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...

Today is the 30th anniversary of the U.S. release of Chrono Trigger! It was my favorite SNES game. When I rented Chrono Trigger in middle school, I assumed it was a two-player action RPG because the box looked like  Secret of Mana . Ironically, Akira Toriyama didn't work on Secret of Mana! However, his work on the Dragon Quest series served as inspiration for Secret of Mana. I saw no similarity between Chrono Trigger and the 8-bit sprites in Dragon Warrior. Anyway, despite the lack of multiplayer, I took to Chrono Trigger immediately. With the money I earned mowing the lawn, I bought the game for about $75, which, adjusted for inflation would be nearly $150 today! Chrono Trigger's main gimmick is time-travel. The appropriately named Crono and his friends (you can choose their names) travel between the present (1000 A.D.), the Middle Ages (600 A.D.), a post-apocalyptic future (2300 A.D.), antiquity (12,000 B.C.), and prehistoric times (65 million B.C.). Changing events in the p...

My lifelong love of role-playing games began with a free copy of Dragon Warrior—part of a promotion by Nintendo Power. The game was primitive, as Western ports of Japanese RPGs lagged years behind. Dragon Quest III came out in early 1988, just three months after Final Fantasy , but we didn't get Dragon Warrior III until four years later . (The name had to be altered because someone had trademarked "Dragon Quest" in the U.S.) By then the Super Nintendo was already out; Dragon Warrior III made almost no impact. Enix declined to localize V and VI. (Fortunately, Squaresoft and Enix merged in 2003, and the new company ported both to the DS for international release!)  Dragon Warrior III and IV are easily the best RPGs on the NES. DW3 does everything Final Fantasy does and more. Instead of choosing your party of four only at the beginning, you control a central hero or heroine (you choose the gender, although they are called Ortega's "son" either way), who can re...