Dragon Warrior II — The Princess Has Been Kidnapped By Demons. Are You A Bad Enough Dude To Rescue The Princess?

Dragon Warrior II is a curious case of a game that I gradually hated the more I thought about it.  I originally posted a review praising it to a website dedicated to classic games.  I write this review now to retract most of my misguided praise.

Thy Road Is Long And Fraught With Peril

Born from the success of the first Dragon Warrior game, Dragon Warrior II returned the player to a much expanded Alefgard.  Apparently, the hero from the first game made good on his word to explore the world and rule over a kingdom of his own.  Unfortunately, it seems that Enix hit the same sophomore slump that Squaresoft did with Final Fantasy II.

Aww, thanks.  Wait, what?  Twice as good looking… as an ox?!

But not all of the game is bad.  The first thing you notice when you start the game is the title screen.  It features a short animation of the three main characters walking towards the screen, something which Squaresoft hadn’t done up to that point.  Text appearing on a blue screen has its own merits in my opinion, but it’s not too graphically taxing.  But I digress.  The game itself starts with an attack on Moonbrooke castle and the subsequent kidnapping of the princess by the forces of Hargon, the evil being whom you must stop. Once word gets out that Hargon’s forces are on the move, it’s up to you to travel the world, gaining enough strength to defeat him once and for all.

For the first time in the series, you can bring multiple characters along into battle, which is a good thing since it allows for multiple strategies in how to defeat an enemy, as long as each strategy starts off with Attack with your first two characters and watch the third one die, all in agonizing slow motion.  In the original Dragon Warrior, you could just press Attack each turn and the battle window would automatically scroll with the results of your turn and the enemy’s turn.  In the sequel, however, the presence of multiple allies and enemies makes battles seem to take forever compared to the instant action of the first game.  Just like with Final Fantasy, you select your battle plan (casting a spell, attacking with a sword, etc.) for each character, and then sit back and watch the action.  It may seem slow in this day and age, but at least it allows for multi-tasking. You can level grind while watching an episode of anime or something.

That sure is one big slug!

And speaking of level grinding, you’re going to be doing a lot of it in this game, especially since certain characters (doggy princess, I’m talking to you) tend to level up very slowly.  Unlike in the first game, the sequel isn’t won by leveling up alone.  You’re going to need to use creative strategies in battle (strategies other than Attack, Attack, Die), and often a lot of luck.  An enemy may use Defeat on you and your characters survive one round, then it uses Defeat again on you and two of your characters are instantly KOed.  It doesn’t help that the concept of a character’s turn in battle seems to be an arbitrary notion, as characters and enemies take their turns randomly with no rhyme or reason. Even when I leveled my characters five, ten, fifteen times, enemies would still often attack before allies.  Turn speed?  What turn speed?

But speaking of cheap spells, the bosses late in the game had the ability to randomly cast HealAll, which pretty much rendered the entire battle up to that point moot.  Such a spell in the possession of the enemy wouldn’t have been that bad, except for the fact that not a single enemy in the game possesses an MP stat. In other words, without an MP stat to compute, the enemy could cast HealAll every turn, and you would be stuck in battle seemingly forever until a Sleep or StopSpell spell takes effect (as long as you don’t run out of MP trying to cast it).  Thus, battles late in the game rely not on skill, but on luck, which is a poor way to design a game.  Imagine you’re nearing the enemy’s final dungeon.  Suddenly he tosses you two dice, and says “If you roll a two, you’ve defeated me.  If you roll anything else, I’ve healed, except if you roll an eleven, in which case I’ve successfully cast Defeat on you.”  I tried it just now and was Defeated in five rolls.

This, the second game in the series, takes place in the same world as the first game, but since the first game didn’t venture past a single continent, it left the rest of the world a blank canvas for the developers to create an entirely new world, and still incorporate the original continent into the game.  And this is the one rare moment where the game triumphs, for when you first step onto the original continent in Alefgard and you make your way to the original castle from the first game, you will see how time was not kind to the world you left behind.  Monsters in the region are a lot tougher than they used to be, which necessitated the amalgamation of the castle and the nearby town. Many other towns from the first game have been obliterated by the second game, leaving only the Dragonlord’s castle and a few caves as the only other survivors of time.  That very first time I stepped onto the old continent, I felt a sense of loss, as if I had left home for a while and returned to find it had fallen into disrepair.  Poignant moments like this were what kept me going in the game, since it didn’t have very many other things going for it.

But if you think about it, the hero of the first game was able to get on a boat and go exploring, presumably taking enough people with him to colonize the New World.  Either that or there was already an aboriginal population who were newly discovered by the hero after he started exploring.  Whatever the case, since no one in the first game seemed to know about the other lands surrounding their own, it paints a rather xenophobic picture of the entire continent.  Perhaps they may have brought upon themselves their own destruction by promoting an isolationist agenda, and I’m not just saying this because of the ridiculous Buy American policy that President Obama suggested.  There is much that Dragon Warrior II didn’t say about the events that unfolded since the first game, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the Old World wasn’t flattened by monsters, and instead simply collapsed because they refused to acknowledge anything outside their own continent.

As for the playable characters themselves, while the two princes are alright fighters, the princess ends up being the squishiest wizard ever, and barely receives anything even resembling a weapon that she could use to fight monsters who have high magic defense.  Instead, she has to constantly protect herself from the stronger enemies and hope that her HP is enough to get her through so she can heal.  If she’s feeling adventurous, maybe she’ll cast an offensive spell to try to kill the enemy.  The theory is probably that she’ll cast her spell before the enemy can get a chance to go… maybe.  There’s also the possibility that they’ll down her in one hit, which once again turns the game into a luck-based mission.  Will she cast her spell before she dies?  Stay tuned.

I’m sure he finds them quite fetching

Woof, Woof!

To those who have the patience to finish the game, kudos to you.  You obviously had a lot of anime to watch.  To everyone else, I’ll spoil the game: the good guys win in the end.  Now skip this one and go right to the third episode, which is so much better (despite flaws of its own).  But that is a quest for another day.

To be continued…