Dragon Quest II Solo

It's high time I finally finish my account of finishing Dragon Quest II solo, without any kind of aid from the two ally characters.

When I left off around a year ago, I had made it all the way to Rhone, but was having difficulty progressing. Part of that was due to inadvertently accepting an unnecessary restriction that nearly cripples this challenge at the end stages. Namely, I wouldn't accept a death for my character without resetting.

It wasn't originally my intent when I started the challenge. But I started doing it to save gold, and by the time I got to where I didn't need to anymore, some twisted OCD-like behavior took over and I just kept at it. But it's not possible to keep from dying in Rhone, whether in a solo challenge or not, and getting experience becomes considerably more tedious with this restriction. Especially if you happen to be playing on a Famicom cartridge, where you have to put in a lengthy password whenever you restart.

The tediousness of it all caused me to defer playing this game for several months. I came back to it a couple of times during the year. At some point I finally made the decision to drop the death restriction, and finally began to move forward.

I was using as a guide the posted experience of a user on gamefaqs.com who had previously done this challenge. Based on his account, I assumed that Atlas would only be beatable with a critical hit, and would therefore be impractical to attempt without the Sword of Destruction. So at some point early in the grind, I dropped my Thunder Sword and fought Giants (called Gigantes in the original Japanese) until they dropped one. I actually found myself able to beat Atlas with it as early as level 37.

I forget the details of my first time through the boss run, but from the beginning of this challenge I had planned to make one major difference from the account that I read. Whereas he fought all the way through with the Sword of Destruction, and was lucky enough to finish Malroth without freezing at the wrong moment, I realized that this wasn't necessary. The Sword of Destruction is useful only because it gives you a much higher critical hit chance, but Malroth is immune to critical hits, so the sword becomes a liability at that point. But except for Hargon, none of the other final dungeon bosses respawn until you reset the game or turn it off. So as long as you don't do one of those things, once Atlas is dead, who is the only one that requires a critical hit to beat, you can go back, uncurse, and re-equip the Thunder Sword to fight the others.

I attempted to follow this strategy after beating Atlas for the first time, but after leaving my system on several days my wife accidentally unplugged the system. I didn't lose my level, because I kept getting passwords, but I knew I would have to go through the process again of getting the Sword of Destruction, beating Atlas, and getting the Thunder Sword again (I couldn't carry them simultaneously because I wasn't using inventory spaces outside of the main characters, and there just wasn't enough room).

Anyway, after this setback, I ended up taking another break for a few months. Then, closer to the end of the year, I think around the time I finished Twilight Princess on Gamecube, I moved the Famicom to my man-cave room and this game replaced Twilight Princess as my default not-in-the-TV-room game.

By the time I had successfully beaten Atlas again, I was in the lower- to mid-40 level range. When I finally made it to Malroth (I can't remember if I quite got to him before this point) I realized that I was going to want every stat boost I could get from leveling. Although I think I did try the fight each level, I'm pretty sure I didn't best him until a few tries after hitting level 50, which is the maximum level.

Taking inspiration from a video I saw on the Internet, I sought out the Light Sword for the final fight. It took a bit of a grind, because once I ditched the no-dying rule my gold reserves quickly went to zero and stayed there, but its Surround effect works on Malroth, and even though Surround in general is noticeably less effective in this game than every other Dragon Quest, any time Malroth misses you is a huge bonus. You can keep yourself alive for quite a bit against him with the Shield of Strength, as long as he doesn't put you to sleep, but it takes, if I remember, 4 or 5 hits to beat him, and if you have to take time to heal yourself, the odds of him casting Healall are very strong. A single miss from him can make the difference in the fight. If you're lucky enough to have two, your odds go way up. The tradeoff, unfortunately, is that with no backpacks I had to get rid of my helmet to make room for the other sword.

Incidentally, I did try fighting him with the Falcon Sword, which is the sword I actually used most of the time I was grinding. Against most enemies, it ends up the superior weapon. But against high-defense enemies, it loses its advantage. Two hits with the Falcon Sword consistently does noticeably less damage than one hit with the Thunder Sword against Malroth.

(I'd like to note that the same is true with Metal Babbles--the Falcon Sword can easily fail to kill one in two hits long after the Thunder Sword is guaranteed to kill one in one hit, even at level 50 if I remember right. There's only a very small window, I think, where the Falcon Sword is more effective than other weapons against Metal Babbles, but that window might actually be closed by the time or shortly after you can afford the Falcon Sword!)

I don't remember how many tries it took at level 50, but I think it was several, but I finally did it. I finished nearly a year after I had blogged about getting to Rhone, but at last it is done. And when I finally finished the last of my challenges for Dragon Quest II, I decided it was finally time to focus on finishing 100% on Dragon Quest III, which brings me up to my current endeavors.