Mini Medal Manor as a Zoom location, the addition of "short-cut buttons" to add spells and skills to buttons, various balance changes, and an increase to movement speed when travelling on the boat or in the skies on your trusty godbird, Ramia.
That last one is pretty crucial — one of ours (and others') biggest criticisms of the game was the movement speed of the bird. So this will make the later hours of the game much more tolerable.
Need a rundown of everything included in the patch? Here are the patch notes:
Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake - Ver. 1.2.0.0 Update Content
This update contains the content listed below
Traversal
- The movement speed when travelling by boat or using Ramia has been increased.
- Adjustments have been made to avoid boat travel speed being reset by opening the menu or getting into a battle while travelling by boat.
- A feature has been added whereby pressing the menu button while flying with Ramia allows the player to switch between automatic and manual flight modes.
Vocations
- Critical hit rates for the Hero and Martial Artist have been increased.
- The Hero's Falcon Slash and Gigaslash abilities have been made more powerful.
- The Warrior's Cutting Edge ability has been made more powerful.
- The Priest can now equip the Duplic Hat.
- The Monster Wrangler's Monster Pile-On ability has been changed to have reduced power until all friendly monsters have been found, and to carry out a random number of attacks between 3 and 5.
- The amount of MP used by the Monster Wrangler ability Wild Side has been changed to 30.
Battle
- A limit has been placed on the number of times that some monsters can perform certain actions within one turn.
- Some monsters have been adjusted so that they no longer use Defending Champion in the next turn after they become the last remaining monster.
- The status-ailment resistance of boss monsters has been increased for Draconian Quest difficulty.
- Adjustments have been made to make it more difficult for both enemies and party members to be successively afflicted with the same status ailments.
- Some monsters (Metal Chimaera and Hardy Hand) now yield more experience points when defeated.
- Defence has been lowered for all monsters except for metal monsters.
- Minor adjustments have been made to the way that damage is dealt.
Miscellaneous
- Once the Mini Medal Manor has been visited, it will be added to the list of Zoom destinations.
- A new “short-cut button” feature has been added that allows spells and abilities to be assigned to specific buttons. For more information, please refer to Traveller's Tips in-game.
- In the Temple of Trials, the number of Elfin Elixirs required to be handed over to the guard has been changed to 10.
- A treasure chest has been added to the Temple of Trials, allowing players to acquire one more Gringham Whip.
- Fixed a bug whereby levelling up after using the Seed of Life or Seed of Magic items would cause the status increase value to be calculated twice.
- Adjustments have been made so that if trophies and achievements have not been acquired correctly, selecting Misc. > Info in the menu allows some of them to be reacquired.
- Miscellaneous fixes for minor bugs.
Since launching in November 2024, Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake has apparently sold above expectations, with sales in December 2024 coming in at over 2 million.
We've also got more HD-2D goodness to come this year, with Dragon Quest I & II HD-2D Remake, which got a new trailer during the March 2025 Nintendo Direct. That's coming sometime in 2025, but we're keeping our eyes peeled for a more concrete date?
Have you completed Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake? Will you be picking it up with these changes now? Let us know down below.