/vr/ - Retro Games

idk, im gonna play it tomorrow.

Only Japanese people care about this series.

It's not that it's the worst, it's that III is so good that it eclipses II. Both games are a massive improvement over the first game. But III is much more playable and better designed and more fun and so on and so forth mainly et cetera

Rhone

>>9197967
It was a rushed and unbalanced mess in spite of what it did to improve on DQ1. The final dungeons weren't even playtested.

Is it? I played up until you get the ship and I liked it.

>>9197970
Oh my god... and they said I would never be Japanese :')

cave to rhone and onward

>>9197967
It's not a bad game at all, but it's certainly the least interesting in the series.
DQ1 was the first, and these days its single-character setup is unique.
DQ3 let you make your own party, and it had a gargantuan open world. Also, the last part twist.
DQ4 had a small story for each of the characters, and then the main game when you as the protagonist travel around the world and gather them all into a single large party that can all fight the villain at once. Sublime.
DQ5 has one of the most original stories in JRPGs without being quirky or weird. You gotta have sex wo produce the actual hero of the story etc. And it lets you recruit monsters.
DQ6 has you hopping between two large worlds that mirror each other.
DQ7 is the longest JRPG out there, with the main story that takes over a 100 hours.

I love DQ8, but really can't say how it's unique. Great cell-shaded graphics, an orchestrated soundtrack, but it's nothing unique. But that's PS2 era already. DQ9 is a disgrace and DQ10 doesn't exist. DQ11 is good but certainly nothing special at all. I would certainly place DQ2 above 9 and 10 and probably on equal footing with 11. But 1 and 3-7 are on another level completely.

>>9198050
Interesting take. Most people like the latest ones and shit on the earlier ones

>>9198050
DQ5 is such a good game. It genuinely helped me have a more positive outlook on life.

>>9198097
Really? Because I'm on DQ4 right now and I'm not impressed with it. The chapter set-up for the party is completely pissed away once the Hero shows up and turns them into mute meatshields. Not even Party Chat helps. Hopefully, 5 will make the wife and kids feel like l should give a damn about them for all their importance.

>>9198131
5 really is that good, yes. The story isn't super complex or anything but it really spoke to me. Taming monsters is also very fun.

>>9198050
This is objectively correct.

>>9197967
Because it's the worst game in the series. What a dumb question

>>9198131
>>9198131
>>9198050
DQ5 is the most FF like game in the series and that's a good thing

>>9198050
>DQ7 is the longest JRPG out there, with the main story that takes over a 100 hours.
Too bad roughly half of that is actual content and the rest is recycled.

>>9198293
It definitely feels like Enix was so obsessed with topping themselves now that they had stronger console specs that they didn't stop to think if perhaps they were overdoing it.

>>9198326
Yeah, maybe a little bit.
Pic related is apparently just the game's script. I can only imagine what the rest of the documentation looks like.

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.

also The Path to Rhone and Rhone itself are some of the best areas in the game. Again, these days it's easy to see pits that put you back on lower floor and non euclydian maze with exist that teleports the player around as something boring and over done, except that when DQ2 did it these things were also novel as far as JRPGs were concerned.
Pits are a great way to have the player think and map the dungeon in his head as a three dimensional place, when the usual in this type of game is "I'll map this floor in my head and then move on to the next one", in comparison the elevators in DQ4 don't nearly do as a good of a job to convey a 3D space.

Then the teleporting exits also force the player to rethink how he maps the dungeon out, again in a different way. Considering that mapping out areas and dungeons specifically was a key mechanic in the genre (something which again, is easy to forget these days when "dungeons" are literal corridors for which you're given full maps when you take just one step inside), these were smart mechanics to keep things fresh and engaging.

In Rhone, the OHKO spell spamming enemies can be seen as shitty, but you have to realize they are a way to make sure the player is high level enough for an end boss which can be unbeatable if you're not high level enough. The higher your lvl is, the lower the chance to be hit by the OHKO spell will be. Also, the game provides a mean to go back to the outside world if you need to go shopping or to gain a couple of levels, and if you're not stupid and don't save anywhere else, you can then teleport back straight to Rhone from anywhere. Plus if you had played the game as intended instead of using guides, you wouldn't be that underlvl'd for the place if at all.

Either way the difficulty of the end game alone isn't worth dismissing the entire game. People also complained about the difficulty (especially the end game) in games like FF2, 3, Mother, etc

I fucking hate this series

>>9199341
>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
Ultima did it.

>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
Ultima did it.

>That's without mentionning party-based gameplay and character archetypes and type of spells
Ultima did it.

>roles in combat, strength and spell usage
Ultima did it.

>because he's precisely been used to playing games that got all these stuff from DQ2
Everything your game did, Richard Garriott already accomplished five or more years earlier. The only thing I'll give you credit for is better-drawn monster portraits. Let's also not forget Final Fantasy 1 came out later that same year and blew DQ out of the water, especially in the realm of "fast, tight combat", audio/visuals, and combat roles.

>>9199395
All jarpigs are ripoffs of Ultima and Wizardry. They based their entire industry on xeroxing those two franchises (literally, they even plagiarized Ultima graphics and artwork for their own products)

>>9199395
>Ultima did it.

Hence why I said "JRPG"

> Let's also not forget Final Fantasy 1 came out later that same year and blew DQ out of the water, especially in the realm of "fast, tight combat", audio/visuals, and combat roles.

FF1 came out always a year after DQ2, it's more accurated to say it competed with DQ3 than 2. It started development long after DQ2 was released and most likely only started development because of DQ1/2. Combat in FF1 is slower paced than in DQ2. The monsters do look great in FF1 but they're a step below DQ2's, whether we're talking about the art itself or technically speaking. The best thing about FF1's graphics are the black outlines around character sprites.
In FF1 the player first explores a limited part of the world by foot, then acquires a boat with which comes more freedom of movement and non linearility, just like DQ2. The goal of the game is to go around the world collecting powerful magical key items, just like in DQ2.

I'm not saying FF1 doesn't have its own merits, like the classes or taking the exploration one step further with a flying vehicule, but it still owes an awful lot to DQ2.

I finished it, but I stopped enjoying it when you got the boat and had to find the orbs

>>9197967
worst one is 6 just because its "very average" snes rpg tier
2 is great but not really playtested after you get the boat, and the endgame is ridiculous

DQ2 is often regarded as the worst game in the series because it has the second worst gameplay in the series plus it does not have the historical intrigue of DQ1.

The Erdrick trilogy - DQ 1-3 - is pretty basic by contemporary standards. You explore a mostly empty world solving puzzles that tend to either be very straightforward or deliberately obtuse in a way that tends to be not fun if you don't have a guide. DQ3 is by far the best game in the Erdrick trilogy and almost certainly the only one worth playing on the merits of its gameplay. This is unsurprising: by the time of DQ3 they'd had a lot of time to refine the formula and they do a pretty good job. It's still fundamentally the same formula, but it's refined to the extent that it's about as fun as it could possibly be without the major innovations that would later come.

DQ1 is a game that consists of about five or six of fun plus a solid block of risk-free grinding that constitutes the endgame. DQ2 is roughly the same experience on a much longer time scale, which strictly makes it worse.