The unflinching hostility of this game became a more prominent aspect of the experience on this 2nd playthrough that I did on the NES version instead of the SNES one. Dragon Quest 2 is already somewhat notorious for being the most unforgiving game in the series, but the way that this is handled is interesting to give some deeper consideration to. The original Dragon Quest game presented a harsh world that could coldly kill you in mere seconds if you were unprepared, forcing you to carefully make your way through, with each new area being a risk that you could only overcome if you had sufficiently powered up enough. While Dragon Quest 2 is similar to this, it has the one key difference of often feeling as if it doesn’t even want the player to succeed, instead being content with repeatedly beating you to death no matter what you’re doing.

The game leans into this difficulty to effectively reinforce its tone, with its sense of hopelessness pervading each town you visit. The threat against the world feels so much scarier without the underlying optimism and belief that the legendary hero will be able to save the world, everyone is despondent, there are Kings that have hidden themselves away from the shame of being unable to do anything to stand up to Hargon, and any attempt at stopping the evil priest’s reign seem so out of reach. I don’t blame everyone for feeling so hopeless in the face of these threats either, because there’s very little working in favour of the player. While the combat system evolving to give the player a party and have battles move away from pure 1 on 1 encounters would seemingly make things easier, giving way to a wider range of strategies to employ and giving the enemies multiple targets to make it harder for the stunlocking nonsense of DQ1 to happen, the encounters are just, so much scarier for the most part. While your party caps out at 3 members, there can be up to 5 dangerous enemies that jump you at once, usually having spells that will damage your entire party, forcing you to divert a lot of your attack power into healing everyone back up before you can strike again. Adding to the problem is that your other party members completely suck, being extremely frail and mostly specialising in magic in a game that makes most spells entirely obsolete by the endgame. It hits a point where the other 2 members do such little damage that the optimal strategy is genuinely to just attack with your main character, and make the other 2 people block every turn unless they outright are required to cast a spell.

This reaches its peak in the last stretch of the game, where every fibre of the experience’s existence is pushing back against you, containing multiple excruciating dungeons in conjunction with enemies that genuinely just feel unfair, having capabilities that can decide to completely wipe you out even when you’re of extremely high levels, doing things such as putting your entire party to sleep, or having constant critical hits that bypass any defence that you have. This is also my favourite portion of the game however, and the one that works best for the game’s atmosphere, because of course the entire world is feeling hopeless to stop Hargon when this is the resistance he presents when you’re trying to reach him, it’s complete justification for why everyone is so terrified here, because it’s brutal in a way that nothing else in the game even comes close to touching. Everything from the Cave to Rhone to the end is a constant uphill battle that keeps escalating even when you swear that it surely has reached its peak by now, every fight is a close one where death is just one unlucky turn away, and your only safehaven leaves you entirely isolated at the top of a snowy mountain with your only quick way back down being one-way, effectively stranding you in this inhospitable wasteland unless you’re willing to brave the horrors of the cave once again, all culminating in a constant feeling of tension as you’re trying to get to the final castle time and time again, only to be met with a string of 5 bosses that each feel insurmountable on their own.

While the game’s final act spectacularly hits its target to make all the buildup worth it in some weird, twisted way, a large swathe of the rest makes the game as a whole feel pretty insufferable. While the escalating enemy difficulty that constantly pulls out some pretty cheap tricks plays nicely into the world being a more hostile place than ever, it completely kills the pacing of the game when you’re more often grinding than actually exploring in any serious capacity. The world is so big, but there’s no way to properly orient yourself most of the time, leading to situations where sometimes the next step you need to take is locating another town that you’ve barely heard anything about, and this is where the line between interesting player hostility and hostility that negatively impacts the experience comes in. While it’s true that the spirit of adventure can be found in aimless exploration of an unknown land, it feels a bit too obtuse here, there are clear places which you need to go, but you’re expected to get there just by wandering the open seas which feel too big and landmasses which feel hard to fully distinguish, combined with the middle portion of the game flatlining difficulty to the point where almost nothing feels like it can get in your way, further contributing to the confusing boredom. The talisman hunting isn’t great partially because of this, but also because of how most of them are hidden in extremely uninteresting locations that makes collecting them all feel like a huge anticlimax.

Dragon Quest 2 has some interesting ideas and is sometimes able to craft a very compelling atmosphere, but it’s also unfortunately a slog to get through that didn’t quite grasp how to effectively utilise its far greater scope in a way that didn’t feel cumbersome. It’s an ambitious title, but not one that works for me a lot of the time due to how much of it felt as aimless as it did. The NES version especially has these issues due to how you get much fewer resources to work with, along with no map or a way to warp to anywhere other than your last save point, making everything feel that much slower. Nonetheless was still happy to replay this and gain a deeper appreciation for it even if I still don’t really like playing it though, especially since I now have a greater point of reference to what it originally was like.

Like many sequels to groundbreaking games, it doesn't have the luxury of leaning on novelty for its plaudits. While the game is competent, it does mostly feel like an upgraded version of the first. The world is bigger, you now have a party of characters that expands upon the combat system and story is longer and more complex.

My biggest issue is that none of this really stands out anymore in a world where Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest now both exist, and the uneven slog towards the end of the game diminishes it as well.

A significant boost in quality compared to the first NES/FC game with much less grinding outside the final area, more music and more unique enemy types helps with the repetition of tilesets and makes areas feel more distinct from one another.
The addition of party members and facing more than one enemy at a time drastically alters the combat dynamics compared to the first, which was closer to an RNG sort of puzzle box war of attrition where you needed to either outlast an enemy or get lucky with a sleep or fireball spell to deal with them appropriately as the game progressed, this one has a bit more strategy to it though it's a bit undercut by how many of the spells either become redundant or require that end game grind to use and aren't even that effective against the bosses in that end game dungeon.
The other big problem from the original that wasn't really addressed is the vagueness of many of the NPC hints about what items are required to progress, it's extremely unlikely that a player could stumble upon some of the items you need or intuit the advice they give without checking a guide to double check because it's just far too cryptic to aid you a lot of the time.
The end game dungeon is what really brings the game down from a solid 3.5 or 4 star experience though, it's just such a ridiculous slog even with speedup and I cannot imagine spending the hours necessary to do it legitimately when the enemies just don't give out enough XP to warrant how tough they are to defeat, not helped by the final boss being a massive difficulty spike in an of itself that I was at 1hp for my final party member before he finally died.
For those reasons I'd probably recommend most people just play one of the ports on SFC or GBC as they did rebalance the end game and other points to be less grindy and cryptic, but in its original NES/FC incarnation it's still got a fair amount of charm to it despite its relative simplicity and occasional bouts of head scratching and tedium.