/vr/ - Retro Games

DQ2 is my favourite in the series, and anyone claiming it's the worst in the series lacks perspective and fail to realize it was one of the most important and influencial JRPG of all time.

It came up with gameplay design and tropes for the genre that remain used these days, like the way the story revolves around finding a number of key items all around the world, or the way exploration is limited by foot at first until you get a boat at which point comes non linearility and freedom of choice where to go.
That's without mentionning party-based gameplay and character archetypes and type of spells, the best example of that influence being the characters in Mother being identical to DQ2 (in terms of roles in combat, strength and spell usage) except on steroids.
None of this, and more, existed in the genre before DQ2 did it. Final Fantasy, which came out 11 months after DQ2, owe 75% to DQ2 and 25% to D&D.

On top of this it set a quality standard for visuals, music, and gameplay (combat is tight, fast paced and responsive) that is not only also un-precedented, but unmatched. Combat is snappy in DQ2, yet slower paced even in DQ3 and 4. And the fact that graphics/sound quality remained pretty much the same in 3 and 4 speaks a lot for how amazing 2 was for a game developed in 1986.

so yeah, anyone playing DQ2 and thinking "this is cliché and boring" fails to realize he thinks that because he's precisely been used to playing games that got all these stuff from DQ2. Like a "horror movie enthusiast" watching Psycho thinking "this is nothing special" and failing to realize how novel the camera work and editing was because everyone else had copied that from then since.