Dragon Warrior III is a top-down role-playing game where you travel around the overworld, caves, castles, cities and other locations while battling random encounters, buying equipment, and talking to people.

You and your party members receive experience when they beat up monsters and level up with enough experience, increasing their stats.

The game features a day/night cycle - as you travel, day slowly changes to night and vice versa; shops are typically closed at night.

You begin with control of just the main character but can quickly recruit three more members to your party. During the game you can choose to drop your current characters and recruit others at any time. The recruitable characters are divided into six classes: soldier, fighter, merchant, goof-off, pilgrim and wizard.

The game has a unique job system, giving you the ability to switch your hired characters' classes after they have achieved at least level 20 in their base class. Characters can switch to the other beginning classes, as well as the sage class, which is not available at the beginning. When a character switches classes, they lose all earned experience points, and half of their stats, but retain all the abilities of the previous class. In this way, you can create powerful combination characters that are able to cast spells and fight effectively.