It's becoming increasingly apparent that I won't be able to update this blog as regularly as I had originally envisioned. Life is just plain too busy. But as long as I have things to write about I'll surely keep returning to it.
I've been plugging away on my Dragon Quest II challenges. The Moonbrooke continent definitely showed a divergence in the difficulty of my play-throughs, as my solo game got dramatically more challenging and my no-equipment play-through actually got quite a bit easier, and surprisingly not far off from my remake playthroughs in difficulty. Although the no-equipment challenge was harder to start off, once you gain your allies and their magic spells, your characters begin to perform surprisingly well compared to fully equipped characters.
I quickly encountered an unfortunate problem with choosing the Famicom version for the solo challenge: in the original Famicom version, with no battery save, the password does not record the state of your party. That means that every time you start the game back up with a password, your party is at full health--including the party members that were deliberately killed off! So I had to come up with a system that would result in them dying without otherwise impacting the game or challenge.
The swamp kill wasn't an option because there are no swamps near Moonpita/Hamlin/Moonahan. I resolved to enter battles and have my hero defend while my unequipped, level-1 allies would attack until the enemies had killed them, then run away from the battle and return to the town, and stay at the inn. This brings the game to a state identical to if they had stayed dead and I stayed at an inn. In general, this is identical to what it otherwise would have been, although if I stay at an inn before getting my password it sometimes results in some wasted gold. It's an annoyance, particularly since I have to frequently reset to avoid losing half my gold, but it's one I'll have to deal with to preserve the integrity of the challenge.
I have learned some interesting things along the way. Some of the English town names have been changed for the Android version. Hamlin is now Moonahan, which seems appropriate, because Moon was clearly a part of the Japanese town name, which is in the vicinity of and associated with Moonbrooke. Lianport is now Rippleport. The Japanese romanji for that is Rupagana, so it seems to reference the consonant sounds in Japanese a bit.
I also discovered something that floored me. There's some dialog in the game that I have never seen before, despite numerous playthroughs, and I strongly suspect its existence is not widely known. I found it as a direct result of the solo challenge; there are two NPC's in Rupagana/Lianport/Rippleport whose dialog in the Famicom version changes if you don't have the princess with you (i.e. if she's dead). I confirmed that this is true in both the Famicom and NES versions, although in both cases the NES dialog has been censored to something completely different.
First off is a man in the middle of town. In the NES he says "I have nothing to say to thee. That's right, nothing at all." In the Japanese version, he actually is drunkenly hitting on the princess, inviting her to have a drink. I think that xloto's translation on Gamefaqs.com is slightly off (though I'm not an expert in this and I could be wrong). He rendered it as starting out "nice behind" or something like that, but I think in this case "behind" was actually referring to the girl behind you. In either case, His dialog is truncated to only the first line if the princess is dead. And this is also true on the NES! He just says, "I have nothing to say to thee."
Of perhaps greater note to Dragon Quest fans is the woman in the lower left corner of town. In the Japanese, she pays a compliment to the princess, while on the NES, she says something bizarre about someone who can turn princes to tadpoles (although it's not entirely clear who she's referring to--no one in the town is otherwise implied to have any supernatural powers). What caught me off guard is what she said when the princess was not there. She asks you if you want a puff-puff.
When I saw that it took me off guard. Xloto's guide on gamefaqs.com mentions that this appears to be the only Dragon Quest game that doesn't have a puff-puff reference, which he found remarkable, and I certainly hadn't seen one on my first playthrough. It turns out the reference is there, in the exact same place you see it in the remakes, but you only see it in the Famicom version if the princess is dead.
Now, what was even more fascinating to me was to see this character's dialog in the NES version when the princess was dead, because she does in fact say something completely different: "Dost thou think I am pretty enough to be a queen?" If you answer yes, she says "Perhaps the great Prince of Cannock thinks so too." If you say no, she says "What's wrong!"
I'm sure there is many a Dragon Warrior II fan out there that has never seen this line of dialog, and it floored me to discover it.
That's my main story for this entry. I've progressed all my files to having explored Alefgard and met the Dragonlord's great grandson. I've had a few setbacks. My Super Famicom file got erased just before getting the Cloak of Wind, and I had to replay it up to that point. More recently, my daughter was playing with my camera and erased some of my recent passwords for my Famicom game, so I have to redo some of it. But overall, I'm still moving forward where and when I can, and enjoying it.
I've also been playing a bit of Dragon Quest VII, VIII, and IX on the side, advancing my characters on my existing files to learn what skills are available in the games. Particularly I've played IX, because it's available to play on the bus, on lunch at work, etc. I'm learning more about which spells and abilities persist through the series. It's all good.
Anyone who hasn't seen it needs to Google Nintendo Switch (formerly known as the NX). Dragon Quest XI is in development for that system, and the system looks very interesting.
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