Dragon Warrior II

Dragon Warrior II came out just a few months after the original Dragon Warrior- remember when that was a thing? But it's incredible how much improvement was made in such a short span of time. The original Dragon Warrior was a very forgettable boilerplate RPG that featured one-on-one turn based combat and relatively nothing in the story department. You find a new town, then you grind, then you go to a dungeon for some fetch quest, rinse and repeat. Dragon Warrior II does follow this pattern somewhat, but gives enough options to not feel like a linear game. It's set in the same land as the original Dragon Warrior, 100 years in the future as the heirs of King Loto set about to defeat a new evil, encountering a few chararacters and environments from the original Dragon Warrior along the way. The change from one character to three in a party opened up some new strategies that would become commonplace in future RPGs, and this is complimented by fighting multiple enemies at the same time. The system isn't quite perfect- each time you meet a new playable character they are woefully underleveled and never really quite catch up as the game progresses. At least the characters are varied enough that they each add their own unique element to battles- Lorasia, a basic warrior; Moonbrook, the much weaker mage; and Cannock, who's a little in between. Complimenting the huge progress in combat are the great strides taken to improve moving about the overworld. Now there's not just one save location in the whole land, but one in every town, which made exploring the world much more fun and easy. In addition the party attains a boat early on, allowing for plenty of exploration right from the get-go. I realize that a lot of the things I'm praising the game for are standard tropes of RPGs now, and honestly I didn't find this game particularly great compared with modern games- it just never felt like a chore, but that's really because I pulled double logging duty, playing the game while watching some seasons of tv on Netflix. It is however easy to see Dragon Warrior II's importance in the history of gaming- there were major improvements over Dragon Warrior and hopefully this continues with the last of the Game Boy Color ports I play, the class-based Dragon Warrior III.