Dragon Quest IV

I hit a major milestone on this game in my solo playthrough. I finally found the last of the small medals.

As I accomplished this, it set in for me that I could finally finish my 100% playthrough of this game, and I felt a shift in my focus. It has been my plan in to finish my solo run, then simultaneously do my miminalist run, my no-magic run, and a comparison of the NES, Famicom, and remake versions. After that ambitious project, I figured I'd finally move on to focus on replaying Dragon Quest V.

But now I'm feeling a surprisingly strong ambition to compress things further. Now that I found all the small medals here, I want to start looking for them in V. And now that I found them all, any potential for spoiling their locations in the PSX version is gone, so I feel like I want to start that version sooner than later as well.

I fear I could easily burn myself out too quickly to try to add these runs and DQV simultaneously to my in-process solo run, but I think I'm going to start off on it anyway. We'll see how it goes.

I'm pretty far into my solo run, anyway. It may not take more than a few weeks to finish it, even if I start juggling more games at once. My current save is at Gardenbur, tackling the nearby cave.

On my level 99 Famicom file, I collected the last medal and I've resumed the process of collecting one each of the game's weapons and armor to store in the vault. Some time back I re-collected an iron claw after having sold it. On my last play session I re-collected a cypress stick. Surprisingly, neither of those items can be repurchased if you get rid of it, so you have to find and fight enemies that drop them. It took me exactly 100 enemies to get the drop for the cypress stick.

I suspect it will take me a couple of hours to repurchase everything I can for 100%. Then I'll check the rest of my equipment against equipment lists on the internet and see if I'm missing anything else. But I think I have all of the hard to find pieces; if I'm not wrong there I should be able to declare my full playthrough done within a couple of hours of game time.