Let's play Dragon Warrior II: Warrior Hardier!

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mharr
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Re: Let's play Dragon Warrior II: Warrior Hardier!

Postby mharr » Sun Jun 24, 2018 8:45 pm

François wrote:Hmm, the odds of Defeat working on us being only 1/8 surprise me, it feels like at least one of us dies to it almost every time, but maybe I'm just remembering the negative experiences more.

The odds of rolling zero ones on 3d8 are about two in three, that's plenty low enough to be bracing for a death every damn time.

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Blossom
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Re: Let's play Dragon Warrior II: Warrior Hardier!

Postby Blossom » Mon Jun 25, 2018 6:23 pm

mharr wrote:
François wrote:Hmm, the odds of Defeat working on us being only 1/8 surprise me, it feels like at least one of us dies to it almost every time, but maybe I'm just remembering the negative experiences more.

The odds of rolling zero ones on 3d8 are about two in three, that's plenty low enough to be bracing for a death every damn time.


Ducking back into the mechanics buried at the tail end of last page ... Blizzards use the "8x 32/256" table, and have Defence four times and Defeat four times. 50/50 shot every turn that each one will cast Defeat, which has about a one in three chance of killing someone, so yeah, roughly every six times a Blizzard gets to act you'll lose a person. That's fun.

Statuses, by the way: Poison Attack has a flat 25% chance. Sleep and Stopspell have a 12/32 (37.5%) without anything equipped, 24/32 (75%) with a Gremlin's Tail, and 3/32 (9.3%) with a Dragon's Bane. Faint Attack, Surround, Poison Breath, and Sweet Breath have a 3/8 (37.5%) chance. Heroic Attack and Defeat have a 1/8 (12.5%) chance. They're presented that way because they're stored as values that way, and then rolled against on that scale - the Sleep and Stopspell rolls are d32s specifically, even though without a Dragon's Bane those odds simplify. Heroic Attack and Defeat reference the same number, and so do all those status things.

If a monster's AI tells it to do a Heroic Attack, it rolls again to see whether the Heroic Attack works. If not, you eat a regular attack.

Interestingly, of the four AI patterns, the second two - which Hargon has one of, but the other bosses do not - are also set to be more situationally aware? Won't Sleep if everybody's slept or Surround if everybody's Surrounded, won't Revive if nobody's dead, won't Heal if nobody's hurt. Won't Call for Help if there isn't room. Won't use the ally versions of Heals at all unless there's an ally to heal, and attack instead, so Hargon will actually never use his Healmore, and will instead sometimes physically attack you. So he MUST have been intended to have friends at some point.

There's a surprising amount of secret mechanical depth in this game, which they just ... didn't end up taking that much advantage of. Really lends credence to the "rushed endgame" idea.
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François
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Re: Let's play Dragon Warrior II: Warrior Hardier!

Postby François » Mon Jun 25, 2018 7:50 pm

nosimpleway wrote:Haha remember when it took me like 15 tries to beat Sans?

This is so much worse.


Yeah, the randomness is really... yeah. It's one thing being challenged, it's another when the outcome is out of your hands.

Friday wrote:I like how Malroth spent a round healing himself to full while already at full HP just to -really- rub it in how fucked you were.

I also like how Leafs of the World tree don't work in combat? What the fuck?


You can't cast Revive in battle either, which is extra weird because Mace Masters can cast it just fine and two of them will perpetually bring each other back if you let 'em.

TA wrote:scrumptious numbers


Good grief, there's a lot more going on in the background than I suspected. Considering they were basically writing the book, it's surprisingly elegant, even if they didn't quite make full use of it in the end.

The stuff about Hargon being a cult leader is fascinating too, like the whole adventure could have had a cosmic horror vibe to it. I mean, there are plenty of RPGs with some sort of quote elder god unquote being summoned at the end, but there's something about Dragon Warrior that feels... grounded, maybe? By comparison, at least. I'm not sure how else to put it.

Anyway, many thanks for the details! I knew the stats for the end bosses but all that behavior stuff is new to me.

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François
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Re: Let's play Dragon Warrior II: Warrior Hardier!

Postby François » Mon Jun 25, 2018 8:16 pm

Image

Image

Image: ...ow.
Image: So.
Image: Malroth, huh?
Image: What a horrifying creature.
Image: Where... where did we see it before?
Image: In the Tower of the Moon.
Image: Ah, those eerie carvings, I remember now. You were right, Gwen, it was a demon after all.
Image: I wonder how the Moon Fragment and the Eye are connected. The tower must have been built by cultists.
Image: Not that this knowledge would help us much right now.
Image: We can't just go home now, can we?
Image: Of course not.
Image: It's obvious that we're the only ones who can end this threat.
Image: So we have to. Right. I knew that. Just... Just making sure, I suppose.
Image: Shall we set off again, then?
Image: ...yeah.
Image: As many times as it takes.

Whew. Alright.

I made a point not to read up on either Hargon or Malroth before we fought them, so I clearly made a bunch of mistakes back there. (Especially trying to use the Leaf in combat; I did not know it only worked outside of battle.) Next time though, we'll know what we're doing.

Hargon has 230 HP, with a Strength of 180 (a bit less than Zarlox), and a defense of 180 (exactly as much as a Metal Slime). He can attack twice, as well as breathe sleeping gas, and cast Explodet, Sleep, and Healall. He's immune to most magic, except he only has a resistance of 3 to damage spells, and of 4 to Stopspell. In addition, just like with his guardians and his patron, you can't roll crits against him.

Obviously we want Zed to attack every turn. Glynn needs to cast Stopspell until it hits, because we do not want to deal with Explodet and Healall; once that's done, it's best for him to cast Increase and otherwise stay on healing duty. Apart from more healing, Gwen doesn't have a lot to do, so trying to sneak in Staff of Thunder blasts is a decent idea. Explodet would of course be more effective but she really needs to save her MP, and it feels bad to blow 8 MP and fail to overcome Hargon's resistance.

Overall he's difficult, because he still hits hard, but you can shut him down with relative ease.

Malroth though, oh boy, different story. He's got 250 HP (so not much more than Hargon), but he has both Strength and defense at 255, making him the strongest creature in the game (and tying his defense with Metal Babbles). His standard attack may cause "fainting" (like Man O' Wars), he has the game's most powerful fire breath, and he also knows Healall.

That Healall is especially bad news, given that Malroth is completely immune to Stopspell. He's also immune to most other magic, except a resistance of 4 to Surround and of only 2 to Defence. There is literally nothing you can do to prevent him from restoring all his HP any time he likes.

However, he cannot recover his defense power if Gwen reduces it with Defence. That's the real key to winning this battle: debuffing his defense until Zed and Glynn can chunk him down between Healall casts. There's a lot of randomness involved, since nothing stops Malroth from casting Healall every other turn, but as long as you keep Gwen casting Defence, he's never completely resetting the battle, and the window he has to heal himself in grows narrower and narrower.

If Glynn isn't busy keeping his cousins or himself alive, sneaking in Increase casts is also very helpful, until such a point as he can actually deal damage with his Falcon Sword. However, since he has no resistance to Malroth's incredibly powerful fire breath, he tends to be the most fragile party member, so he doesn't have that luxury often.

That said, knowing what to do isn't quite enough, since this clever plan means nothing if we can't outheal his damage or if we run out of MP before he runs out of HP. Malroth hits hard, and right now Glynn can't even survive two fire breaths in a row if he's not continuously pointing his shield-arm at the sky. So we have to gain more levels. If nothing else, higher max HP will make our own Healall casts more efficient, and reduce the amount of turns Glynn and Gwen have to spend on mere survival.

A point could be made that we got reallllly close last time, but I feel we got incredibly lucky with a long stretch of turns where Malroth didn't heal himself, and I'd rather tip the scales away from requiring even a little bit more luck than we had then, which means we could use better stats.

We've exhausted everything that the game has to offer before Malroth shows up. We have everyone's best gear (barring the nigh-unobtainable Mysterious Hats), we've seen every enemy, we've cleared every dungeon, opened every chest, mapped every continent. As much as I enjoyed the flow so far (...mostly), it comes to a screeching halt here. Even the utterly unpleasant instakilling enemies here offer much higher experience gains than any other monsters anywhere else, so the only thing left to do is to run around Rhone and make an attempt at Malroth every time all three of our party members have gone up a level each. (Which is to say, not an attempt every single level up, but every time all three have leveled up at least once since the previous attempt.)

At least we don't have to save up our MP while grinding, so we can use Explodet and Defeat at will. Small comfort, I suppose. I'll even use Gwen's Chance spell a bunch and see if anything interesting occurs.

I'll get to it, then. Gotta line up the old "watch later" playlist on youtube and zone out for a bit. See you on the other side, true believers!

14 minutes: Zed reaches level 34, for 2 Strength, 2 Agility, 2 HP.

16 minutes: Gwen reaches level 26, for 1 Strength, 3 Agility, 4 HP, 9 MP.

22 minutes: Glynn reaches level 31, for 2 Strength, 2 Agility, 6 HP, 4 MP.

Judging from how our first battle went, I don't think this'll be enough margin of error for my tastes. Let's get everyone another level before we start making attempts.

39 minutes: Gwen reaches level 27, for 5 Agility, 1 HP, 7 MP.

43 minutes: Zed reaches level 35, for 1 Strength, 2 Agility, 2 HP. Good grief.

50 minutes: Glynn reaches level 32, for 3 Agility, 1 HP, 3 MP.

Wow. It's as if the game saw the previous three levels, and challenged itself to give us even worse ones. Let's go for another set.

1 hour, 11 minutes: Zed reaches level 36, for 2 Strength, 1 Agility, 5 HP.

1 hour, 15 minutes: Gwen reaches level 28, for 1 Strength, 4 Agility, 1 HP, 5 MP.

1 hour, 23 minutes: Glynn reaches level 33, for 10 Strength (HOLY SHIT), 2 Agility, 1 HP, 3 MP

Man, considering he has a Falcon Sword, that Strength increase on Glynn is incredible. On paper, it's a bigger upgrade than going from the Dragon Killer to the Light Sword.

Fooling around with Chance, there were the expected Sleep and Defeat effects. It also occasionally casts an equivalent to two stacks of Increase or Defense, and it can even heal our entire party, which is a completely unique effect, since no other spell can heal more than one target.

There is also a chance of...

Image

...which gives enemies a chance to attack each other instead of us. It doesn't check individual foes for resistances, so I presume it always works, though probably not against the enemies who would also be immune to Sacrifice.

Also, there is...

Image

...the Sorcerer's Call, which causes our entire party to fall unconscious and all enemies to flee, ending the battle immediately as if we had used the Run command.

Overall these are mostly good and useful effects (apart from maybe the Sorcerer's Call), but considering how random it is, 15 MP is way too steep. I mean, it couldn't be like 2 MP, it has too much potential power, but if it cost 8 instead it would be a lot more usable.

Alright. Zed only needs a bit over 10k to level up again, so let's give him one more chance at a good roll before we have a go at Malroth again.

1 hour, 33 minutes: Zed gets to 37, for 2 Strength, 2 Agility, 3 HP. I know he's already our toughest party member and he needs big stat increases the least, but this is pretty silly.

Anyway, it's about time we put our serious face on and try to reach the end. We're actually getting pretty good at taking out the Rhone ménagerie quickly and Glynn is kind of a powerhouse by now, so we take have to facetank a lot fewer Explodets and Defeats on the way. It probably won't take thirteen trips again, but I'm not going to promise it, because that sounds like tempting the Fates.

Image

Whew, okay, first try. Or, well, "first" try. Be that as it may.

Image

Zed can now one-shot Metal Babbles with a normal blow. We've come a long way.

Image

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We run into surprisingly few enemies on our way up. I'm definitely not going to complain about that!

Image

Image: Crap, he's back.
Image: ...he could probably say the same about us.
Image: Oh, uh, right.
Image: Malroth must have revived him.
Image: Doesn't matter. He's gonna wish he had stayed dead.



Image: Hey, Gwaelin.
Image: Yes dear?
Image: I think those kids are alright.
Image: Heroes, descendants of heroes!
Image: Yeah, but, also, no. Erdrick didn't kill that monstrosity. I'm not the one who took it down either. They did.
Image: With a little help we left them, right?
Image: Ha, true enough. Gotta pay it forward.

Image

Image: ...guys, this is weird, but, uh, hear me out here, I have this strange feeling. Like we've just killed Hargon and Malroth.
Image: That's because we did.
Image: They've been consigned to oblivion, where they belong.
Image: ...huh!
Image: Will wonders never cease, eh?
Image: Come on, Zed. You were there too!
Image: Yeah, I guess I was. Wow.
Image: We did it.
Image: We did do it!
Image: Holy hell, we sure as balls did it!

Image

Image: You were right, Gwen. This place is kinda nice without all the demons in it.
Image: Hahaha, isn't it, though?
Image: Doesn't look as good as home sounds right about now.
Image: You can say that again.

Image

Image: Nice work, by the way.
Image: Hmm?
Image: You sure stabbed the crap out of that abomination.
Image: Oh, I couldn't have done it without you both. I mean, I don't know how your stuff works, but it sure let me do my stuff in the first place.
Image: I wonder if all of us put together are basically worth one Erdrick at this point.
Image: Pffft. We're worth three Erdricks and a half, easy.
Image: I'm thinking four.
Image: Ha.
Image: At least!

Image

Image

Image
Image: Malroth was the source of all the monsters, then. Who knows what would have happened if it had been let loose in the world?
Image: Well we sure don't have to worry about that now.

Image
Image: We couldn't have done it without both your help. I don't know who you are, or where you're from, or... how you made it here. But you have our gratitude.

Image

Image

Image
Image: Huh. How is he still here?
Image: Redemption is available to all who would seek it, even to devils.
Image: ...I suppose.

Image

The trap tiles here no longer cause damage.

Image

Ah, we're getting repeating dialog here. NPCs with the same sprite tend to all say the same thing. I'll only show the new stuff.

Image

Image

We can't save anymore, of course. I wonder what the Dragon Potion might do, then.

Image

Image
Image: Ha, we killed him dead for sure, don't worry.
Image: And his patron as well. There should be peace now.

Image

Image

We have free roam of the world. I suspect there's a lot of repetition among the townsfolk, but there are a few places I can think of where there might be unique responses. Let's start with the only children in the world, in Zahan.

Image

Welp, I don't know what I expected.

In Tuhn, Don Mahone has the "old man" dialog.

Image

Image

Image
Image: You know, I wouldn't mind if you renamed the Armor of Gaia as the "Armor of Zed". I've had it for a while, it was important. Just saying!
Image: Pass.

Image

Rubiss' sanctuary is still empty. The sage at the island shrine northeast of Midenhall and the folk we helped in Lianport all have their sprites' generic dialog.

Image

Image: I wonder if the Dragonlord even expected us to win.
Image: Be on your guard, he might try something.
Image: Heh, we're stronger than a creature stronger than the wizard he was afraid to take on himself. I think we'll be alright.

Image

Image

Image: We kept our side of the deal.
Image
Image: So...
Image: Are we going to have a Problem?
Image
Image: Yeah, I thought so.

Image

Image

Image
Image: Deceiving us?
Image: Oh, please.
Image: You've been wearing the crown all this time. You weren't fooling anyone.

Image
Image: I hope there's nothing left to find, but...
Image: Gwen...
Image: We'll help you rebuild, of course. Whenever you're ready.
Image: Thank you.

Image

Image

Image: Father!? How?
Image
Image: We thank thee for all that thou hast done.
Image: It should be... It should only be a matter of time, now.
Image: ...I see. Take care, dad. I love you.
Image: Rubiss isn't just some "good wizard", there's no way.
Image: Hmm.

The other spirits here say the same thing as the king.

Image

Image

Image

Image
Image: So that's why it's actually bad to steal. I hope you learned your lesson.

Image

Image: Sister! I have returned!
Image
Image: Well... haha, shucks.
Image: ..."again"?
Image: Ooooh, that Halla! Always a kidder!

Image
Image: Heh, it was hardly any trouble at all.
Image: Glynn, my heir, thou hast gained a great victory, and I am proud of thee.
Image: I am honored by your recognition, father.
Image: He sure did well.
Image: To thy new duties must thou go now, Zed.
Image: Ooof. After all this I don't know how I'll ever be able to sit through another audience with the peasantry squabbling over chickens and fenceposts.
Image: I would rather adjudicate a thousand chickens and a thousand fenceposts than see the world threatened again.
Image: Yeah... yeah, this is better, in the end.

Image

Image

Image: Good grief, if my dad doesn't want to build me a room after this...



And here we are again.

Dragon Warrior II has more than its share of substantial flaws, as we've seen. Very often, this is just not a game that people finish, for absolutely understandable reasons. Thinking about Rhone almost made me decide against doing this Let's Play series at all in the first place. When we cracked that mountain in half at the swamp of the hidden valley, we opened the gates of despair in more ways than one.

But there's a lot of good meat around that bad bone. In so many ways, this is a brilliant evolution over its predecessor. It's no longer concerned with simplification at all costs, and it has so much more depth and personality to it. Considering it predates fellow early JRPG juggernauts Phantasy Star and Final Fantasy by almost an entire year, everything that it does well, it does far ahead of its time. And if the mistakes it committed here helped shape its successor into the genuine triumph that it turned out to be, then I'll say it's been worth it.

Anyway! Thanks for coming along with me on this thrill ride, good readers. This may have been the installment I've been least looking forward to, but it's still always a pleasure to share the highs and lows with all of you.

Image

Image: Wait a minute... My reward for all of this nonsense is the crown I was going to inherit anyway? I was sold a bill of goods!
Image: Well, you do get to live in an undestroyed world.
Image: You have to admit it has its advantages.
Image: So does everyone else who didn't decapitate an arch-demon from the Shadowtime!
Image: No worries, kid. You also get to sit in on Dragon Warrior 3 with us.
Image: ...eh what? Who are you?
Image: Oh! That's Gwaelin and her husband!
Image: Hopefully there will be more dragons next time.
Image: I can hardly wait!

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MarsDragon
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Re: Let's play Dragon Warrior II: Warrior Hardier!

Postby MarsDragon » Mon Jun 25, 2018 10:56 pm

As promised, a Yuji Horii DQ2 interview.

It's less spoilery than I remember, but I think at the end is still a good time to look at it. Some quick interesting things:

Naturally, game balancing isn’t something you get right after one pass. We repeated this process over and over. At first it went in 4-5 day increments, and soon after 2-3, and then we were getting new updated prototypes daily. At that point we had to make sure every prototyped version was clearly labeled with a date and time: “December 8th, 4 A.M. version.” Without that you’d have no way of knowing what the newest version was.

Adjusting the order of spells learned… changing the strength of monsters… lowering the prices at the church… in this way, the month went by in the blink of an eye. We had a time limit after all. I wouldn’t say we found the 100% ideal balance, but I think we came 90% of the way. If we had more time I think we could have made it perfect, but I didn’t want to make the children wait any longer.

By mid-December we had finished the final version. But at that moment I collapsed from a stomach ulcer. Ah, it was really horrible.


Yeah. Rushed endgame. That entire section is interesting, because it goes in-depth into how they balanced the game and helps explain why Rhone sucks so much.

The memory limitations we had with DQII caused us no shortage of strife.

The first unfortunate victim were the large kamishibai-esque pictures we planned to use for cut scenes and such. We put them in at first, but as the graphics memory got larger and larger in the end we had to remove them and abandon the idea. I imagine few people have noticed this, but we stealthily printed one of those images in the story section of the DQII instruction manual. Of course on the famicom it would have actually been in color.


It's really fascinating to me that DQ tried that. It probably would've changed how RPGs handle cutscenes, instead of leaving the big panels to being pretty much entirely a Phantasy Star thing.

Another idea we had for the ending was this: in the final battle, the Prince of Cannock would sacrifice himself to defeat Hargon. Your quest would be complete, but the Prince of Cannock would not return. Wishing him peace in the next life, you and the Princess of Moonbrooke would return to Middenhall. The people there would be praising your great exploits, and a grand ceremony would begin…

But then!

A single girl would rush up to you, yelling “You killled my brother!” And you realize only too late the dagger in her hand, as she plunges it deep into your breast. This, of course, was the younger sister of the Prince of Cannock. The people are shocked. Life slowly fades from your body…


That's probably why the Prince of Cannock has Sacrifice. Also imagine playing through everything and getting that ending as a kid.

Thanks a lot for the LP, Zed! I never got into Dragon Warrior/Quest, but I love learning about it. This has been a real highlight of the boards.

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Friday
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Re: Let's play Dragon Warrior II: Warrior Hardier!

Postby Friday » Tue Jun 26, 2018 2:37 am

That Healall spamming fuck is gone at last.

Congrats, Zed. Great LP.
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Niku
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Re: Let's play Dragon Warrior II: Warrior Hardier!

Postby Niku » Tue Jun 26, 2018 7:13 am

The debuffing attrition versus a fullhealing boss is actually kinda fucking cool, as obnoxious as it is, given how unique it is as a game mechanic. It actually reminds me of Shinobi (PS2) in a roundabout way, since you can just wale away on the bosses in that game until you deplete their HP, or you can utilize the combo system to kill them in one hit if you go through the trouble/skill level of setting up the combo that allows you to do it in each boss encounter. But it's easy to think it's neat from the sidelines when you don't have to suffer through all of Rhone and the RNG yourself, so thanks for taking that one for the team.
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Blossom
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Re: Let's play Dragon Warrior II: Warrior Hardier!

Postby Blossom » Tue Jun 26, 2018 9:18 pm

The thing is, it's just completely random. Malroth might do a Healall every 2 rounds and you'll never, even if you cast Defence until it's taking off 0 every cast, be able to outpace that. Or he might decide never to cast it and just breath fire while you heal until Midenhall kills him. It's a crapshoot.



It only took four tries to record a run like this.
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Rico
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Re: Let's play Dragon Warrior II: Warrior Hardier!

Postby Rico » Tue Jun 26, 2018 10:45 pm

Boss healing as attrition is a great pairing to dungeons as resource management, but there's a reason later series entries went with a flat Meditate heal amount over HealAll (which FF ended up duplicating with Chaos' Cur4).

Having recently replayed 7, 8, and 3 I think I might do 9 next but I'm really interested to see what 11 ends up playing like in a few months.

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François
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Re: Let's play Dragon Warrior II: Warrior Hardier!

Postby François » Wed Jun 27, 2018 12:02 am

MarsDragon wrote:That's probably why the Prince of Cannock has Sacrifice. Also imagine playing through everything and getting that ending as a kid.


Good Lord. Yeah, that's... wow. For how colorful and clean the series looks, it's still fully capable of looking gut-punching tragedy in the eye, but ending this one on that note would have been way over the line.

Niku wrote:The debuffing attrition versus a fullhealing boss is actually kinda fucking cool, as obnoxious as it is, given how unique it is as a game mechanic. It actually reminds me of Shinobi (PS2) in a roundabout way, since you can just wale away on the bosses in that game until you deplete their HP, or you can utilize the combo system to kill them in one hit if you go through the trouble/skill level of setting up the combo that allows you to do it in each boss encounter.


Right, it's an alternate way to do lasting damage in a game where that kind of sideways thinking isn't necessarily required a lot of the time. It's just a shame that it's a lovely band-aid on such a dumb problem. And the fact that Malroth is fairly vulnerable to Defence isn't obvious to the average player, and if you try it once and hit the resistance, you might think that he's immune to it; at that point your recourse is either getting lucky, or getting so grossly overleveled that you can kill him quickly through his full defense. I mean, the prince of Midenhall can get to level 50, and even the prince of Cannock reaches a Strength of 140 at his max level; I don't want to imagine how long it'd take to get even halfway there from the level 37 we ended up at.

TA wrote:It only took four tries to record a run like this.


Ha, wow. Yeah it's a RNG boss basically, which is the heart of the problem. Dude has a random amount of HP between 250 and infinity, so the spectrum of experiences people will have with him will vary by a large margin. And on top of that, he's a RNG boss as the final hurdle of a RNG instadeath gauntlet, so every retry is excruciating. Just a bad scene on a lot of levels.

Rico wrote:Having recently replayed 7, 8, and 3 I think I might do 9 next but I'm really interested to see what 11 ends up playing like in a few months.


11 looks pretty good, but considering my current goals of going through at least up to 4, I'll probably leave it for much later, heh.

Oh and yeah, I'll be starting on 3 in probably a couple weeks, and moving on to 4 after that is basically a given at this point. I'm still looking at blind runs for 5 and 6 but that's vastly less likely by several orders of magnitude.

I'm champing at the bit to start building a backlog for 3, but since it'll require voting at the end of the first episode, I am literally forced to just take an actual break instead. It's probably for the best just for the sake of not burning out, but man, I got a good workflow and I'm generally having a good time even when it's rough going. And besides, the pills are swallowed, Rhone is a memory; from here on out, it's all gravy.

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Rico
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Re: Let's play Dragon Warrior II: Warrior Hardier!

Postby Rico » Wed Jun 27, 2018 1:08 am

4 will probably always be my favorite DQ, but I also haven't played through without the PSX/3DS upgrade of being able to manually control party members in Chapter 5 for a long time. I think it would be an amazing game even at the end of the SNES/early PSX era, but much like the first 3 DQs, it's pushed to practically incredible how much it accomplishes on the NES.

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Blossom
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Re: Let's play Dragon Warrior II: Warrior Hardier!

Postby Blossom » Wed Jun 27, 2018 2:18 am

4 is probably the best that I've played, but I actually prefer the NES version to the DS remake. I like the translation better, I kinda hate the postgame content, I'm not a fan of the townbuilding thing, it just FEELS better.

Except for that FUCKING tactics system. I appreciate them trying to do something original and break from tradition but that was such a massive misstep. You can get rid of it and take direct control with a simple game genie code. I was thinking of doing a 4 LP if Francois doesn't pick that one up after 3, and while I'd be down for input on party composition, you can bet your ass that'll be in use.
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nosimpleway
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Re: Let's play Dragon Warrior II: Warrior Hardier!

Postby nosimpleway » Wed Jun 27, 2018 8:40 am

François wrote:And besides, the pills are swallowed, Rhone is a memory; from here on out, it's all gravy.

Most people swallow pills with plain water. I've never heard of anyone washing medication down with gravy.

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Re: Let's play Dragon Warrior II: Warrior Hardier!

Postby Niku » Wed Jun 27, 2018 10:12 am

hello
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Friday
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Re: Let's play Dragon Warrior II: Warrior Hardier!

Postby Friday » Wed Jun 27, 2018 1:49 pm

the first dinner is the pills, the second is the gravy

the third is the fact that Niku was the Weretiger

the fourth is really old memes

the fifth is Grey Fac

That's Fac as in Factory
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