everything i like about dragon quest 1 is BACK and it's BIGGER AND WORSE
Wandering around an essentially open world with no direction that gradually expands as you piece together information you get from talking to the people you meet in towns and dungeons, collecting a few key items along the way that further broaden your horizons, keeping your adorable little hubris in check by slapping your wrist with tougher enemies when you get too big for your britches? sick shit, rad.
Okay but what if the world was like unmanageably large now, so getting anywhere is a huge slog, even if you think you know where you want to go? What if instead of a few key items there were, like, twenty, just kinda slapped aimlessly around the world?
The pacing of the whole thing feels off. The first chunk of the game, where you're gathering your party, is the most linear but also the most similar to DQ1, and by far the most pleasant for me, even though there's an ill portent early on where you go back and forth across the same three locations several times looking for a guy only to be told each time "oh damn you just missed him get fucked I guess go back to where you just came from." Little did I know that sequence is the blueprint for the entire game.
Even after this saggy, elongated, pseudo-open world experience, your reward is a protracted endgame featuring no fewer than three endgame dungeons before a really underwhelming final boss.
If there's one thing I'll give Dragon Quest 2 it's that the combat is handily improved over the first game (although that one's simplicity has its charms). Three party members and Fighting Lots Of Guys Per Encounter is a big change up and the game is a Proper JRPG now and it feels fully formed. Having your party members be the guy who hits, the girl who magics, and the guy who does both-of-those-but-badly-but-he's-the-one-with-all-your-environmental-spells-so-you-wanna-keep-him-alive is enough complexity to keep things fun for the game's relatively short length, and there are way more spells and they're actually useful in combat in this game so fighting is generally a lot more fun, which is good because there's more of it, it's harder, and grinding is less "the entire game" and more of a necessary evil in the vein of a classical JRPG conception of grinding.
Ultimately I'm glad the game is only like fifteen hours but on the other hand holy shit I can't believe the game was ONLY fifteen hours it felt like fifteen years in the moment. It's still dragon quest, it's still pleasurable most of the time, which is why I feel like it's so impressive that when it was all said and done I came away so sour on it. Honestly not sure how they pulled that off.
Wandering around an essentially open world with no direction that gradually expands as you piece together information you get from talking to the people you meet in towns and dungeons, collecting a few key items along the way that further broaden your horizons, keeping your adorable little hubris in check by slapping your wrist with tougher enemies when you get too big for your britches? sick shit, rad.
Okay but what if the world was like unmanageably large now, so getting anywhere is a huge slog, even if you think you know where you want to go? What if instead of a few key items there were, like, twenty, just kinda slapped aimlessly around the world?
The pacing of the whole thing feels off. The first chunk of the game, where you're gathering your party, is the most linear but also the most similar to DQ1, and by far the most pleasant for me, even though there's an ill portent early on where you go back and forth across the same three locations several times looking for a guy only to be told each time "oh damn you just missed him get fucked I guess go back to where you just came from." Little did I know that sequence is the blueprint for the entire game.
Even after this saggy, elongated, pseudo-open world experience, your reward is a protracted endgame featuring no fewer than three endgame dungeons before a really underwhelming final boss.
If there's one thing I'll give Dragon Quest 2 it's that the combat is handily improved over the first game (although that one's simplicity has its charms). Three party members and Fighting Lots Of Guys Per Encounter is a big change up and the game is a Proper JRPG now and it feels fully formed. Having your party members be the guy who hits, the girl who magics, and the guy who does both-of-those-but-badly-but-he's-the-one-with-all-your-environmental-spells-so-you-wanna-keep-him-alive is enough complexity to keep things fun for the game's relatively short length, and there are way more spells and they're actually useful in combat in this game so fighting is generally a lot more fun, which is good because there's more of it, it's harder, and grinding is less "the entire game" and more of a necessary evil in the vein of a classical JRPG conception of grinding.
Ultimately I'm glad the game is only like fifteen hours but on the other hand holy shit I can't believe the game was ONLY fifteen hours it felt like fifteen years in the moment. It's still dragon quest, it's still pleasurable most of the time, which is why I feel like it's so impressive that when it was all said and done I came away so sour on it. Honestly not sure how they pulled that off.