Doragon kuesuto II: Akuryou no kamigami

Hey! You can have a party! At least when I was a kid that was the major selling point. You could have all the fun and excitement of the first Dragon Warrior, but this time you can have a party, a band of loyal companions to follow you on your quest....

... except you never really played it as much as the first one because, ultimately, it wasn't as compelling. Interactions with your party weren't what you expected, they didn't come with the mystery that you thought they would walking into it.

It was still difficult, it still had it's super hard moments that made you feel like the hero you wanted to be when you FINALLY beat them. It still had the mystery, the quest feel to it...

... but something was missing. The story never felt as rich. The world never felt as exciting as the first one did.

But.... you had your loyal band of followers, so, you played it through at least once, but never revisited it as much as you did Dragon Warrior.

This game is hard! That is the first thing I can say, don't just start playing the game expecting the simplicity of the first game. Because if you do, the game will utterly destroy you! And I'm not making that up, thats actually what the game say's if, or more likely when, you get a game over.

Lets get the bad things out of the way first. The difficulty was increased so much from the first game that its not even funny! It starts off like its going to be pretty simple like the first game but as soon as you get your second party member the game starts to get brutal and the way from the cave to Rhone to Hagon's castle is possibly the hardest area in RPG history, not to mention the last room of the cave to Rhone where if you don't go exactly the right way, you get sent to a random area in that same room, and I wasn't just under-leveled because I did a ton of level grinding during my play-though of the game which stayed in from the first game, but now it became a lot more and if your just money farming from monsters then you may just cancel all plans that you have because the monsters drop a very low sum of gold. Another thing was the transition from one room to the next, sure it made the game realistic but in the end it just made it that much worse.

Now for some good things. The story did well to follow the almost-no- story Dragon Warrior, it centers around an unnamed prince from the castle of Middenhal who is a descendant of the descendant of Erdrick. He along with his cousins the Prince of Cannock and the Princess of Moonbrook must defeat an evil cleric named Hargon who plans to summon Malroth and either destroy or take over the world. It was also pretty neat that we went from just one character running around on the little world map to three characters running around on a three times bigger world map, which offered a ton of more exploration. The music, which was composed by Koichi Sugiyama again, was also really good although I would personally prefer the soundtrack from the first one.

So to sum up, it was pretty good, but you should only play this one if you're a hardcore RPG gamer.

6/10