The Bases are in fact still Loaded.

Admiring the home run ball

To Beat: Get a perfect 100 rating against a Level 5 team
Played: 5/27/21
Difficulty: 4/10
My Difficulty: 2/10
My Video: Bases Loaded 3 Longplay

The NES has several game series with an excellent third installment. Super Mario Bros. 3 is one of the best games of all time. Castlevania III: Dracula’s Curse is a fan favorite with an all-time soundtrack made even better when utilizing the expanded chips on the Famicom. Dragon Warrior III is often considered one of the best RPGs on the NES and one I personally enjoyed very much. Ninja Gaiden III is awesome, as is TMNT III: The Manhattan Project. Mega Man 3 might well be the best of the 6 NES installments, at least to some. Bases Loaded 3 is not considered, well, at all, when talking about great 3rd games of a series. But I can confidently say that Bases Loaded 3 is my favorite game in the series for one very specific reason that I’ll get into.

For more information on the Bases Loaded series, check out my reviews for Bases Loaded and Bases Loaded II: Second Season. As before, this review will focus primarily on the changes between the previous installments. Let’s get started.

Bases Loaded 3 was first released in Japan, originally named Moero!! Pro Yakyuu ’90: Kandouhen. That translates roughly to Burn!! Pro Baseball ’90: Exciting Edition, or perhaps Impressive Edition. It was released in Japan in July 1990, about six months after Bases Loaded II reached North America. The US release came in September 1991. Here it was called just Bases Loaded 3 but it features MLB Hall of Famer Ryne Sandberg on the box cover. Like the other installments, the game was developed by Tose and published by Jaleco in both regions.

They really want you to understand what’s going on here.

Let’s get the biggest change out of the way first. Bases Loaded 3 does not require playing a full season to beat the game. In fact, there is no season mode at all! This game features five difficulty levels for the opposing team, but you’ll always start off playing the weakest, Level 1 team. At the end of each game, you are given a special screen and a rating value. I’ll spare the full details until later, but you can score up to a 100 rating with very good, efficient play. The rating determines which difficulty level you’ll face in the next game. If you lose a game, or have a low rating, you’ll go back to the base Level 1 team. To beat this game, you need to earn a match against a Level 5 team and then beat that team with a perfect 100 rating.

Here are other changes between versions that take place prior to starting up a match. From the title screen you can select Watch mode to watch the CPU square off against itself. Choose the teams and settings, then sit back and enjoy. There is also an Edit mode for creating your own team. Behind the scenes, there is a special team designated for the Edit mode, so you can only build and update that specific team. You can change any of the players’ names and stats with no restrictions or limits. Build the super team of your dreams, go crazy! In this game there are 12 standard teams to choose from, plus the Edit team. After choosing teams, pick one of three stadiums to play in. Each stadium has different outfield dimensions, so you can opt for the pitcher’s park with long distances or a more hitter friendly park with closer walls down the lines. You can also adjust your starting lineup and pitcher as you can in the other games.

The pitching is tweaked a little for Bases Loaded 3. You begin a pitch the same way as before, hold any direction and press A to target a specific location. From here on, it is handled differently. To increase the direction of the pitch, tap A between the windup and delivery. The more you tap A, the more the pitch travels in that direction. For example, for a right-handed batter, you can throw a pitch up and away by holding Up and Left before winding up with A. This pitch will target the upper left of the strike zone. By adding A button taps before the pitch is thrown, you can aim the pitch further up and away beyond the strike zone. This gives you a more granular adjustment on where to aim pitches. During the windup, to throw the ball faster, you’ll hold Up on the D-pad. Because the D-pad only increases speed during the windup, you really can’t curve the ball like you can in the other games. Finally, you can press B to initiate a pickoff move.

You can choose the field that favors your abilities.

The developers managed to set this game around yet another defensive perspective, this time putting the camera out in center field. Logically this makes sense, as now batting, pitching, and defense are all oriented the same way toward home plate, but this is uncommon compared to other baseball games of the time. The controls for choosing a base to throw or run to also reflects this perspective. Press Up to target home, Left for first base, Down for second base, and Right for third base. Another tweak the manual calls out is that the speed of the throw is determined by how quickly you get rid of the ball. As soon as you grab the ball on defense, throw it right away. This gives you the crispest throw, otherwise if you delay even a little bit the throw will be much slower. It’s an interesting timing mechanic. The other controls are the same: Press A and a direction to throw to a particular base, press B and a direction to run to a base.

Batting is made simpler here. The A button swings like usual. This time you can do a level swing, a high swing with Up and A, and a low swing with Down and A. In earlier games you could adjust your swing to reach inside and outside pitches. To do that now, you must position yourself in the batter’s box prior to the pitch. This might seem like a downgrade but this is how it is done in most other NES baseball games. To bunt, press Select. You can cancel a bunt by pressing Select again or pressing A.

Baserunning is much improved this time. They finally standardized the baserunning controls in Bases Loaded 3 to align with other contemporary NES baseball games. To advance a base, press B and the D-pad direction for the base you are heading toward. To go back, press A and the base you want to return to. The directional mapping for the bases is the same as when fielding, from the centerfield perspective. These controls are so much more intuitive to me. To move multiple runners, you have to control them separately. You can even halt the baserunners by holding both A and B together during a play.

With only the shadow in view until the end, it’s tough to place your fielder.

With the controls and other differences out of the way, it’s time to explain the new winning condition. To win the game you’ll need to understand how to score 100 points in the new rating system. To get a rating at all you need to win a game first. Interestingly enough, the rating screen is more a list of your flaws rather than how well you played. You start with the base score of 100, and most of the categories are negative factors that reduce the rating by 3 points for each infraction. You’ll see a count of the number of faults made in each category with the total score at the bottom.

Here are the 13 categories, mostly taken straight from the manual:

1. Making an error
2. Delaying a throw, i.e. making a slow throw
3. Allowing an inside-the-park home run
4. Throwing to an unmanned base
5. Forcing in a run with a walk
6. Leaving a tired pitcher in the game
7. Allowing more than 3 runs in an inning
8. Throwing a wild pitch that allows a runner to advance a base
9. Striking out
10. Getting caught stealing
11. Getting picked off or doubled off a base
12. Making a great play
13. Bonus

A few things stand out to me about this list. The manual claims a few times about playing the perfect game, but by baseball definition, you don’t actually have to play or pitch a perfect game, not even close. You can allow hits and walks, and even runs, and not necessarily be penalized for them. Most of the categories center around playing clean defense. Miscues on defense that are not necessarily errors in an MLB game tend to count against you here. Many of these are pretty straightforward to avoid. By far the hardest to avoid is striking out, this is what burned me the most starting out. For any point-reducing penalty during game play, you’ll hear a set of beeps to indicate that you messed up.

The biggest moment of the game in the 3rd inning.

The final two categories add points to your score. Funny that these are here to help cover up a mistake or two that let you maintain your “perfect” run, but I digress. A great play will add 2 points to your score. These are for very good defensive plays, such as diving for a ball just barely in reach and throwing out the runner at first base. You can’t fake these points by diving after everything unnecessarily, trust me, I tried that. The mysterious Bonus category gives you 1 point, and I have no idea how this works at all. I was just happy to see points there. Note that with these last two categories it is possible to exceed 100 points, but your rating will round down to 100 if that occurs.

The game rating determines which difficulty level of team you’ll play in the next match. Score 90 points or higher, and you’ll face the most difficult Level 5 team. Every 10 point range down from there reduces the difficulty level by 1. Scoring fewer than 60 points, or losing the match outright, will reset you back to playing the Level 1 team. To beat the game, it’s not just enough to get the perfect 100 rating. You need to earn the right to play the Level 5 team by scoring 90 points or more, and then you have to secure a 100 rating against that team to win for good.

This was my first time playing Bases Loaded 3. Just like the others, this is an affordable cart that is not difficult to find, though it is not nearly as ubiquitous as the first two installments. When you do find a cart, it isn’t expensive, about $5-$10. I have had maybe one or two extras of this game during my heavy collecting days.

The math isn’t exactly right but I’ll take it.

I knew going into Bases Loaded 3 that it would be a much quicker play than the other two games I’ve completed, but I was not prepared for just how quickly I would actually finish. These games usually have a bit of a ramp up to get a feel for the batting timing, to learn the tendencies of the opposing defense, to adapt to pitch types, etc. That ramp up also means that I’ll lose a few of the first few games before I catch my stride. This time was special because none of that really happened. The first game I won with a rating in the 80s, good enough to face the Level 4 team. In the second game, I won and got the perfect 100 rating. That earned me an audience with the Level 5 team, which I beat and got another 100 rating. Victory after only three matches!

The only bad part of it was that I didn’t capture video of the entire playthrough. I realized part way through the first game that I didn’t start the recording. At the time, I assumed it wouldn’t be a big deal because certainly I would lose a match and have to start all over anyway. To try and fix the issue, initially I intended on recording a brand new full playthrough, hoping to replicate my success from the first time. On the first game of the replay, I got a similar enough rating to get from Level 1 to Level 4, just like I did on the winning run. I decided then to call it, and so for my final video I stitched the replay of the first game together with the final two games of the winning run. There are probably some continuity errors at that split point as far as the video goes, but I’m not bothered by it. Getting the full final game with the 100 rating against the Level 5 team to finish it is really all that is needed for proof anyway. I just want to be obsessively open with my process in all this!

The developers did some good work with the tweaks they made from the prior games. I appreciate the upgrade to the baserunning controls and simplifying the batting and pitching. The outfield defensive perspective is not the greatest, but it works fine. I wish the viewpoint was zoomed out more than it is. It makes it more challenging to get your fielder in the right spot, particularly in the outfield, when you can’t see the fielder you’re controlling until the ball gets close enough. But also, I had no real trouble finishing this game, so perhaps it is fine the way it is. Bases Loaded 3 is a solid NES baseball game. I’m not saying this is an essential game that you need to play, but if you appreciate a different style of challenge in sports games, then I think this is worth trying out.

#177 – Bases Loaded 3

More dragons, more warriors.

Pretty menacing dragon there.

To Beat: Reach the ending
Played: 5/24/19 – 6/30/19
Difficulty: 4/10
My Difficulty: 4/10
My Video: Dragon Warrior III Final Area and Ending

Exactly 50 games later, I’m back with another Dragon Warrior game. The NES does have a few JRPGs of this style, yet the only ones I’ve played so far are all Dragon Warrior games. Actually, I haven’t played many RPGs on this project yet period. The only games remotely close in style I’ve beaten already were AD&D Heroes of the Lance and Gemfire. It’s just a curiosity of the randomized list. I am not complaining though since I thoroughly enjoyed playing through Dragon Warrior III over the course of several weeks.

Dragon Quest III: And thus into Legend… was released in February 1988 on the Famicom in Japan. Just like the other games in the series, the NES version wasn’t released until way later and it was renamed to match the others. Dragon Warrior III appeared on the NES in March 1992, over four years later! The game was developed by Chunsoft and published by Enix. There were many ports and remakes of this game. A Super Famicom remake released in 1996, and the Game Boy Color port appeared in 2001. The game was also ported to mobile phones as well as the Wii. The English Android/iOS release in 2014 added the subtitle The Seeds of Salvation.

For more information on the series, check out my previous posts of Dragon Warrior and Dragon Warrior II. For this review, I will be focusing on things new to this installment in the series.

Scene not indicative of actual gameplay

The story for this game is simple. Our hero awakes on his 16th birthday at home in the kingdom of Aliahan. He is now of age to begin a great adventure, and that first step begins with visiting the king. When you meet with him, he tells you of the archfield Baramos and gives you the task to defeat him. From here, you will travel the world in search of Baramos.

One of the first things you will do before you leave the castle is build your party. On the west end of town is Luisa’s Place and you can do a few special things here. The first counter you will see is for the Vault. You can leave items and gold here and retrieve them later. There is a cost associated with retrieving stored items, but since you will hit full item capacity on your journey this is a great place to stash things for later. Saving your gold here protects it from being lost if your party is wiped out in battle. Past the Vault is the counter where you can add new members to your party. In Dragon Warrior III you can have a party of four people. The default characters available for your party right now are a Soldier, a Pilgrim, and a Wizard. This is the recommended party for starting out and the group I went with. These members are pre-assigned a name and a gender. My party was all men. I had Ragnar the Soldier, Petrus the Pilgrim, and Mathias the Wizard.

If you go upstairs, you can register brand new party members. You can choose the name, the sex, and the class. There are eight characters classes in Dragon Warrior III. Your main character is the Hero class which is an exclusive class with strong stats all around as well as some unique spells. The Soldier is a very strong warrior that can equip most weapons and armor. Soldiers level up quickly but cannot cast spells. Pilgrims are average strength characters with a set of healing and effect spells. Wizards are more fragile but can cast powerful attack spells. More or less, Pilgrims have white magic and Wizards have black magic. Fighters have very high agility, leading them to attack quickly in battle and they have a high critical hit rate. The tradeoff is that the Fighter cannot equip most things and is more effective fighting with bare hands than with most weapons. The Merchant is an average character with a couple of unique capabilities. Merchants can obtain more gold from defeated enemies in battle and they have the ability to appraise items. Select an item held by a Merchant and choose the Appraise option to see who can use the item or how much it might be sold for in a store. The Goof-Off does not offer much in battle. They do have a very high luck stat which helps in getting rare item drops from enemies. Finally, the Sage is a strong class with average battle capabilities but can cast both Pilgrim and Wizard spells. Unfortunately, you cannot start off with a Sage and have to wait to add one to your party until later in the adventure.

Make sure to have a full party before leaving the castle.

With a full party, you are now ready to leave town and begin your adventure, just in time to see the next major development of Dragon Warrior III. This game has a day and night cycle which can impact your journey. The longer you walk outside, time passes and the color palette changes to indicate the time of day. Stronger monsters may appear at nighttime. Shops are closed at night, though inns are always open. Towns are often different at night as far as the townspeople and what they tell you. Several events in the game occur only at day or night. There are a few things you can do to influence the cycle, aside from wandering the overworld. For instance, staying at an inn always brings you back to the start of the day when you wake up. Later in the game, you have more direct options to change to either day or night.

Some towns or castles in the game contain a battle arena. This is like a gambling mini-game where you can watch a fight and bet on which monster will win. You can get the odds of victory or see what other spectators think might happen in a match. You can then place your bet, pick your fighter, and watch a battle play out automatically among the monsters. This is something I only did one time just for kicks. I would rather spend time continuing the journey, but who knows, maybe this is a good way to earn cash quickly if you can game the system somehow.

Speaking of combat, random battles in this game are just like in Dragon Warrior II. Enemies can appear in groups and you decide which group you attack. There is still the problem of wasting an attack on an enemy group that no longer exists. However, I figured out over the course of many battles that your party members do attack somewhat intelligently. When attacking a group, the attacker tends to target the monster with the most HP remaining that they can take out in one hit. In Dragon Warrior II, it sure seemed random which player hit which monster. This is quite helpful for the speed of the game because combat is already plentiful in these games. One issue with this I found was that the AI tends to spread hits around evenly in a group if all the monsters have high HP, meaning those baddies tend to stick around longer. A more intelligent system might opt to gang up on one monster in a group in those situations. As it stands, I do like this hidden system and I’m glad it’s something I paid attention to.

Numbness is a nuisance.

There is one new status ailment in the game. In addition to becoming poisoned, confused, put to sleep, or cursed, now you can become numbed by paralysis. In this state, you cannot do anything except wait it out. It will eventually go away by walking on the world map, or you can use an item or spell to remove the status. Should all your party members become numbed, you lose the fight. I had this happen to me one time and I made sure it didn’t happen again.

The spell list is more expansive in this game. Three character classes, Hero, Pilgrim, and Wizard, all get spells and some are unique to that class. Many of them are various attack spells that are elemental in nature and can target individuals, groups, or entire enemy parties. Rather than go over every spell, I want to draw attention to a few interesting ones. There are two revive spells. Vivify only works half the time to bring back a party member with half HP, while Revive works nearly every time and gives full HP. X-Ray is used to examine treasure chests before opening. Some treasure chests are enemies and this spell lets you know if the chest is safe or not. The DayNight spell lets you switch between day or night. You can turn invisible with the Invisible spell, which can be useful for encounters both good and bad. Bounce can be cast on an ally to have all magic spells bounced back to the caster. BeDragon lets you turn into a dragon and breathe flames every turn for the duration of a battle. Transform lets the caster turn into another party member for the entire fight. The last two related spells I want to mention are Expel and Limbo. This lets you knock enemies out of fights with no gold or experience gained. Expel works on a full party while Limbo only targets one enemy but is much more successful. Sometimes a enemy will cast Limbo on you, and if it works that member is removed from the party entirely. Don’t worry, you can get your ally back but you have to look for him somewhere in the world.

A good part of the way through the game, you can find a place that lets you change your character classes. There are a few rules around this. First off, you cannot change your Hero at all, since he is one of a kind. A character must reach at least level 20 before changing class. After class change, that character goes back to level 1 with half of his current stats. He keeps any spells learned to that point. This is also the only way you can become a Sage if you meet the criteria. Since each class has some better stats than others, you can shape your party any way you want, given enough time grinding for levels.

There are plenty of dungeons, caves, and towers to explore.

The overall flow of the game is similar to the previous one. Roughly halfway through the game or so you get a ship that opens up the entire world. This time instead of collecting five crests, you are searching for six orbs. The map is just as large as in Dragon Warrior II, maybe even larger. Since early on you move around through travel doors between some destinations, it can be a little tricky to piece together the entire map. This game came with an insert containing the world map and charts for monsters, spells, weapons, armor, and items. The manual is a tall, 80-page book that even contains a partial walkthrough and tips for some more difficult sections. While not essential to beating the game, it does help. I did not need the walkthrough but I did refer to the map once or twice.

I beat Dragon Warrior III one time before about 10 years ago. I remember spending a lot of time sitting on the couch in my apartment just grinding away at the game on an emulator. I had picked up all four Dragon Warrior loose carts many years before but I was not able to beat the game on a real cart until now. I had tried several times. It always happened after playing for a few hours where the console got bumped, the game locked up, and I was forced to reset to an empty save file. This was long before I knew how to take games apart and clean the pins. I have owned at least a couple of copies of this game before, including my current CIB copy with the map in decent shape. Just to be sure, I know I let my old cart go in favor of a different one with a confirmed good save battery. Now that I clean carts and consoles I didn’t have any issues holding a save the entire time playing. Dragon Warrior III has always retained value. Loose carts sell around $50-$60 with CIB copies at $150+.

It had been long enough since my first playthrough that I didn’t remember all that much about the finer details of this game, including where most of the quest items were. I knew enough though to have a solid attack plan, particularly around class changes. I changed Ragnar from a Soldier to a Fighter and converted Mathias from a Wizard to a Sage. Switching to a Fighter was a bit experimental. I thought it might be useful to have a decent fighter with high agility. That worked out for a couple of reasons. Fighters are better at getting critical hits and his attack stayed high enough that I could deal out some heavy damage early in a turn. The other thing is that Fighters only benefit from a few cheap pieces of equipment, versus Soldiers that can equip many expensive items. Extra gold in my pocket freed me up to spend on my other characters earlier. Having a Wizard become a Sage gave me two good characters with healing spells, since Sages learn two sets of magic. I always opt for having good healing options in my RPGs whenever I get a choice.

The bad guys get pretty nasty toward the end.

There were a few interesting notes concerning this playthrough. I spent over five weeks beating the game, and one of those weeks I was away on business. I was able to take my game with me in an unexpected way. The AVS can connect to a computer and it has the capability to both apply and back up save files from an emulator. Before my trip, I dumped my save file to the computer, then I continued that file on my laptop that I brought with me. When I got home, I put my updated save file back to the cart and completed the game from there on normal hardware. I’m really glad I tried out that feature. I’ll be using that again to back up save files on longer games. This time I kept better track of my hours spent on the game. I beat the game in a little over 36 hours, right in line with the 30-40 hour estimate I had in mind. I feel like I did very well in solving issues and finding items as they came up throughout the game. Perhaps I had some of those events stuffed into my subconscious from my previous playthrough. Lastly, I am a tiny bit disappointed that I remembered a twist that occurs in the endgame. It would have been nice to have experienced that anew.

If you like these kinds of games, you will find a lot to like about Dragon Warrior III. In some ways it doesn’t feel all that different from Dragon Warrior II. It certainly is less of a leap from the second to the third as it was from the original to the sequel. Most of the main beats are the same. There’s a linear start, then the world opens up with a ship, then you explore the world looking for items, then that opens up the end of the game which is quite challenging. Then again, this game is quite different. The map is new, the enemies are almost completely different, there are more spells to learn, more items to buy, and more places to visit. Changing classes has a huge effect on the way the game is played, making it easier if you can find the right tweaks to make and put in the time to build up your characters. The difficulty curve is gentler than the second game which I found a welcome improvement. The graphics, music, and gameplay are all very good. I imagine the NES version is not the definitive version of Dragon Quest III, but the game does stand up as one of the best RPGs on the console.

#129 – Dragon Warrior III