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So Dragon Warrior 1 was the first game I ever emulated, back in the very early days of emulation. But obviously, I wasn’t going to stop there. And if I was enjoying Dragon Warrior 1, why not try out its sequels as well? While DW1 devoured me, and I did beat it back then, I did not beat Dragon Warrior 2 until just now. And on further reflection, I know why.

This game is kinda fucked up

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Dragon Warrior 2, or Dragon Quest 2 if you’re not an old head like me, is the perfect example of a sequel to an RPG. It continues the story, many generations later, in a distant land. You can go back to the previous game’s region and explore it. It takes the original graphics and gameplay and straight up adds to them, in every way.

In DQ1, you have one on one battles with a character I can only describe as “Ness from Earthbound”. Strong and kinda good at everything, though not as much at damage spells. In DQ2, you get a party of three characters, each with their own spell list and stat growths, so they each excell in different ways. Your main hero, the Prince of Midenhall, has no magic to speak of but is built like a brick shithouse and hits like a dozen trucks. Your cousin, the princess of Moonbrooke, is squishy and weak, but has a lot of good damaging spells, and supporting spells too. And your other cousin, the prince of Cannock, is very good at dying! He uh, is weaker than you in every way, and has less spells than the princess. He’s kind of trying to be a redmage, master of none, but he’s certainly a master of none, to a kind of meme-worthy degree.

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And since you get more than one party member this time, so does your enemy! Enemies come in groups, and if there’s more than one type, you need to specify which enemy type you’re fighting. You can’t focus down one enemy if there’s multiple of that type, it’s random who hits which, and if you try to hit an enemy that’s no longer there, you waste your turn. It’s VERY classic RPG bullshit, and they didn’t fix that for aaaages.

So yeah, it’s typical early Dragon Quest stuff. Wander around, kill slimes, go into caves and towers to get items to progress further in your quest. The thing about Dragon Quest 2 though is that once you get past the more linear early part of the game, getting your three party members together, you reach a town and get a boat, and now the entire game is wide open to you. And that means that you will prolly wander to a place you can’t survive in yet, cause there’s no guidance, and get your shit beat in. This is… not very fun, honestly.

Dragon Quest has a LOT of very cryptic hidden shit, and it’s all mentioned as rumors by towns folk, but you need to do a LOT of note taking and exploration to know what the fuck any of it means. And this game is not kind to that exploration. DQ1 had a bunch of cryptic shit too, I mean getting that item in that swamp? But DQ2 has a lot MORE of that, and in DQ1 it’s pretty easy to know where new enemy groups begin, and slowly progress further into new areas, but it’s not here. This is, IMO, to the game’s detriment. This is a game you’ll probably want to use a guide to complete, which tells you exactly where you can go without becoming paste with Vegeta’s face ironed into it.

The end game is also pretty mean. DQ1 was a huge grind fest, and this game is also, indeed, a huge grind fest. You NEED to be at a high enough level to even stand a chance of the boss gauntlet and huge-ass dungeon in front of you. But once you finish your grind, it is in fact a relatively fun game. Prolly better than DQ1, though I think I do prefer DQ1 more still.