New Dragon Quest III speedrun strat involves heating game cartridge

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Isaac Todd
December 30, 2020
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In what might be one of the oddest glitches in recent memory, Dragon Quest III speedrunners have discovered that heating up copies of the game while playing can be used to reach level 99 in minutes.

Twitter user @Hitsheegame posted a picture of their speedrun setup, which includes a hot plate needed to perform this new glitch.

As explained by @sackchief, it’s only possible on certain versions of Dragon Quest III for the Famicom. By overheating the cartridge and resetting at a specific point, the game’s control circuit causes an error that breaks the game in multiple ways.

So, while all text boxes become unreadable, you also end up with a level 99 sage that can be used to breeze through the game, as demonstrated by pirohiko on YouTube.

Messing with cartridges while games are running isn’t anything new (take the Geddan meme for example), but literally heating them up is pretty wild. It just goes to show that even after all these year, people can still discover weird oddities about older titles.

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