DQIII's postgame was too much for one post, so here's the back half. Will Erdrick get closure with the loss of his dad? What will the final postgame superboss be? Will I get the platinum trophy? Will I ever move on to Dragon Quest VII? Tune in to find out.
Time for the Temple of Trials, floating in the sky. This is pretty cool...until you actually get in there.
Ramia - who looks like a Legendary Pokemon - drops our heroes off and from there you have to suss out what to do. There are five "wings" of the dungeon, and each one presents a different challenge.
Note: The southwest part of the main floor has a War Drum in a chest. This is an infinite-use item that casts Oomph on the entire party and is so tremendously useful that I really wish I'd popped in here much sooner to get it. Makes it easy to keep Oomph on Midenhall while also bumping up everyone else's attacks. Sasha is basically an Egg On bot during the final fights while Midenhall does most of the damage, but Cannock can do some decent additional damage while Oomphed as well. So this item can be added to the buff rotation.
Moonbrooke using it makes the most sense since she's doing the least attacking of anyone and is on buff rotation, but it might work even better to have Midenhall be the one with it: He can't cast and spends his first turn buff-less. Rather than doing a one-quarter-strength Cutting Edge and having someone else spend a turn casting Oomph, he can hit the War Drum on the first turn while other characters are free to load up Wild Side and then Sap the boss into oblivion on round 2 before he dishes out a massive Cutting Edge.
Well, enough delaying, time for this awful series of trials:
SOUTHWEST TRIAL: Have to give this spirit a bunch of specific items. That's it. Costs a few hundred thousand gold if you have to go out and buy them all, but all of them are buyable which is nice. Most expensive part are the Elfin Elixirs, which I believe run 40k each. The trial used to require 25 of them, but it got patched and now only requires 10. And yeah, it DOES eat everything you turn in, so don't expect to get any of them back. Which is pretty lame, given how good these elixirs are.
Altogether, it requires:
-4x Hardwood Headwear
-4x Staff of Sentencing
-4x Epic Apron
-4x Flame Armour
-4x Slime Earrings
-25x Magic Water
-10x Elfin Elixir
SOUTH TRIAL: This one is super easy, barely an inconvenience. Requires recruiting over 100 monsters, and if going for the plat you need to get all 121 monsters anyway. Anyone putting off finding all the monsters until the very end is going to have a problem here.
SOUTHEAST TRIAL: This one requires presenting four particular key items that are all the result of side quests.
-Sword of Kings
-Auroral Helm
-Gringham Whip
-Mod Rod
The only one that might be a bit of an issue is the Gringham Whip, which requires getting almost all of the Mini Medals. Again, have to do that regardless if going for the platinum. If not going for the platinum, and not actively keeping track of medals, then this could well be the biggest hassle of the entire trial. You're essentially locked out of finishing this place until you go and figure out how to collect enough Mini Medals.
Anyone going for the platinum would know this already, but anyone just trying to play the game who wants to do the postgame afterwards, do yourself a favor and keep track of the Mini Medals as you go.
NORTHEAST TRIAL and NORTHWEST TRIAL: Both of these are actual dungeon areas, not just checklists like the others. They're both very challenging and have super-strong enemies. They also both use a portal system, just like the Castle of Ordeals in Final Fantasy 1.
Oh yeah, and also...each trial only allows use of specific weapons. Anyone not using one of the named weapons will do like one-tenth their normal damage and take about ten times the normal damage. In other words they're completely useless for the entire trial because they'll get one-shotted by everything. If your class composition doesn't allow for using the required weapons, then you're screwed. Another roadblock. Which is why this dungeon is so lame, it's just one potential roadblock after another if you don't happen to meet the requirements it doles out.
You can get by with one character being gimped, but if you have, say, 3 characters gimped and Erdrick has to solo, then you're kinda effed unless you go change classes. Can turn on Easy Mode I guess and autobattle everything, I guess. Forcing an 11:59th hour class change at this point in the game is kind of ridiculous.
There's a recruitable Baramos-like dude in here who is one of the last few monsters in the game for me to find. This dungeon in its entirety has four monsters to recruit, if I'm remembering it right.
The TILES OF DOOM make a return. Then, the boss is...
...a bunch of Pandora's Boxes. They're the strongest mimic type in the game, and they're a real chore to fight with. I tried that spell that knocks foes out of the battle entirely (Blasto) and it didn't work, of course. Gotta win this on the up and up. Luckily all four of my four characters had proper weapons and were able to be useful here. This would be doable with 3 characters, and possible with 2, but it'd take a while.
Unfortunately, for the OTHER trial, I'd be stuck at 3 out of 4 able to use the correct weapons, with my fourth character just dying every round. I hate this place.
The weapon requirements let me step out of my usual setup and try some weapons I haven't been using, at least. Having a Warrior for this is great because they can use pretty much anything.
No TILES OF DOOM in this one, but it does have a boulder puzzle. A pretty easy one. Moving on.
It's another Pandora's Box foursome, no big deal. I'll just trounce these like the others and...
..........nope, these are totally different from the other set of four, or any of the other Pandora's Boxes in this dungeon / other postgame dungeons. These are super special Pandora's Boxes that have Omniheal and TAKE A ZILLION TURNS IN A ROW. I had to turn the game down to Dracky Quest just to be able to hang in there against these guys as they continuously negated all the damage I did. And that's with 3 characters; any less would be legitimately impossible. Four wouldn't have been that much better either.
Why did they make one Pandora's Box fight so much harder than the other, when they're basically equivalent fights on opposite sides of the dungeon? It's weird.
Here it is. It is THE dumbest fight in this game, if not this entire trilogy. It's a 23 minute video before I actually tapped out on the fight, and I'm sure one can get the point within a couple minutes. Just a horrendous fight. Absolutely horrendous. It's like the King Hydra fight in my first run, times four. They basically had me stunlocked and everything. I eventually just gave up and reset. If you don't win in the first few rounds, you're too locked up to make a comeback. Why is this dungeon so damn horrible?
Here's the rematch once I found out that Blasto actually DOES work on these guys. It doesn't work on the other set of four Pandora's Boxes, so the assumption was it wouldn't work here. I wish I could get back the 2-3 hours I spent trying to defeat these guys on the up and up.
Now that this awful shit is out of the way, onward to the actual super-boss challenge of the dungeon, which I'm guessing will be nothing compared to his own miniboss fights:
A long walk down Snake Way follows after the five trials are down.
The very last monster recruit of the game (if you've gotten everyone to this point) is...Xenlon himself! He calls our heroes "frivolous" and joins them anyway.
STATS BEFORE THE VERY LAST SUPERBOSS:
Oh yeah, did I never mention that I grinded Erdrick to level 99? I sure did. Never starting over on levels like the others kept having to do made a big difference.
Here he is, the final superboss of DQ3! It's...a gold version of King Hydra. Not sure what I expected, but it was cool not knowing what would await at the end of this place. DQ3 had one final surprise in wait, and here it is.
Now this is a real superboss. It dwarfs Xenlon in power, and being at high levels was pretty much a requirement as it turns out. Xenlon, who I thought was the big dude, is basically the "entry level" superboss of both this and DQII. Grand Dragon here is probably more on the level of the Dragonlord Grandson or maybe even the Kraid Malroth. My characters are so strong in this game that it's hard to tell, though. I had less trouble with this fight than either of those fights, but that's with far higher levels than I had at the end of DQII.
Here's the fight. This thing has a TON of HP so it dragged on. I actually needed all those levels, and had to use some Elfin Elixirs for this.
The Grand Dragon is another "best your own high score" fight, and you have to win in under 20 turns for it to be considered a real win. So I barely made it. All you get for winning this fight is the Grand Medal, which does nothing and is essentially just proof of the win. It's an homage to the Game Boy Color version of the game, where this guy is the final postgame superboss and you unlock him by farming medals from EVERY enemy in the game.
I never got to do that fight (doubt it would have been any sort of problem) because farming all those medals was an absolutely ridiculous ask. I think it was something like 10-20 of each enemy type that you had to defeat to get everything.
Come to think of it, I think the postgame of this version might be a combination of the postgames of the GBC and SNES versions. Or at least similar material to both of those. I kinda wish the Temple of Trials had just been a normal dungeon leading to this guy, because this is a great fight... that followed a real pain in the ass of a location.
With that, the game is completely beat. There's no True Final Boss like DQ2; this guy is the equivalent fight for this game. I still have a platinum to get, however, so the rest of this is just going to be Platinum Clean-Up.
Finishing the Bestiary was the next target. I expected to be missing a ton of foes due to using Repel, but I guess I managed to abstain from Repel enough that only a few things were missing. By the time I had to go back and fill in the blanks, I was only missing around ten monsters. All of them were pretty easy to suss out by putting the list in alphabetical order and looking it up online.
In the massive northern forest, which didn't get much attention during the game, I search for a missing boulder enemy.
There it is...along with a small army of Metal Slimes. Who knew this forest was the place to go for those?
There's one last enemy in the "Cave of the Dwarf Area" (according to the bestiary) that is really hard to find. Turns out, it isn't in that area at all. It's in the closed-in area right outside the Castle of the Dragon Queen, a place where the player is unlikely to ever fight anything. Do a few battles around there to find...
...Heavy Hood, the very last enemy I needed for the bestiary, and one that's really easy to miss so this might help someone out someday. And yeah, he only appears in the small area around the castle, while all the other enemies in this area-set appear in a much larger overworld space.
With the bestiary finished (that didn't take long) it's time for our heroes to rub themselves vigorously with essential oils. How do you think the female Sages get their legs so shiny?
From here on out I'm avoiding any further battles and just going around looking for any missing recruitable monsters.
There are a few good lists for this online, and going to the Monster Meadows NPC in the Monster Arena is how you suss out what you're missing.
Any monster with a ??? listed in the column in the lower right means there's a missing entry. There are 121 monsters total, NOT the 120 that I've seen said in a few places. The sly "Lump Shaman" here managed to sneak by me when I was checking everything.
This particular aspect of the platinum is a pain in the ass, because most of the lists online have things missing, and if you haven't found any variation of a particular monster it won't appear in your list at all (not as a ???) and you have to just...figure it out.
Luckily, much like the Bestiary, by this point in the game I pretty much had 90% of this done already and it didn't take long to fill in the blanks. I will say that recruiting monsters was way more of a hassle during the game than a simple bestiary was, and makes me not that keen on replaying the game again. Wild Side (which is really a requirement to have on at least one or two characters) should be for 25 monsters, not 50. That'd be a more reasonable number to recruit while playing through the game (while still putting in some extra effort to find these) and get the ability just in time for the final dungeon.
A situation like this, that talking animal is pretty sus. Whip out the Mirror of Ra and let's see what this "seal" REALLY is:
Sure enough, another monster to add to my collection. Throw a Pokeball at it!
The final monster I got is super obscure: It's in the town of Lozamii, but only at dusk. That rare, gorgeous time of day that you have to wait for. It's super unlikely anyone will actually ever be here at dusk, since it's in the middle of the ocean and thus you're going to be Zooming here at all times rather than flying around the overworld. If you're lucky it'll be dusk the first time you arrive here, cause that's about the only chance to have it happen naturally.
This gets me...blue crab dude, and that's monster #121.
.......that was such a chore. The Bestiary hunt was totally fine, but the Mini Medal hunt and the Wrangled Monsters hunt were both a lot more annoying than they needed to be.
just gimme my reward so I can get outta here
Alright, platinum obtained. This will go really well with the DQ1+2 platinum:
Aww yeah. I also finished the MK one, making it a 3-peat. No one will care except me, but it looks pretty cool seeing plats lined up.
Here's the platinum trophy clip-compilation, as is tradition. Nothing here was particularly difficult besides the few things that were a chore: Medals, Monsters, getting Goof-Off to level 45 or whatever it was. DQ1+2 had a more fun trophy list; very similar but nothing in particular on it stood out as being annoying. I wish it had a Bestiary trophy, though, and I wish DQ3 had a "display treasure boxes on the map" option. Two things that one did really well and the other could use.
Last thing I do is return to Aliahan. When I was getting all of Xenlon's wishes, one of them was to return Ortega to life. And well, here he is!
He left a while ago, and missed his kid growing up, but now he doesn't have to die with only a momentary glimpse of said kid. And also, now Erdrick's Mom doesn't have to be alone in the world and grieving in this room for the rest of her days.
...all of that said, technically all of this postgame takes place before the final battle with Zoma. So...technically, even though we're not seeing it here, Erdrick will still need to go back to the Citadel to fight Zoma and be trapped in the underworld, setting in motion the events of the rest of the trilogy.
At least this woman and Ortega will be able to mourn the loss of their child together, rather than this woman suffering on her own. So really, we put right a wrong for Erdrick's Mom.
Patty at the character recruitment bar gets the last word for DQIII...ever.
It's pretty cool how basically everyone in Aliahan reacts to Ortega's return. This is a big deal.
Why are three of my characters coffins? Well, anyway. On to the next game.
Ortega's return. Great scene to close this trilogy out for real.
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