Stay up to date with the Dragon Warrior II NES Mega Playlist playlist here: ua-cam.com/play/PLoiDuuKGlM90kz0fA7piMAuqvPB7p_vYR.html Timestamps 00:00:00 Intro 00:00:40 Review Starts 00:01:17 Story 00:01:57 Graphics 00:02:39 Music & Sound 00:03:51 Controls 00:04:20 Gameplay & Fun Factor 00:07:50 Critiques 00:12:02 Summation 00:13:00 Score 00:13:43 End Screen
Funny you asked if they play tested the last few areas of the game. From what I've heard... no... they didn't. In an interview from 1987, the director mentioned how the game was supposed to be released in December of 86, but got delayed because the ENTIRE GAME (beginning included), was just too hard. They did extra play-testing and balancing for 5 extra weeks. Though the interview doesn't specify this next part I'm about to say, supposedly, they did not have enough time to play test the last 1/3 of the game, which I assume would be the Sea Cave and beyond. So no, I don't think those last few dungeons were play tested at all, which would definitely explain the absurd difficulty jump.
I generally avoid all the Sugiyama drama, personally. Seems to be spread by a lot of people who like getting mad about stuff that doesn't matter. The guy did good work with his music. Good review, good video though. A bit higher review score than I'd give it, but not by too much. Pretty spot on. I look forward to seeing your takes on 3 & 4 which are way, way better than 1 & 2 imho.
Yeahhhh. I honestly didn't know anything about it until I started researching for the review. Felt the need to include the disclaimer just in case, I truthfully didn't dive deep enough to really have a complete grasp on all the drama (nor do I really wanna involve myself in that sphere). But musically, really enjoyable! And thanks! I hope to get to 3 and 4 this year, possibly sooner rather than later. Kind of confidential (but now not really) my schedule has become an absolute nightmare so I'm probably going to axe my Let's Plays for a long while. Only a handful of people watch them anyway. Which is good for review enjoyers, because then I can finish games wayyyy quicker - playing here and there whenever I have any pockets of time. Instead of clearing a huge block of time of no interruptions.
One of my favorite games. I played it to death as a kid and I replay it every year or two still. The difficulty is crazy but I kind of enjoy the grind.
@ I’ve played the first seven games so far, and I rank/rate them like this… 1. DQ5 (played on both Super Famicom and Nintendo DS) - 10 2. DW4 on NES - 10 3. DW7 on ps1 - 9.5 4. DW3 on NES - 9 5. DW2 on NES - 9 6. DW1 on NES - 8 7. DQ6 (played on Nintendo DS) - 6.5
@@thevideogamecabinet3681 awesome! I’m actually finally going to get to DW3 after I finish paladins quest. Heard nothing but good things (and your comment as well) about the immediate future of DW/GQ that’s in store. I have a nasty habit of replaying games, so the first two have been replayed a bunch and I didn’t get beyond 😅
One of my biggest gripes with DQII was the item management system. Each character only had eight item slots. And to make it worse, equipment like weapons and armor took up some of those slots. This is one thing the original DQ did better. DQI had dedicated slots for weapon, armor, and shield. I understand they did it this way so you could trade equipment with the party, but it just seems unnecessary. Also in DQI, you can stock medical herbs and keys, whereas in DQII each item requires its own slot. So there was no way to stock items. By the time I got to the second town, I had filled six slots with random junk: weapon, armor, shield, and three lotto cards I just happen to have found along the way and didn’t know what to do with. That meant I only had two slots for herbs and antidotes, so I grabbed two herbs and prayed I didn’t get poisoned along the way, since the main character doesn’t get magic and I hadn’t acquired other party members at that point. They should have made designated slots for equipment and stock for items, maybe even include keys in a separate window like they do with tokens.
Yeah the inventory management certainly could have been better. TBF a lot of games from this era are a bit cruddy with that. On the whole though I do think I prefer DW1, certainly one of the reasons why is quality of life stuff like this as well. Thanks for watching!
DW2 is a great game in a fantastic series. It’s often considered the worst in the entire series, and that speaks to how good the rest of the series is. That’s because DQ2 is still a great game!
@BitsAndGlory Nice vid! But while the devs said the game did need more balancing late in game, it was mostly due to bugs, strange jig being overpowered, a lack of more equipment, and some enemies not giving enough exp (outside Osterfair, Wellgarth, and Beran). Rhone cave was fine though; its biggest issue was that most people entered it when they were too low level. You are supposed to go in there with explodet and defeat. And before going lower than floor 3, you should also have learned revive. Enemy groups were designed with you having these in mind before you entered the lower levels where attackbots, hargon's knights, etc. appear. And it is setup so you should gain 3 levels going thru this cave in the process and come out with the Prince of Midenhall at level 28 (I will use his level as a reference so I am typing less). You can then gain one level for your party in lower rhone (cyclops area), then one in upper rhone where giants/bullwongs/etc. appear. Now, at level 30, you go to Hargon's castle and can grind metal babbles on floor 3. Gaining these 4 levels took me about 90 minutes. Not long at all. At Level 32, you are ready to beat the game. And I'm talking beat all 5 bosses in Hargon's tower in a row. Anyway, I wrote a mini guide and put it on woodus.com. If you are curious, look there for a LOT more info. :) Link: www.woodus.com/den/games/dw2nes/pdf/dw2nes_mini_guide.pdf
While that does sound fine and dandy, casually I still stand by the end game being a complete mess. Regardless of grind tactics, being able to get to a certain point with relative ease and then not is a huge issue. For example, I’m playing Paladins Quest right now and the game is clearly telling me at certain pit stops - hey you probably shouldn’t proceed without some grinding, even if you can. Definitely like DW2, but the end is brutal. EDIT: phone was about to die haha, but I do appreciate the comment, link and thanks for watching!
The first huge difficulty spike was at the sea cave. It was enough to discouraged me as a kid. Actually that s the onlytl thing that pissed me off that I never beat it as a kid. Had to wait for emulators to fast forward the insane grind.
Nah, you're totally right. Prior to the pandemic I was way more in-tune and serious about fitness. Working out was always my release for my brain & body to feel better. I have been getting back into it more lately, but I know that the lackadaisical last few years haven't helped my mental at all.@@rpghero46
I feel that! Honestly, the whole cave/Rhone areas are just rough in general. Kind of brought the game to a screeching halt for me, when I felt otherwise it was well paced and had good difficulty. Thanks for watching!
Second and third party member names aren't random, if you choose the same name for your main guy every time your allies will have the same names (which always come in pairs). Makes me wonder if the aunts/uncles communicated with each other and discussed baby names around the time all three cousins were waiting to be born. The NES, Famicom, and Game Boy name lists are of course all different (NES is 8 characters in Roman font, Famicom is 8 characters in kana I believe and thus potentially much longer, Game Boy is 4 characters so rather short names like Fran and Gwen for the pricness). I actually _like_ when you tell multiple characters to attack the same monster on a given turn and they don't have time to redirect their fire. It encourages you as the player to pay some attention and put at least a little thought into your characters' relative attack strengths, spells, and just how tough (or not) given monsters are. There are many times I'd make the Prince of Cannock strike a relatively weak foe on its own to get it out of the way while concentrating force with the other two. I think FF1's melee is actually pretty clever for this reason too. When it comes to the battle backgrounds, this _was_ an actual hardware limitation and not something that could be changed with a couple lines of code. It's either your three heroes ganging up on a single monster with a background _and_ that monster can't use black outlines in its art _or_ fight multiple enemies on a black background _and_ you get to use the transparent color as an outline color for the high fidelity pixel art as well. They went with the more mechanically interesting tradeoff.
To each their own. Not a game ruining issue for me by any means, but I'm not a fan of the FF1-style whiffing-at-the-air-post-enemy-death mechanic. I get it, I can understand it, but I'm not a huge fan. Same goes for the battle backgrounds, hardware limitations or not. In the grand scheme of things, these are very minor gripes I have. They definitely don't impact my overall thought of DW2 too much. I just like listing all of my grievances in my reviews, even if minor. Thanks for watching.
@@Bitsandglory Remakes have the ability to give battle backgrounds, and some do so. Most remakes of any of these games add autotargeting accounting for dead enemies, which doesn't make the game much easier so much as it makes grinding more thoughtless. Fortunately they also usually boost money and experience points by default and roughly cut the grind in half (I _love_ grinding in old style JRPGs but there are reasonable limits). I love listing out grievances for my favorite games. I have some for Dragon Warrior 3, few but some for the first Golden Sun, _many_ for Breath of Fire 2, and hilariously long lists of them for the first two generations of Pokemon and the only Final Fantasy games I've played. The more intimate I get with a game, obviously, the more grievances I can become aware of which would go unnoticed if it was one and done; I do think Dragon Quest games tend to just be better polished and better designed overall than Final Fantasies and Pokemons.
I find it funny how this game, final fantasy 3, and Mother/Earthbound Zero all had janky endgame areas that were insanely difficult due to lack of testing.
I'm having a tough time really recalling FF3's ending area, but I do remember it being gauntlet-y. But honestly anything was a cake walk after the horrid difficulty of FF2 haha. Still haven't played through any of the Mother games yet surprisingly (Earthbound didn't click with me when I was young). That being said, yeahhhhh, the ending of DW2. So rough. Such a shame because I really like the game, but it's such an awful roadblock that makes me not want to replay much.
As long as it’s consistently bad I won’t have as much of an issue, a commenter mentioned that DW2 was not really play tested properly haha… the end game shows!
Yeah, your part about the end game makes me never want to bother with this one. I've actually never played a Dragon Warrior game until I played a demo of 11 on the switch
When I think of playing this game way back I think decades ago when I first played this in 92. I think its a vast improvement over the original game but its still my second least favorite game in the series.
I haven’t played much of the series surprisingly, but still agreed. Huge improvement over the first from a technical standpoint - but from my limited series experience and what I know, definitely seems to be towards the bottom of the list
Stay up to date with the Dragon Warrior II NES Mega Playlist playlist here: ua-cam.com/play/PLoiDuuKGlM90kz0fA7piMAuqvPB7p_vYR.html
Timestamps
00:00:00 Intro
00:00:40 Review Starts
00:01:17 Story
00:01:57 Graphics
00:02:39 Music & Sound
00:03:51 Controls
00:04:20 Gameplay & Fun Factor
00:07:50 Critiques
00:12:02 Summation
00:13:00 Score
00:13:43 End Screen
Funny you asked if they play tested the last few areas of the game. From what I've heard... no... they didn't. In an interview from 1987, the director mentioned how the game was supposed to be released in December of 86, but got delayed because the ENTIRE GAME (beginning included), was just too hard. They did extra play-testing and balancing for 5 extra weeks. Though the interview doesn't specify this next part I'm about to say, supposedly, they did not have enough time to play test the last 1/3 of the game, which I assume would be the Sea Cave and beyond. So no, I don't think those last few dungeons were play tested at all, which would definitely explain the absurd difficulty jump.
lmao, well that at least gives it some extra context or why the end is so horribly balanced
Thank you for including the wonderful "My Road, My Journey" at the end. Always gets me a tad misty-eyed.
Ha, no problem. Such a great tune! Thanks for watching
I’m 2/3 or so through the game now. Apparently I’m about to hit that wall where it becomes a grind/run fest. Thanks for preparing me lol
Hahaha as long as you know it’s coming, it’s not AS bad! But still bad… haha
I generally avoid all the Sugiyama drama, personally. Seems to be spread by a lot of people who like getting mad about stuff that doesn't matter. The guy did good work with his music.
Good review, good video though. A bit higher review score than I'd give it, but not by too much. Pretty spot on. I look forward to seeing your takes on 3 & 4 which are way, way better than 1 & 2 imho.
Yeahhhh. I honestly didn't know anything about it until I started researching for the review. Felt the need to include the disclaimer just in case, I truthfully didn't dive deep enough to really have a complete grasp on all the drama (nor do I really wanna involve myself in that sphere). But musically, really enjoyable!
And thanks! I hope to get to 3 and 4 this year, possibly sooner rather than later. Kind of confidential (but now not really) my schedule has become an absolute nightmare so I'm probably going to axe my Let's Plays for a long while. Only a handful of people watch them anyway. Which is good for review enjoyers, because then I can finish games wayyyy quicker - playing here and there whenever I have any pockets of time. Instead of clearing a huge block of time of no interruptions.
One of my favorite games. I played it to death as a kid and I replay it every year or two still. The difficulty is crazy but I kind of enjoy the grind.
Definitely enjoyed my playthroughs of it! The end is very grindy, but such a unique jump from the first game. Thanks for watching.
I played&reviewed DW2 last year, and loved it. I gave it a 9 out of ten. And I did not mind the endgame grinding at all.
Glad you enjoyed it. I liked the game, but found it to be pretty flawed towards the end. Not my favorite.
@ I’ve played the first seven games so far, and I rank/rate them like this…
1. DQ5 (played on both Super Famicom and Nintendo DS) - 10
2. DW4 on NES - 10
3. DW7 on ps1 - 9.5
4. DW3 on NES - 9
5. DW2 on NES - 9
6. DW1 on NES - 8
7. DQ6 (played on Nintendo DS) - 6.5
@@thevideogamecabinet3681 awesome! I’m actually finally going to get to DW3 after I finish paladins quest. Heard nothing but good things (and your comment as well) about the immediate future of DW/GQ that’s in store. I have a nasty habit of replaying games, so the first two have been replayed a bunch and I didn’t get beyond 😅
One of my biggest gripes with DQII was the item management system. Each character only had eight item slots. And to make it worse, equipment like weapons and armor took up some of those slots. This is one thing the original DQ did better. DQI had dedicated slots for weapon, armor, and shield. I understand they did it this way so you could trade equipment with the party, but it just seems unnecessary. Also in DQI, you can stock medical herbs and keys, whereas in DQII each item requires its own slot. So there was no way to stock items. By the time I got to the second town, I had filled six slots with random junk: weapon, armor, shield, and three lotto cards I just happen to have found along the way and didn’t know what to do with. That meant I only had two slots for herbs and antidotes, so I grabbed two herbs and prayed I didn’t get poisoned along the way, since the main character doesn’t get magic and I hadn’t acquired other party members at that point. They should have made designated slots for equipment and stock for items, maybe even include keys in a separate window like they do with tokens.
Yeah the inventory management certainly could have been better. TBF a lot of games from this era are a bit cruddy with that. On the whole though I do think I prefer DW1, certainly one of the reasons why is quality of life stuff like this as well. Thanks for watching!
DW2 is a great game in a fantastic series. It’s often considered the worst in the entire series, and that speaks to how good the rest of the series is. That’s because DQ2 is still a great game!
That's what I like to hear! If this is the worst it has to offer, then the future is bright for me haha. Thanks for watching!
@BitsAndGlory Nice vid! But while the devs said the game did need more balancing late in game, it was mostly due to bugs, strange jig being overpowered, a lack of more equipment, and some enemies not giving enough exp (outside Osterfair, Wellgarth, and Beran). Rhone cave was fine though; its biggest issue was that most people entered it when they were too low level.
You are supposed to go in there with explodet and defeat. And before going lower than floor 3, you should also have learned revive. Enemy groups were designed with you having these in mind before you entered the lower levels where attackbots, hargon's knights, etc. appear. And it is setup so you should gain 3 levels going thru this cave in the process and come out with the Prince of Midenhall at level 28 (I will use his level as a reference so I am typing less).
You can then gain one level for your party in lower rhone (cyclops area), then one in upper rhone where giants/bullwongs/etc. appear. Now, at level 30, you go to Hargon's castle and can grind metal babbles on floor 3. Gaining these 4 levels took me about 90 minutes. Not long at all.
At Level 32, you are ready to beat the game. And I'm talking beat all 5 bosses in Hargon's tower in a row.
Anyway, I wrote a mini guide and put it on woodus.com. If you are curious, look there for a LOT more info. :)
Link: www.woodus.com/den/games/dw2nes/pdf/dw2nes_mini_guide.pdf
While that does sound fine and dandy, casually I still stand by the end game being a complete mess. Regardless of grind tactics, being able to get to a certain point with relative ease and then not is a huge issue. For example, I’m playing Paladins Quest right now and the game is clearly telling me at certain pit stops - hey you probably shouldn’t proceed without some grinding, even if you can. Definitely like DW2, but the end is brutal.
EDIT: phone was about to die haha, but I do appreciate the comment, link and thanks for watching!
@@Bitsandglory I personally loved the challenge. But I do agree that the end game could use some tweaks.
The first huge difficulty spike was at the sea cave. It was enough to discouraged me as a kid. Actually that s the onlytl thing that pissed me off that I never beat it as a kid. Had to wait for emulators to fast forward the insane grind.
Yep, that is definitely an underrated spike in the game! Thanks for watching & the comment
Hey bits just checking a couple of vids 😉 and on you buddy. keep on trucking 🚚 !
I appreciate it! Still been kinda up and down, but trying to keep on trucking as you said!
@@Bitsandglory i dont want to sound preachy or intrusive but dude exercises always helps a lot. start a 😎 bitsgym the exercise channel
Nah, you're totally right. Prior to the pandemic I was way more in-tune and serious about fitness. Working out was always my release for my brain & body to feel better. I have been getting back into it more lately, but I know that the lackadaisical last few years haven't helped my mental at all.@@rpghero46
i hate the room with the floor traps in the cave to the path of rhone. get right by the stairs and fall into the trap.
I feel that! Honestly, the whole cave/Rhone areas are just rough in general. Kind of brought the game to a screeching halt for me, when I felt otherwise it was well paced and had good difficulty. Thanks for watching!
Second and third party member names aren't random, if you choose the same name for your main guy every time your allies will have the same names (which always come in pairs). Makes me wonder if the aunts/uncles communicated with each other and discussed baby names around the time all three cousins were waiting to be born. The NES, Famicom, and Game Boy name lists are of course all different (NES is 8 characters in Roman font, Famicom is 8 characters in kana I believe and thus potentially much longer, Game Boy is 4 characters so rather short names like Fran and Gwen for the pricness).
I actually _like_ when you tell multiple characters to attack the same monster on a given turn and they don't have time to redirect their fire. It encourages you as the player to pay some attention and put at least a little thought into your characters' relative attack strengths, spells, and just how tough (or not) given monsters are. There are many times I'd make the Prince of Cannock strike a relatively weak foe on its own to get it out of the way while concentrating force with the other two. I think FF1's melee is actually pretty clever for this reason too.
When it comes to the battle backgrounds, this _was_ an actual hardware limitation and not something that could be changed with a couple lines of code. It's either your three heroes ganging up on a single monster with a background _and_ that monster can't use black outlines in its art _or_ fight multiple enemies on a black background _and_ you get to use the transparent color as an outline color for the high fidelity pixel art as well. They went with the more mechanically interesting tradeoff.
To each their own. Not a game ruining issue for me by any means, but I'm not a fan of the FF1-style whiffing-at-the-air-post-enemy-death mechanic. I get it, I can understand it, but I'm not a huge fan. Same goes for the battle backgrounds, hardware limitations or not. In the grand scheme of things, these are very minor gripes I have. They definitely don't impact my overall thought of DW2 too much. I just like listing all of my grievances in my reviews, even if minor. Thanks for watching.
@@Bitsandglory Remakes have the ability to give battle backgrounds, and some do so. Most remakes of any of these games add autotargeting accounting for dead enemies, which doesn't make the game much easier so much as it makes grinding more thoughtless. Fortunately they also usually boost money and experience points by default and roughly cut the grind in half (I _love_ grinding in old style JRPGs but there are reasonable limits).
I love listing out grievances for my favorite games. I have some for Dragon Warrior 3, few but some for the first Golden Sun, _many_ for Breath of Fire 2, and hilariously long lists of them for the first two generations of Pokemon and the only Final Fantasy games I've played. The more intimate I get with a game, obviously, the more grievances I can become aware of which would go unnoticed if it was one and done; I do think Dragon Quest games tend to just be better polished and better designed overall than Final Fantasies and Pokemons.
Dragon Warrior 2 aka Dragon Quest 2 got amazing graphics in this great sequel. 😀👍🎮
Agreed! The intro scene & Malroth are so memorable to me graphically... probably why I overused them in my thumbnails haha
I find it funny how this game, final fantasy 3, and Mother/Earthbound Zero all had janky endgame areas that were insanely difficult due to lack of testing.
I'm having a tough time really recalling FF3's ending area, but I do remember it being gauntlet-y. But honestly anything was a cake walk after the horrid difficulty of FF2 haha. Still haven't played through any of the Mother games yet surprisingly (Earthbound didn't click with me when I was young). That being said, yeahhhhh, the ending of DW2. So rough. Such a shame because I really like the game, but it's such an awful roadblock that makes me not want to replay much.
"Did they actually play test these areas?" 11:17 No. It was one of the drawbacks for making the game in a year. Idk why they made it so quickly.
Haha and it definitely shows
I played the remake on my switch. I didnt think it was bad. Wait till the grinding in 3 lol
As long as it’s consistently bad I won’t have as much of an issue, a commenter mentioned that DW2 was not really play tested properly haha… the end game shows!
Yeah, your part about the end game makes me never want to bother with this one. I've actually never played a Dragon Warrior game until I played a demo of 11 on the switch
And for that, I wouldn’t blame you! Stinks cause the rest of the game is pretty dang enjoyable
When I think of playing this game way back I think decades ago when I first played this in 92. I think its a vast improvement over the original game but its still my second least favorite game in the series.
I haven’t played much of the series surprisingly, but still agreed. Huge improvement over the first from a technical standpoint - but from my limited series experience and what I know, definitely seems to be towards the bottom of the list