Adventuring Update
I really have a lot to reflect on regarding Dragon Warrior II. It’s so bad, actually, that it’s making me completely rethink my opinion on Square versus Enix. I had always said, “Enix doesn’t do insta-death spells, Enix doesn’t yoink magic points, Enix balances its combat.” Dragon Warrior II reverses all of these.
Now that I am in the final sequence of the game, a minor randomly encountered enemy can wipe out your entire party with a single spell automatically, with no way to defend against it.
Enemies can dance a “strange jig” and knock off perhaps 10%-30% of your total available magic in one unpreventable shot. And you can’t recover magic anywhere but an inn.
You go from tarring bosses in one shot to getting knocked off by basic cave monsters.
I’m not really venting here. I’m enjoying playing through the game. If I wasn’t playing sped-up with instant saving/restoring capability, I might honestly have quit by now.
Actually, I would have been less risk-taking, earning up more levels once things started looking bad. Being able to save state and restore allowed me to get too far into the game, as I was under the assumption the grass would get greener. It did not.
Also, the basic RPG plot grease of cause-effect (questing for the item you need to quest for to open the door to the quest area where you get the magic rock that opens the cave door that lets you get the moon cookie which unlocks the spaceship that takes you to the planet where you… okay, that’s not exactly how it worked) is so undocumented, you would find yourself sailing all around the world asking random people in towns for tips, which are handed out in seemingly inverse order throughout the game.
I would also make the point that players guides weren’t exactly as common in this era, nor was the internet, so getting stuck was a much bigger deal. You better have a pad and paper to write down all the clues if you’re playing without help.
While this review is a bit angry, it pretty much encapsulates my feel of the game versus the classic first edition.
I’ll end with a quote I’m seeing a lot lately:
“No pulse, no breath, cold as a cod. Yes, thou art truly dead.”