More Dragon Questing

I guess I've taken myself down the rabbit hole with Dragon Quest now. It's all I can think about in most of my free time.

I've chipped away a little bit at Warcraft III: The Frozen Throne. But most of my free time has been spent with Dragon Quest III, both the Super Famicom and Game Boy versions.

I finally beat Shin-Ryu several days ago. Once my sage was levelled up to normal endgame levels I was able to do it with her and my hero, fighter, and soldier. My soldier spammed the sage's stone while my sage buffed and my other two attacked, with an occasional supplemental sage stone from my fighter. It went surprisingly well. However, when I finished the fight, somewhere over 40 turns, I was chided by the boss on how long it took me. I realized soon after that the boss sets a target turn time of 35 turns to beat.

I thought I could beat that with a refinement of my strategy and my existing characters, but I did a little more levelling anyway before coming back. Last night, it took me longer than I intended. I had a few bad luck runs against the boss and even more mishaps on the way to it. But I finally won again, this time in 25 turns.

Well, when you beat it, you can choose between 3 wishes. On of them, to my surprise, adds a brief new story element to the game, which is the one I picked. I have learned, however, that if you want to choose a second wish, you have to beat the fight even faster. Fortunately, the threshold for the second wish is 25 turns, which I already know I can hit (but even if you meet that threshold before making a wish, you only get one wish per fight). Apparently the third wish takes a higher threshold of 15 turns, which I really wasn't sure I could hit with my current party and strategy.

But I've been both analyzing and researching the fight this morning, and I think it's doable with my current party and a little luck, bolstered by some targeted seeding. I was originally just going to focus my efforts on grinding my party to level 99, but now I'm detoured from that while I try to beat Shin-Ryu in the target time, which I think I can do much sooner.

Meanwhile, while I'm out and about, I've been replaying the GBC version. When I was doing all three together some time back, my GBC cart basically died. Someone looked at it and said something was wrong with one of the chips and the repair would be more expensive than a replacement. So I wasn't able to finish that file. I decided to start over. Actually, it was starting the GBC one that inspired me to finish my SFC file, rather than the other way around.

After working to fill out the enemy list on Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, I was thinking about the in-game bestiaries for the Dragon Quest games, which all remain unfinished on my game files. Dragon Quest III for the GBC, as near as I can tell, is the first Dragon Quest game that features any kind of bestiary. It doesn't technically have one by design, but the monster medal list still basically functions as one. So I thought I'd fill it out by collecting the monster medals.

My thought is to try and collect one of each non-boss before finishing the game normally. I've now made it up to Dharma and have all the medals up to there, excluding the ones in Kandar's cave. I managed to get a medal by chance for the first Kandar fight (I don't know if he has two medals or not) but not his henchmen. 

I decided to get myself the whistle ability before getting the monsters in the cave, since the encounter rate there is quite low. As it turns out, I had my thief and jester characters learn Whistle and MapMagic at about the same time, so I've taken a brief break to make sure I have all the treasures up to this point as well. I've been playing with a thief to that end, but now that she has the ability I'll take her out of the party for normal fights. I learned online that any successful steal from a thief negates the chance of getting a medal, so from here on out I'll keep her in Aliahan during medal hunting sessions.

Every day I'm thinking of the replays of Dragon Quest IV, V, and VI that are in my queue, but not quite there yet. I've also booted up Dragon Quest IX, where I finally got a Silver Orb from Baramos, and, consequently, a Sage's Stone. Progressing on the postgame on DQIII also makes me want to revisit VIII's postgame and try again to unlock VII's. It's too much. I'm on the verge of overwhelming myself with thoughts of these games, but I'm relishing my actual play time when it finally comes time every day.

I guess it means I have stuff to look forward to in the coming months.

And, Back to Dragon Quest

 I beat Dragon Quest V for my second time ever about a week ago.

Dragon Quest V is easily one of the best games I've played in the last decade. It left a bigger impression on me, for instance, than Castlevania: Symphony of the Night, which I recently extolled in this blog. Besides that game, the only other games that I've played in the last ten years that have been remotely comparable have been other Dragon Quest games. Dragon Quest VII and XI have left comparable impressions on me.

I've wanted to replay Dragon Quest V for a long time. I wanted to give it a little breathing room after finishing it the first time, especially since I wanted to keep playing through the series. But I never could get in in my queue with the proper focus until I finished my 100% file on Dragon Quest IV. Before that I tried twice to restart it, but ended up both times not going past the first two towns.

This time around, I was determined to push through to the end. I had a long lull after my basement flood and the subsequent, drawn-out repair process, but this was the first game I resumed. The amount of time needed for translation made it a slow process, which caused me to put the game on the back burner a few times, but I ultimately made it through some seven or eight months after starting.

Now, in the weeks before finishing, I had been thinking a lot about taking a break from Dragon Quest for a bit, and focusing on other games, some of which I had written about here. But I seem to have triggered something upon completing it that is affecting me quite the opposite.

Having finished it my second time, I allowed myself near full access to guides and other online resources. I've determined what is needed for a satisfactory 100% game file, and I've done research into missable items and such. I've started trying to find answers to questions I had after perusing message boards, and in doing so I found the answer to one question that has been asked several times on the message boards I've browsed. The answer hadn't been presented on those boards, and I couldn't find it in English resources. But I ultimately found it on a Japanese wiki and was able to document the answer myself on those boards.

Somewhere in this process, my zeal for the Dragon Quest games has been stirred up quite a bit. I'm torn between going for my 100% game file on V, finishing off my SNES Dragon Quest III, doing my Dragon Quest IV runs that I'd put off in favor of playing V, and moving on to VI. I can't seem to make myself stop thinking about it. I spent the weekend working on III, but I think I'm gonna start grinding on III in the mornings and working on V at other times.

Unfortunately, despite the care I thought I took, I ended up not having some of the missable items in my inventory on my last playthrough of V. It turns out there are about half a dozen ordinary items that you can't get back if you didn't hold on to them. I never threw any away or sold any items on this run, so I think I must have lost them in the transition between generations. I had meant to test if Bianca and Bolongo retain their inventories when you re-recruit them, but I didn't write down what they had and I forgot during the months I was waiting on flood repairs. But since I was missing items, I think that the items in their respective inventories must not have been retained. I also found a Japanese site discussing some of the missables that seemed to suggest as much.

Regardless of how I lost them, I'll have to play through from the beginning again to get full completion. I had originally thought to defer that for a time, but that thought was surprisingly short-lived. I guess I'm not done with this game, even for the time being. I plan to start my new game file tonight. I'm also going for all the monsters and leveling everyone up full, so it will be quite the endeavor. But I won't keep it as my main game. When my enthusiasm starts to wear, as it surely will, I'll keep it as a game to fill in between others that I'll invariably want to play. If I keep this blog going, I'll probably mention it here and there.

But regardless of my progress on V and other games, I'm hoping to beat Shin-Ryu on Dragon Quest III in the coming weeks. More on that to come, hopefully.