"Shine on, you crazy Dragon Warrior!"

''With graphical upgrades, memorable tunes, and several entertaining additions, [Dragon Warrior 3] is the game to buy for your portable RPG fix.''

Every gamer has their holy grail of video games. The game that you enjoy beyond all else for a system, yet is incredibly hard to find. Such was the case for a much younger Sir ''O'' and the Nintendo classic, Dragon Warrior 3.

Therefore, suffice it to say that I was more than I little worried to look at the screenshots of the new Game Boy Advance port, seeing the changes to the game and worrying that the title would lose its original charm upon its portable release. Well, I am overjoyed to inform you that it has not lost the old Dragon Quest series charm in the slightest, the after building on what I now see was only an incredibly solid foundation of a great game, this title is unquestionably one of the greatest RPGs to ever grace a portable system.

The story is more or less that which you might expect from a Dragon Quest game. Your Father, being the town bad-ass that he is, decides to take it upon himself to take on the Demon Lord all by himself upon a fiery volcano. After a fearsome battle, both he and the Demon Lord fall to their apparent demises inside the volcano. Later the Demon Lord proves to be alive and well and only those in the bloodline of the brave Ortega (the guy in the volcano) can take on this jerk. That someone is you.

One of the many upshots of this game is the party system, which allows you to choose your characters and build them from the ground up, picking their sex (yes, you can have a female main character), class (Warrior, Wizard, Jester, etc.) and in this GBC port, even their personality, which effects how they level up. For instance a person with a ''Smart'' personality will probably gain a lot of Intelligence per level up, but not so much Vitality, making it a good personality for Wizards, but less so for a Fighter. Don't like the character's personality? No biggie. Just grab a mood-altering book or accessory and make them change their tune.

One of my biggest fears was that the music would be changed on the Game Boy Color. I know it sounds cheesy, but one of my favorite factors of the NES version were the battle and town music. Thankfully, Enix not only did a great job in porting the music, but even added various remixes to indicate nighttime in a town or castle and other such things.

And that brings me to the actual quest. Again being ahead of later games in the aspect of doing things at a certain time of day, Dragon Warrior 3 will turn from day to night and back again, and that often opens or closes paths. For instance, say you want to get a treasure behind a shopkeeper's counter (THIEF!), but the shopkeeper is in the way. You leave town, return at night, and are able to sneak behind the counter while the shopkeeper is asleep.

The graphics, however, are truly where the game is at. Now a lot of people don't care for Dragon Ball Z (and I agree with them, but I'm going somewhere with it), but most agree that the artwork in the series is fantastic. Learning from this, Enix tapped the artist for Dragon Ball Z to redesign the characters and monsters. This adds a wonderful new look to the world map and a gigantic graphical leap in the battles. For now, not only are your attacks shown on screen (such as a sword slashing or a fireball hitting the enemy), but the monsters are now fully animated! And this isn't some cheesy, Pok'emon Crystal two frames of a start pose. No sir. The monsters have several-frame animations and sound effects for their attacks and spells; and often they have more than one. For instance a Raven flies up in the air and drops his skull (the one he sits on) on you; a Magician will either strike you with a one-handed jab or wave his arms and let loose with a Blaze spell; and a Metaly will either bob from side to side to attack or will come charging right towards you. These animations alone are worth getting the game to look at. I'm not one to go ape over eye candy, but I was seriously impressed by the work put into the graphics on this game.

Not one to just leave the game being ''exceptional,'' Enix went yet another step further by adding the ''Tiny Medal hunt'' game. You want some secret items? Well, you'd better search from stem to stern for those precious medals. They might be hidden in a dresser drawer or just some dusty corner. But find enough of them and you can look for the Medal Collector and trade them in for valuable gifts.

But to quote countless infomercials, ''That's not all!'' You can also collect Monster Medals, which are bronze, silver, and gold representations of monsters you've defeated. This gives a level 50 character an actual reason to go back to Aliahan and fight some Slimes.

If a had to make one minor complaint, I'd say that the dialogue text is about twice as large as it should be. I understand that it's more readable, but I think that it's a little ridiculous that they can only fit two lines of text in each dialogue window. But that's a trivial matter. With graphical upgrades, memorable tunes, and several entertaining additions, this is the game to buy for your portable RPG fix.

(Scores based on a 1-10 scale)
Concept: Prove that successful GBC ports DO exist.
10
Graphics: By far the best a Game Boy RPG has shown me.
10
Sound: This is one of the few Game Boy games you won't feel the need to turn the volume down on.
9.75
Playabilty: Extremely minor twinges occur with the increased in-town speed, but I barely noticed them.
9.75
Entertainment: Unbelievably good in every way, this RPG slipped through the generation gap with ease.
9.75
OVERALL: 9.75 (rounded up to 10 for GameFAQs)

Reviewer's Score: 10/10, Originally Posted: 09/24/02, Updated 09/24/02