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Dragon Warrior (Quest) II: Bigger, longer, harder

Dragon Warrior II is a bigger Dragon Warrior: more heroes, monsters, equipment, spells, items, towns, and dungeons. The formula is the same, but with three party members instead of just one, who battle up to eight monsters at once. But it released a few months after Final Fantasy in the U.S., to which it compares poorly (in Japan it predated FF by almost a year). An opening cut-scene shows Moonbrooke Castle being destroyed by monsters; a lone survivor escapes to warn the neighboring kingdom of Midenhall. At first you control only Midenhall's prince, a descendant of the legendary Erdrick, but he is soon joined by his noble cousins, the prince of Cannock and princess of Moonbrooke. She has been transformed into a dog, but the Mirror of Ra, which the men retrieve from a swamp tile on the world map, reveals her true shape. She is a magic-user, who will learn powerful, new spells like healall [fullheal], revive [kazing], and explodet [kaboom]. The prince of Midenhall is a warrior who c...
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Dragon Warrior (Quest): Save the princess, save the kingdom

For the fifth anniversary of this blog, I am reviewing an oldie but a goodie: Dragon Warrior! My lifelong love of RPGs began with a free copy of Dragon Warrior sent to new subscribers to Nintendo Power. It's not often one gets a video game for free (I guess it didn't sell as well as Nintendo had hoped). Before Dragon Warrior, the RPG genre was not popular in the U.S., unlike Japan. I suspect this promotion helped kickstart it. Today RPGs are one of the most popular genres of video games worldwide. The series finally broke through in the U.S. with Dragon Quest XI in 2018, which became the best-selling game in the storied series. Thanks largely to that success, the original trilogy has been remade in the acclaimed 2D-HD art style, with a fully modernized remake of Dragon Quest VII coming soon. The original Dragon Warrior/Quest is primitive even by NES standards . It pales in comparison to its three NES sequels because it is short, grindy AF, and, worst of all, has a single charac...
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The Final Fantasy Legend: Mutants and monsters find and kill God

The Final Fantasy Legend was a pioneering release for the Game Boy, being its first RPG. Early Game Boy games were tiny, just 128 kilobytes of data, so it was an achievement to create a complete, albeit small, RPG. The game is not actually a Final Fantasy game but the beginning of a separate series, called SaGa in Japan. Square (successfully) slapped the FF name on it to capitalize on the success of Final Fantasy . Due to the memory limitation, FF Legend is structured around four small worlds connected via a central tower. You create a party of four characters using any combination of three races: humans, mutants ("espers" in the Japanese), and monsters. The game's mechanics are unusual. Firstly, there are no experience points. Each race has its own growth mechanism. You boost your humans' stats by buying items that increase strength, agility, or hit points (HP). Some weapons use strength and others, like whips and bows, use agility (which is also a defensive stat), s...
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Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest: 30th anniversary

Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest builds upon and adds to everything the first game did well. By the way, if you didn't catch the pun in the game's subtitle, read it again—it's not Diddy Kong's Quest, as some have misread it. Donkey Kong has been kidnapped by Kaptain K. Rool (formerly King K. Rool, a detail I didn't clock while playing). This may be an homage to the sequel to the Donkey Kong arcade game , Donkey Kong Junior , in which Mario took the big gorilla captive, leaving DK Junior to save him. Well, I don't know what happened to Junior, but now Diddy and his girlfriend Dixie must rescue DK.  The action takes place on Crocodile Isle, with a world map set up like in the original. Per usual, each of the seven worlds boasts a different, tropey biome: a pirate ship, volcano, poisonous swamp, abandoned amusement park, haunted forest, K. Rool's castle, and finally his airship. The biggest change from the original is replacing DK with a chimp named ...
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The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask: 25th anniversary

The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask is not a typical Zelda game. To capitalize on the success of The Ocarina of Time  (OoT), Nintendo gave Shigeru Miyamoto, Eiji Aonuma, and their team one year to  create a sequel  using the same assets and engine. Majora's Mask is set in an eerie, dream-like, parallel world appropriately named Termina, populated by doppelgangers of NPCs from OoT. It uses a unique,  Groundhog Day- like, three-day cycle, which Link must keep reseting to gain more time to save Termina from its heavenly doom. An opening cinematic shows the Skull Kid (a minor character in OoT), wearing Majora’s Mask, steal Link's horse and ocarina, then turn him into a Deku Scrub. The mask empowers him to make the moon, with a disturbing grin on its face, hurtle toward Termina. A strange mask salesman, from whom the eponymous Mask was stolen, asks Link to get it back. The first part of the game is completed in Deku form, swordless. Though Link fails to reclaim the mask, t...
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Yoshi's Island: Super Mario World 2: 30th anniversary

Although given the subtitle "Super Mario World 2" for commercial reasons (like Wario Land: Super Mario Land 3 ), Yoshi's Island was actually the first game in a new Yoshi series. The sequel, Yoshi's Story  (N64 1998), is in my opinion underrated. The series has had success in recent years with Poochy & Yoshi's Woolly World (3DS 2017) and Yoshi's Crafted World (Switch 2019), both of which I have enjoyed as well. The story of Yoshi's Island is that, while the stork was delivering the twins Mario and Luigi to their parents, a Magikoopa named Kamek kidnapped them. However, he only got Luigi: baby Mario fell to Yoshi's Island. Now it's up to the Yoshis to bring him home. Opposed to them are various enemies, including a whole lot of Shy Guys. As a huge Super Mario Bros. 2 fan, I love that this game re-introduced the Shy Guys to the Mario universe. There are even a few Snifits. Snifit The two most memorable things about Yoshi's Island are the cut...
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EarthBound: Call your mother

Despite flopping upon its release in 1995, over the decades EarthBound has acquired a great reputation. It's easy to see why it wasn't popular: the cartoon-art style—inspired by Charles Schultz's beloved Peanuts comic strip—doesn't compare well to the cutting-edge graphics seen in the two blockbuster RPGs released that same year: Final Fantasy VI and Chrono Trigger . Also, the contemporary American suburbia setting may have been unappealing. Like many other Super Nintendo games, EarthBound is essentially a remake of its 8-bit predecessor. Titled "Mother" (apparently in reference to the Beatles song, "Let It Be"), it came out in Japan in 1989. A fully translated NES prototype was created—under the title "Earth Bound"—but never released (like Final Fantasy II ). In both EarthBounds, some kids (you choose their names, as always) must save the world from the alien Giygas. This guy keeps appearing to have everyone pose for a photograph. EarthB...
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