A Quest Draws Near-er

A few months ago I went on about how much fun I had playing the original Dragon Warrior it was a pleasant surprise while I was looking for a history lesson. Dragon Quest instantly became one of my favorite 8-bit Nintendo games and piqued my interest in the other games. Today we no longer fight slimes alone.

After a pretty impressive title screen Dragon Warrior 2 starts out much like the first one with the descendant of great hero readying for an epic quest in a king’s throne room. Once he’s acquired some starting equipment and healing items; multiple slimes attack at once outside of the castle. This is different, that single file line of monsters waiting to jump you has widened to up to 6 foes per encounter. That’s a game changer folks, it’s still one action per round per participant but now turn order plays a much larger role. Fear not, there may be multiple monsters in each encounter but you have your two cousins to join in the fray. Each of you has a unique skill set; the main hero is all brawn with the use of all of the most powerful equipment, the male cousin is a mixture of magic and physical power, and the girl has the most powerful magic in the game.

Comparing Dragon Quest 2 with its predecessor is pretty impressive, it looks like they took everything from the first game and made it bigger. The first noticeable change is the upgraded battle system that adds a new layer of strategy to battles. Difficulty has been ramped up quite a bit, but not any worse any other RPG from the late 80’s. The world map is 4 times larger with a ship to traverse the seas. You can even travel to the island and visit the castles from the first game, the Dragonlord’s descendant still lives in the same castle and encourages your fight against a the new evil.

There are growing pains. Oh the growing pains. Having multiple party members with different roles is cool at first until you realize the balancing is totally off. The main hero is amazing; he hits really hard and can take punishment like a champ. The female is semi useful once she gets the better healing spells and attack magic but will fall in a single hit. Your male cousin is useful at first, but later on his magic and physical abilities aren’t up to snuff save for being the only character with a revive spell. Your party is pretty much reduced to a tank and two heal bots. My other major gripe with the game is the success rate of instant death spells; this can be great for you but sucks when you get ambushed in one of the final areas and your fully refreshed party is leveled before they can act by a monster that poses no threat otherwise. Deaths like that happened pretty often in the endgame and make it really tempting to throw your controller.

I’ve heard that the SNES and Game Boy remakes of the game help with the balance issues in the game, so you might want to pick up one of those in place of the original NES cartridge. Dragon Warrior 2 isn’t the best game in the series; actually it’s likely close to the bottom of the stack. I’d recommend playing Dragon Quest 1 or 3 instead if you have to play an NES Dragon Warrior, but it’s interesting to see the bridge between the two.