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...

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...