Tis the season. While everyone is getting worked up about their Modern Warfares, Dragon Ages and the like, I sit at work agonizing over whether I should bite the bullet and make my priest into a sage. It's not a decision to be made lightly, if I do it my character will have more skills and better stats, but in exchange I will have to suffer through some levels until I can survive slogging through the dark corners of the world, looking for orbs.

It's my first time through Dragon Quest 3, and I am an addict.

It's hard to believe it's taken me this long to play this game. As someone who loves RPGs and retro games, my "first hit" was from the original Dragon Warrior. A friend had the game, and we spent many hours exploring, looking for artifacts of the world we were thrust into. When the legendary Nintendo Power promotion hit, somehow I convinced my mother to weasel a copy of the game from them in exchange for another year, the suckers! I was gonna subscribe for another year anyway!

Dragon Warrior 2 was released approximately around the same time as Final Fantasy. In a personal era where pocket money was limited by the number of yards I could mow, I could only choose one. My friend had Dragon Warrior 2 and we played it together in much the same manner as we played the first game, and I was captivated by the fact that you could see what your weapons and spells looked like in the original Final Fantasy. Between that and the insane coverage the game was getting at the time, I never really looked back. The rarity of the latter Dragon Warrior games didn't help (check ebay, marvel at the prices for games over a decade old!)

Dragon Quest came to my attention again when the DS re releases were announced. Final Fantasy has been stuck in my mind ever since the original, and while I obsessively bought, imported, emulated, and replayed each one, Dragon Quest has sat by the wayside, waiting patiently for me to come back to the fold. Playing through DQ4 on the DS was like reconnecting with an old friend from grade school, or like eating peanut butter and jelly after weeks of dining on finicky complicated food and being unsatisfied.

No one really wants to read my life story. In fact at this point you've either clicked somewhere else or are thinking "Why the hell are you playing dragon quest three in this day and age? Get on with it!". So here's the meat: Romhacking.net has recently (okay, nearly three months old) put out a translation for the SNES ROM.
http://www.romhacking.net/trans/1323/.
Follow the instructions and you're golden, enjoy playing the best port of this game you'll see unless Square Enix decides to put out a new version, which they may. Probable disclaimer: I don't know how or where to get roms, neither does anyone else.