One thing I love about Dragon Quest 2 is the enemy variety. Not only enemy variety is usually high (except maybe at the very start of the game) but each encounter has a random factor to both the enemy types chosen for the fight, but also the number of enemies for each type. It's very rare to get the same encounter twice; and then each floor within a dungeon has a different pool of enemies too.It's astonishing how much they got this right the first time around and how so many JRPGs failed at this concept, even the so called DQ clones.
>It's astonishing how much they got this right the first time around and how so many JRPGs failed at this concept, even the so called DQ clones.All JRPGs of the era are just bad compared to even the worst DQ game, the series is still held in high regard in Japan for a reason. Well except maybe Phantasy Star because of its graphics, music and first person dungeons
Only the water areas have repetitive encounters, but if you look at cut content a lot of water enemies were cut. They sacrificied water for the rest, likely because the encounter rate is lower on water.I wonder where the rhino and boulder enemies would have been, maybe in the mountains around Tuhn and the Tower of the Moon , that area has a lot of palswaps
>>12056325>but also the number of enemies for each typeI played FF5 recently so its still fresh in my mind but I remember thinking while playing how it was weird that there was 0 randomization to the enemy teams despite throwing up to 8 enemies at you at a time. Seemed like a wasted opportunity, there are so many monsters and so many possible permutations of enemies but you dont get that.
>>12056720Yep, exactly. I can't think of many games that do this, most have pre-determined encounters only. Even though it's just a simple way to make the game more interesting.
>>12056328Gameplay-wise, the Megami Tensei and FF games from that era humiliate DQ and Phantasy Star.
>>12056823Look I love smt but let's not be retarded. SMT and Atlus games in general were all auto battle simulators until Nocturne
>>12056325>It's very rare to get the same encounter twiceI dont know about that. I definitely remember seeing a lot of the same encounters, especially with all the grinding you need to do to stand a chance in the endgame.
>>12056823next time reword your opinions as opinions before you get caught in an obvious lie
>>12056823I've never finished MT 1 and 2 so won't speak for them but FF games don't humiliate anything, I respect the fact that Square wanted to make something more complex than DQ (especially with 2) but those games are ultimately not fun to play with 3 being the worst one, especially if we compare it to DQ3 and its job system
>>12056824NTA but I think Megami Tensei II is easily the best RPG on Famicom.Yeah sure, you autobattle through kost encounters, but you also basically do the same for Dragon Quest, just without the convenienceof it being a feature, its not often you have to carefully select commands. I think MegaTen was really ahead of its time in certain aspects like that. Plus demon fusion is an incredible mechanic.
>>12056851The difference is in DQ you will only do "auto battles" only when you are overleveled, in any old atlus game you do auto battles even on new areas.I said nocturne but it was mostly around the saturn/ps1 games they got their shit together with how battles should be.
>>12056842FF 1 introduced a bunch of mechanics like classes and elemental weaknesses that DQ hadn’t touched on. Plus, the battle screen looks much nicer.
>>12056873>the battle screen was better>your guys are chibies while the enemy is a super detailed giant even if lore wise both should be the same size or even the enemy should be smaller.Miss me with that gay retarded shit
>>12056873It plays so fucking slowly though, I'm actually really grateful it didn't take long for other 8-bit RPGs to just be a lot snappier. I think FF1 is a pretty well thought-out RPG but it feels like you can spend hours in a single area. Healing in the game is so tedious, and you earn so much money to buy so little by the end game.
>>12056881>I am gay retarded shit and I miss my mom
>>12056865The only party members not just spamming attack are your casters, and you're just going to be using the same spells with them over and over. Its as mindless as Auto.There's also demon negotiation that gives MTII a big edge. If you're friends with demon, you can just avoid fights with them, no getting bogged down with too many encounter while exploring if you just befriend them all, and even if you don't have them all recruited, you can still end encounters peacefully, stuff like that is more engaging than the combat in any 8-bit DQ.
>>12056886>no argument just seetheI mean it lol, I fucking hate Metal Max went with that retarded shit too
>>12056884You can change the message speed at the beginning.
>>12056893I get it you're a retarded 20 year old chucklefuck who can't into SD characters.
>>12056897Man I have been playing this game WRONG.
>>12056898I can into SD retard, I fucking love how 7th Dragon ds did it, because guess what? There is no God awful art style juxtaposition between the enemies and your party.Meanwhile the first boss of FF1 is supposed to be just a human knight but he is a giant compared to your guys and they are side by side. It's retarded and immersion breaking.
>>12056909Nigga your knights are All Grown Up by the end game.
>>12056830I meant twice in a row
>>12056830The end game grinding is pretty insane, especially if you're familiar with the game meaning you'll spend a lot less time turning in round and redoing shit.I'm currently replaying it, MSX version, and I reached the priest in Rhone my princess was lvl18, meaning she didn't even have Explodet yet and Cannock didn't have Revive either. So now I gotta grind, a lot. With that said, the grinding is still nothing compared to DQ1.Everytime I play the game I do my end game grinding in the last room of the cave to rhone hoping those fuckers will drop a Mysterious Hat but I never got one, including that one time I grinded to the lvl cap. I did get the item that lets you get the password anywhere, twice, first time I sold it to buy the Falcon Sword and the second time I just threw it away immediatelly lol
>>12057090>the grinding is still nothing compared to DQ1.I feel like it was worse, especially since the rng was brutal with those enemies that sacrifice themselves to party wipe you, even worse they fucking gave it to Pazuzu too, so you're just racing against the rng clock.Then you've got Malroth being able to infinitely full heal himself until you run out of MP and slowly die.I have no remorse about abusing savestates to finish both games, fuck all that grind, its just padding in 1 and its probably moreso the rushed development in 2's case.
>>12057198You didn't beat the game
>>12057198dumbass
>>12057202I beat them, just saved myself time. There's zero value in the obscene amount of forced grinding they require.
>>12057216>I beat themlmao
>>12057220>NOOOO YOU HAVE TO WASTE YOUR AFTERNOON SPAMMING ATTACK JUST LIKE I DID
>>12057198Faggot
>>12057225nope you dont have to, unless you want to beat the game. I mean its pretty simple im sure a 5 year old understands what beating a game means.
>>12057225It's more like you need to put a chunk of time in (realistically, an hour) each day just learning how far you can go before you have to pull back and replenish etc. and that is something which is dictated by your ability to save (or in this case, use passwords).It's a basic of RPGs.
>>12057240And I did beat the game, I played through the whole thing, fought the final bosses, and saw the end credits.You can't name me a single aspect that savestates ruins for skipping the end game grind in DQ1 and 2. This isn't something like Megaman or Castlevania where there's skill involved.Do you cry about fast forward too? Are you just that pathetically bad at games that you have to act high and mighty about spending more time on what is effectively cookie clicker rather than being able to finish something that takes any amount of skill?>>12057254Yes, the learning of DQ1 and 2 where you enter the end game dungeon, get fucked up by random encounters and have to keep grinding, grinding, and grinding until you can maybe comfortably get past the enemies and then you get stonewalled at the boss and have to repeat. Its especially bad in DQ2 where not one, but TWO bosses are 100% rng dependent and can't even reliably be killed at max level, and you have two major grinds, one to be able to get through the Cave to Rhone and one more once you're in Rhone.
>>12057290Not those anons but I don't give a fuck if you use save states or not, just telling you there is an 'edge' you lose when you instantly place a checkpoint that's not actually there. If you take away the instant checkpoints, then you have to adhere to the restrictions the game places on you in terms of how far you can go on an end game area. You will be wasting time if you play yourself too far deep, run out of HP and items, and die before you make it out, so you have a conundrum of playing it safe in which you are in escape distance or press on further for greater rewards. You're meant to make gains even on the way back to your healing points too.
The biggest proof that I'm a JRPG scrub is that I had to grind to like level 23 to beat DQ1 and even then I almost got my ass handed to me by the Dragonlord. I still don't get how people manage to beat him at level 19. It was a very long time ago though and I have more experience with the genre now
>>12057385Your name determines your stat growth. If you have a name with bad strength growth, 23 is about the earliest you can win.
>>12057415You're right, forgot about that. Hard to tell though because I actually played the translated Famicom ROM and my name was Daniel in that
>>12057358For other RPGs, sure, but that really doesn't apply here because DQ1 and 2 are some of the most barebones basic RPGs you could play. There's no strategy to them, you can only grind, and items are absolutely useless after the early game.
>>12057437>There's no strategy to them, you can only grindThis isn't true at all. Malroth requires a strategy to win, you don't just grind and spam attack and pray that he doesn't heal.>items are absolutely uselessusing piece of equipment isn'tI didn't want to enter this savestate arguement that's ruining my thread, but the moment you're shitting on the game is the moment you're going too far. Your attitude is typical savestater cope.
>>12057465Oh what's the strategy retard? Malroth can randomly fully heal himself
>>120574681)Cannock probably has the Falcon Sword and sold his Spear ever since Tuhn. The Spear is better against bosses (and any enemy with high defense) so you need to switch back to that2) Spend the first 3-4 turns buffing your defense to max and debuffing his defense to the minimum, to ensure both that you don't need to heal as often and to maximum damage per turn, thus minimizing the number of turns it takes to kill him and as a result the likelyhood of him healingI'm not saying it's a complicated tactic but dismissing it like it's all "grind and luck" is still stupid
Not a big fan of 2 but I think this game is better than 6, now 6 is just a fucking mediocre DQ game, you know that? It's probably what people who've never played a DQ game think the series is like, it's like you're playing it and you feel nothing
>>12057476Malroth doesn't have the buff-wiping ice wave like later DQ final bosses do, so you just need to build the party up, sap him down, and lay into him fast and hard in one go.
>>12057465>Malroth requires a strategy to win, you don't just grind and spam attack and pray that he doesn't heal.Do tell what this strategy is, because the only things you can do to him is lower his defence and blind him if you're lucky. There's nothing you can do to stop the healing because he's immune to everything else.>using piece of equipment isn'tYou said items, not equipment. Items are shit, equipment is also usually not worth using as an item outside of very rare exceptions like the Power Shield.>the moment you're shitting on the game is the moment you're going too farOh sorry for shitting on the worst version of the worst DQ. Get over it, its a fucking ass game. You wanna pretend like there's some strategy to it, tell me how you can beat the game without spending hours and hours grinding and without rng manipulation or savestates, you fucking can't because its a pure numbers game.What set me pff with DQ1 was grinding to the recommended level for Dragonlord, only to find that my name is shit so I'd have to grind more, to which I just said fuck it, put the Dragonlord to sleep and savestate rng manipulated his ass 1 damage at a time without him ever waking up. For 2 my breaking point was spending an hour almost every day grinding muddy hands for a week, finally making it through the fucking Cave to Rhone, and then finding out that wasn't even the biggest grind I would have to do. I just used savestates and rng manipulation to roll up to and through Malroth cause fuck this game and fuck every time I've had to seen my whole screen turn red before the fucking text even starts typing cause some nigger casted Sacrifice.
>>12057535If you would use savestates smartly you would just use them to farm Metal Slimes instead of being a cuck and use them for actual fights...
>>12057540Metal slimes take forever to encounter and in the time it'd take to savescum them to death I could have earned more experience finishing regular fights.They didn't exactly give you an amazing amount of EXP for Metal Slimes in these early games.
>>12057545Use savestates to encounter them too, and yes they do, the whole dq1 speedrun is based on killing those fuckers.
>>12057535You're dismissing everything the game has to offer in a desperate attempt to fuel your cope and justify your cheating. There is absolutely nothing anyone else can say that can change that, it's something you need to realize by yourself for your own betterment.
>>12057556You're an idiot, speedruns use rng manipulation, of course its fast for them when they can guarantee everything about them. The DQ speedrun is literally just an autistic memory test to memorize a series of inputs you have to do for 2 hours or however long it was.Again, using savestates to try and guarantee the encounter would take longer and yield less EXP than just fighting other enemies in a stronger area. I don't know the rng manipulation, it takes a long time to brute force it, long enough to not be worth it at all.>>12057557>You're dismissing everything the game has to offer in a desperate attempt to fuel your cope and justify your cheating.I didn't cheat, I saved myself time. There's fucking nothing hard about these games, you just need to level up enough, you're the one coping here, you're dismissing the biggest issues with the games because you're too insecure about the copious amount of time you had to spend grinding and are jealous of others who aren't stupid enough to put up with it when they don't have to.The only other possibility is you're really just a fag that played the remakes that massively cut down the grind among other things, and you think the original is the same experience.
>>12057090Just play the SNES or GBC DQ1&2 versions that rebalance it so the grind isn't as bad. Also the 1&2 HD remake is soon that will have a 4th character and maybe even be a little bit less grindy than even the SNES and GBC versions.
>>12057602Cope, enjoy your hollow victory
There is another aspect of randomization to the battles: enemy HPEvery enemy has semi randomized HP level, the calculation being base HP + or - 10%.Again that's not something I've seen in many RPGsFun fact, the amount of gold you get is dependant on the HP. If the HP is base number+8% you'll also get Gold base+8%.
>>12057494six has excelent flow and atmosphere people who trash it simply got filtered by the bare minimum exploration and strategy required in the boss fights.
>>120574946 is around top 3 DQs. It has exploration, a class system and damn good music.It just filters people who actually don't want to play a game.
>>12057602>I didn't cheat, I saved myself time.So often you retards stumble this one step too far. You want to say "cheating is okay, so what I do is okay" but your little brains get heated and that claim somehow transforms into "it's not cheating to do what I do" because RETARDS can't keep the idea that cheating might be okay from being tainted by the popular pressure to consider cheating bad, as these two competing concepts flop around messily in their wishy-washy mush-filled minds.
I think if you're spending too long thinking and worrying about what background calculations are happening in RPGs, you should move on to different games. I like the spontaneity of encounters, and sure there's only a finite number of possibilities with every encounter, but I'd rather not be the one dwelling on to the point it's dictating my enjoyment.
>>12058537I'm not the one who needs to cope here. There's nothing hollow about it, it'd be hollow if I wasted more of my time mindlessly grinding away. I felt accomplished to take down the Dragonlord with the sleep strat, it was a grind of a fight, and it took less than a quarter of the time than it would have for me to grind another 4 levels.>>12058882You're the retards here getting heated because someone didn't spend as many hours grinding to beat a barebones RPG as you did.You can cry all you want over it, I don't see you beating DQ2 at levels 28/26/21 so you're just shitting yourself over your own stupidity. I mentioned the savestates as a matter of fact because of how bad the grinds are in these two games, and then the retard brigade came in and started whining because they think beating these games takes skill and try to make arguments that truly don't apply to DQ1 and 2.
>>12058716The randomized enemy HP is actually pretty neat. It kept battles from becomes too monotonous and me from autopiloting.
>>12059035Another cool thing is the enemy grouping that's also randomized, if you get the same enemy x4 the grouping might differ from the next time you get that same enemy x4>>12059028>>12058882Holy shit shut the fuck up, both of you. We just got two "savestate shit flinging" threads back to back that reached the bump limit, isn't that enouhg for you?! We all know this discussion is pointless as 95% people will not change their mind on the subject
>>12059043The discussion wouldn't have even happened if the brainless retards would have stayed on topic to the point of my original post, discussing which game has the worse grind, since I never knew anyone thought 1's was worse, but instead the insecure little babies want to start fighting because they think doing all that grind is some grand achievement.
>>12059028You did not beat the game, why not just use GameShark?
>>12059197I did beat it though, all I did was beat it at a lower level. Anyone could do it if they were lucky enough, the savestates just let me manipulate the rng to have that luck, basically the same as speedrunners do it.There's not a single thing to learn from grinding for hours on end in Rhone until you're arbitrarily the right level to beat the game, its just shit game design. Same shit goes for DQ1.Also for contrast, I've beaten the original Megami Tensei, no outside tools used, cause its just a solid game, however there's a point where you have to put 3 jewels into 3 holes and it has to be both the correct hole and correct order or else you get booted back to the start of the game. This is a perfectly acceptable spot to use savestates as it is just a dumb time waster, however since I was thoroughly enjoying the game I did the 15-20 minute run back 6 times before getting the correct combination, I was even resetting the game and re-entering my password just in case the failure flag would still be active otherwise. But would I condemn anyone for using savestates to pass it? Absolutely not, there's no reason for anyone to need to go through all that over and over again.
I'm gonna throw in the caveat that an RPG that's not grindy sometimes makes for a really good alternative to its contemporaries. Pic related is not the most balanced game (it gives you an item early on which basically breaks the difficulty and I found not using it makes it much more enjoyable) but it's easily the most fun 8-bit RPG I've been happy to replay multiple times because it streamlines so much of the process and gives you something that's pretty polished overall. They even made a Game Boy entry in this series and out of all the 8-bit RPGs I've played I would actually rank it very highly.
>>12059062How do you know DQ2 requires more grinding than 1 if you use savetates to bypass said grinding?That's right, you don't. You said you completed the game at lvl28 with savestates, the lowest I've beaten it is lvl 30 and I'm pretty sure it can be done lower than that. Wow, so much grinding. Such need for savestates.Some players really exagerate the difficulty of late game. Yeah, it will be harder if you play it stupid.
>>12059381I know it takes more grinding because I fucking experienced it, dipshit. I was enjoying 2 up until the Cave to Rhone and only put up with the bullshit grind there because of that, but then after getting past the infamous cave I had heard so much about, the game throws a second grind right after it. Game becomes fucking turbo ass, and there's no shame in just doing whatever it takes to wrap it up at that point.DQ1's average runtime is about 10 hours, and like 6 of that is just level grinding for the end. In DQ2 I spent a solid 5 hours grinding for the cave, its pretty fucking easy to see how much more grind would need to be done to finish the game.>the lowest I've beaten it is lvl 30 and I'm pretty sure it can be done lower than thatYeah, with big luck, which is what I gave myself to finish the game, since the devs couldn't design it better.
>>12059304I played the first game on NES in English recently. It is pretty horribly balanced with Minovsky just shutting down all boss fights, and a single crit from enemies usually being instant death because crit damage is so fucked, plus the rate at which characters miss is obscene, feels like every attack is a 50/50, but otherwise it was enjoyable, certainly better than DQ1 and 2.
>>12058716>>12059035Also helps make them feel like living things in the world instead of an army of clones.
>>12059469First game is pretty clunky, quite cute and funny, but the dungeon design is tedious, the encounter rate is high, and there's a pretty pointless hidden dungeon with no real rewards other than high experience gains, and the end game is also disappointing. The Game Boy game is something of a remake is a much, much more fleshed out game, as is the sequel. I'm playing through the SFC entry at the moment which weirdly is another remake of the first game, and it's better, but is probably inferior to other games available from the time. The second FC game just seemed to get so much right in terms of pacing and design even if it was a little on the easy side.
>>12059559The dungeons in the first Knight Gundam Legend are pretty bland, they're much more interesting in 2 and 3. 3 would be my favourite if it wasn't for spell useage being so limited. It also got rid of the cardass mini game but frankly 2 had perfected it already.
>>12059606You can play it from the main menu of 3, gonna have to use that one a bit more next time I play it. Actually had a lot of fun playing the minigame in 2 this time, even got a couple of cards I hadn't seen before.
>>12058845>>12058881The only thing filtering about 6 is how dogshit it is. The only positives I can give it are the SFC graphics and sound.>class systemWow it has the shitty Heartbeat class system where the jobs are hilariously unbalanced and emphasize grinding 100s of random encounters for job levels. What a positive. Glad they dumpstered it after 7.
>>12059865>Terry's boss battle is his map sprite, just very badly upscaledYeah, top-notch graphics.
>>12057198>I have no remorse about abusing savestates to finish both gamesAt that point I'd say play the later versions instead (SFC, Game Boy, etc.)
>>12059886>badly upscaledI'd say it's an excellent upscale. There are no mixles, aliasing, artifacts or whatnot.But it is a little lazy.
>>12059043>>12059494The grouping thing in 2 is something I'm not sure how I feel about. Just in regard to how some enemies will be considered a group and so you can't have your team focus fire a single one of them down, even if you tell everyone to hit that group, they can hit every single one separately and it ends up making battles needlessly harder. BUT it is different and maybe the intent is like a hoard of them are attacking you all at once, which is neat and I can't think of any other jrpg that does this outside of non-retro pokemon.
>>12059886Glad I played the remake
>>12056873Final fantasy always has all these mechanics but never really gives you a. Actual opportunity to utilize then (except V that game is actually good). Dragon quest is simple but actually requires you to understand the mechanics to beat the game
>>12060285Megami Tensei does this, though it was always a single group of 1-8 demons until SMT where there were a couple fixed encounters with two groups of 1-4 enemies, then SMT2 made it a natural part of random encounters.You can never single out a target and can only choose what group to attack.
>>12060690The grouping in DQ2 is definitely inspired by Wizardry, but it differs from it (that I suppose later SMT games might use). In Wizardry it's always each enemy type is his own group, whereas in DQ2 you could have a single enemy type x4 and 3 different types of grouping for that 1 enemy x4 encounter (1x4, 1+3, 1+1x2)
