What's the best option between the Shield of Strength and the Falcon Sword?
I know the Shield gives you free Healmore casts but I haven't actually had much MP troubles in this game so far - that said it could always change I guess.
Sword seems like it'd be a nice upgrade for the Prince who's been a piss party member for most of the game at this point.

I always have a Shield of Strength per character (even if they don't actually wear it) by the end game so use for free healing. You'll need it.

The Falcon Sword is best weapon available for the Prince of Cannock (except for bosses and a couple of enemies with high defenses, in which case the spear is still the best) so it's important as well

Eventually you'll probably get them all even if it means backtracking to the shop so don't worry about it, but right now, I'd prioritize the weapon

>>11808973 (OP)
shield is op, like the other anon says by the end of the game everyone has one when I play

what is the best, least grindy version to play NES or SNES?

>>11809139
The best version is NES
SNES is "less grindy" indeed, the game is a LOT easier. But the graphical presentation is really nice. Fan translation still has some glitches though, protip don't go beyond 65k Gold if you don't want the lava dungeon to glitch out, buy some stuff to put in storage if you have to.

Seems about as good a place as any to ask but does anyone know if there's a way to revert the EXP and Gold boost in DW3 NES without applying the retranslation patch?

>>11809286
No, but I can probably whip that up in just a few minutes. I'll check it out tomorrow and let you know. I did play that deloclization and wasn't found of the re-translation myself indeed

>>11808973 (OP)
Playing it now myself, at the very end of the game, levels are 27, 24, 21, and shields are by far the better option. Falcon swords are still doing ass damage and just not worth it. Yet maybe, maybe later they will be better. Atlas is kicking my ass either way, though.

>>11809359
> Atlas is kicking my ass either way, though.

You should have the Thunder Sword for the Prince of Midenhall at this point, if not you should consider going back to the cave to rhone to look for it

As for the Prince of Cannock, switching back to the Iron Spear is better for the bosses at the end. The Falcon Sword is better for random encounters though because often times the first hit will finish off an enemy and the second hit can hit another enemy, and more often than not against random encounters you're having a higher dmg ouput with the Falcon Sword than with the Iron Spear. It's only against single targets with high defense that the Falcon Sword loses its appeal.

>>11809371
>You should have the Thunder Sword for the Prince of Midenhall at this point
I do, but it only does 29-50 damage to Atlas. And half the time he cheats by ambushing me and getting a free turn, which instantly kills someone.

>>11809414
Yeah you have to deal with it, he has pretty high defense. If you can make it through the first couple turns and use buffs/de-buffs it helps a lot. Buffs-debuffs last the entire fight in DQ2 (it's starting with 3 that bosses learnt the art of cancelling them). The max enemy HP in 2 is 255 so in the late game they make up for that with other means like high defense or OHKO attacks. If all else fails go back to the last room of the cave to safely grind a couple levels

I got a dragon potion. When is the best time to use it?

>>11809427
I can't do it. It's fucking impossible. He attacks twice and before I can heal he attacks the same guy again and it's just dead. Fuck this, jfc. I've tried like 10 times so far and it's shit RNG every time.

>>11808973 (OP)
Isn't it crazy Pokemon stole the revisiting previous game's overworld in the sequel premise from this game?

>>11809919
I know your pain anon.
As a kid I had DW2 on NES, and after I finally got through the Cave to Rhone I thought the misery was over. I was stuck trying to survive the boss gauntlet going into the final battle for about two months. My morning routine before going to school was usually 'get dressed, eat breakfast, attempt to get past the gauntlet, leave game on if still alive by the time I had to go to school'. Finally one day RNG rolled in my favor and I made it to the big boss himself. It was a brutal battle that left me with only the MC alive and barely hanging on, and no Leaf of the World Tree to use since I used it in the gauntlet getting there. With victory at last, I headed out to celebrate.
And then the game dumped the final boss on me who promptly 1-shot me. Welcome to Dragon Warrior 2 bitch.

>>11809637
Why have I never heard of this item before

>>11810121
> no Leaf of the World Tree to use since I used it in the gauntlet getting there.

You can easily and quickly get another one

1) make sure you save at the priest in Rhone (probably already done)
2) use the teleporter to go back to Beran. From there, you can do whatever the fuck you want and as long as you don't talk to another priest using a wing of wyvern will bring you back to Rhone
3) From Beran using Repel you can get to the world tree with an average of between 0 and 2 random encounters and then use a wing of the wyvern there

You may also use this technic to get a wizard's ring at the lottery if needed

>>11810264
It's supposedly even more rare than the Mysterious Hat (1/256 on a single enemy), but I got it once in the NES version too (unlike the Mysterious Hat which I'd swear, like some others claim, was literally impossible to drop on NES until I checked the game code and saw nothing to prove that).

>>11809637
You can use it any number of times you want. Also loading the save you back at the last priest you saw and not where you actually saved so it's not very useful.

>>11809919
Well then you probably need to grind more.

There are two other possible tactics I didn't mention: use cursed items like the Sword of Destruction and the Gremlin Armor and hope you get lucky with the cursing. Some people swear it works for them but others say it's not worth it, I never tried it myself.

The second one are OHKO spells. I can't remember if the Cannock's Sacrifice works on bosses, but the Princess's Chance spell definitely does. One time I was against one of those late game bosses and only the princess was left with little hp, she was going to die on the next turn guaranteed. I had her cast Chance and she made the boss disappear, after dying to a mob and coming back to the castle I realized the boss wasn't coming back and I laughed my ass off.

However both Sacrifice and Chance are learnt at higher levels than you currently are so again you probably just need to go back to the last room of Rhone and grind a bit, it won't take that long

>>11810019
Pokemon owes so much of its existence to Dragon Quest. The tale goes that the idea for trading Pokemon came from Tajiri being unable to get a Magical Hat in DQ2 but his friend somehow got two and he was wishing his friend could give one of them to him.

>>11810597
>Tajiri being unable to get a Magical Hat in DQ2 but his friend somehow got two

Fun fact: this is impossible in the NES version. The game checks if you already own the item that's dropping and if you do, you get Gold instead (with the only exception being consumables like Herbs etc).
This was removed in the later versions of the game however (starting with the SNES ones) where it's possible to get multiple of the same item drop, but they're obvioulsy not talking about those versions since in those the game hands out the Hat in a chest.

It's possible that the Famicom version allows for multiple of the same drop however and that this was changed in the US version, I should check on that to make sure; but I'm thinking his friend probably just hacked the password system.

>>11810608
>It's possible that the Famicom version allows for multiple of the same drop however and that this was changed in the US version, I should check on that to make sure;

I'm just checking right now using the dissassembly of the US version and comparing it to the JPN ROM, and this is interesting actually: the code for this *is* there for in the JPN version, or least it's supposed to be, BUT the US version added at least 10 more bytes of code, for instance adding a flag for "there was an item drop" which looks like a failsafe.
I'd have to investigate further to make sure but this looks like a hint that this routine *may* not work as intended in the JPN version which *may* just open the possibility for multiples of the same item drop.

>>11808973 (OP)
It's fucked up how this game is nearly unplayable blind just because the english translation fucks up the single most important hint in the game.

>>11811142
What?

>>11811154
The game never tells you that the Echoing Flute is used to discern when you're in a location with a Crest.
It gets even worse because
>On an island, in a tower, in a chamber remote
Can easily be read as one single location rather than three separate ones.

>>11811259
>The game never tells you that the Echoing Flute is used to discern when you're in a location with a Crest.

It literally tells you in the first screenshot of that collage

>Can easily be read as one single location rather than three separate ones.
Only if you can't into english

>>11811283
The first screenshot just tells you to use the flute in a specific place with no indication of what effect it'll have, you have no reason to assume it's any more relevant to the Crests than the plethora of other one-off key items in the game.
And you're telling me you really can't imagine how anyone would find the wording of the locations confusing? There is literally a tower on an island in the game already, why would you not assume you're supposed to find a remote chamber where you're meant to play the flute? Hell for all you know the tower might even be a dungeon you can't access yet.
The Japanese text umambiguously tells you the flute locates Crests while the English version makes it stupidly cryptic and the only way you're gonna figure it out is through hindsight.

>>11811295
>literally unplayable blind

>>11811398
It definitely makes the Flame Crest a piece of shit if you don't know about it.
>dude just examine every tile in the shrine... except not really there's an invisible wall that leads outside which is where the crest actually is and if you're just looking around casually based on the NPC hint you'll never know it's therew

>>11811426
Thats not exclusive to the english version

>>11811398
>literally beat the game blind as an 8 year old
skill issue

>>11811429
Let me break it down for you
>play the japanese version
>get to fire shrine
>play the flute because you know what it does
>now you know the crest is in that screen, so when you run out of tiles to examine inside the shrine itself you start looking for the walkable walls that lead you outside because there's nowhere else it could be

>play the english version
>get to fire shrine
>don't play the flute cause you don't know wtf it does
>suddenly you have a colossal amount of options for things you could do to get the crest, including entering one of the portals in the shrine that take you to totally different areas
Not saying you couldn't eventually stumble across the correct solution after exhausting all other possibilities, but it's a far less elegant little "puzzle" when you don't have all the info you need to make it work before it becomes extremely tedious.

>>11811259
There is a guy in one of the towns who gives you a clue about the echoing flute.

What the fuck is this bitch's problem?
That is a priceless historical artifact!

>>11812073
>I know what I have

>>11811854
This is what the US version came with. On top of another map which tells you where the flute is.

and since I'm sure you're going to find some retarded way to try and turn this against the game, the vast majority of 8 and 16 bit RPGs released in the US (and A-RPGs released in Europe) came bundled with mini or complete walkthroughs

>>11812293
Wow they had absolutely 0 faith in players huh

>>11812301
That whole situation makes me sad. I played with those guides on hand as a kid, and I loved it. I never even thought to wonder whether using the guides might be cheating or whether cheating in that way might be bad. It's sad that I can't go back to that ability to enjoy things so stupidly yet so well. It's also sad that now that I've done it, the games' secrets have been spoiled for me so I can't play them in a hardcore way even now because my memory is too good. It's sad that the publishers usually didn't even try to encourage kids to at least take a crack at winning without the guides. A few games did this - I think maybe Link to the Past had a hint book that was labeled as something you shouldn't look at unless you were stuck, and there was a guide to red jewels in Illusion of Gaia that was presented that way too? Maybe? But usually they'd just tell you everything and expect you to have fun being an idiotic casual cheater. Which lots of us did, somehow.

>>11812073
That doesn't mean she knows what it is or has a use for it. Maybe it doesn't look like a good sword.

>>11811283
> Only if you can't into english
Nothing about that text implies it is multiple locations. Stop being arrogant.

>>11812323
Its ironic. As a kid, information about games was scarce, and I would salivate over ever tidbit of info I could get. These days, social media algorithms are begging to tell me all of a new game's secrets the moment it comes out, and I go extremely far out of my way to avoid seeing any of them.

So this is something I just noticed after basically the whole game's passed me by.
Defence? Why the fuck is it spelled 'Defence' if these games were never released in Europe?

>>11812485
Even if it didn't putting two and two together with the other clues make it clear.

Also claiming that it's a "translation issue" is incorrect

>>11812515
Thee mean thee never noticed the translation was going for a Shakespeare style?

>>11812515
Since it's a spell that decreases defense I'm pretty sure you're literally de-fencing the enemies.

THE shittiest enemy of all time FUCKYOUFUCKYOUFUCKYOU

>>11812713
Run anon, run.

>>11812323
>It's sad that the publishers usually didn't even try to encourage kids to at least take a crack at winning without the guides. A few games did this - I think maybe Link to the Past had a hint book that was labeled as something you shouldn't look at unless you were stuck, and there was a guide to red jewels in Illusion of Gaia that was presented that way too?
NES Zelda was like that. The hint pamphlet they added to the North American release was sealed with a sticker, and said something to the effect of "use if you must but if you believe in your strength you won't need too"
Hint books included with computer games tended to be written like that, too. Wizardry, et al.
I recall at least one was printed in a way that required a red-colored cellophane decoder to make the text visible so you could read specific hints without accidentally reading other ones on the same page.

I was looking up art of this game and who the fuck is this?
Is it supposed to be the Prince of Midenhall?

>>11814853
Looks like it, see pic

>>11809919
idk if you're still stuck on this but Atlas always attacks the same person once he picks a target.
The best course of action is to defend with both mages and attack with the Hero in the first turn, then once you see who he attacks just keep healing them.
If the prince or the princess are targeted just defend with one and heal with the other until the Hero kills Atlas.
If the Hero is targeted you should defend with him until you get lucky and heal after Atlas attacks so you start the turn on full HP, in this scenario you want the non-healing mage to use their buffs or debuffs (ideally you have princess of Moonbrooke using Surround and Defence but she's also the better healer of the two so it's up to you)

>>11814668
>red-colored cellophane decoder

That's awesome. All these games should have been packaged with that mentality. A sticker or special envelope and a "hey at least try it yourself first" label on a hint book are good enough though. And separately sold guidebooks are fine because the player, by default, won't buy them. Not sure how the likes of Nintendo Power could deal with this problem though. Spoiling things is fundamental to a publication like that, and it wouldn't make sense to say "don't subscribe to us until you tried all the games on your own first".

>>11814853
Japanese people never got around to reading that part in Arthurian legend or Tolkien or whatever where it was specified that most of the heroic knights in those stories had in fact experienced puberty (those parts of the manuscripts got sake dripped on them at the importer's office and became illegible)

>>11815942
I don't remember if age is ever stated in 1 or 2, but in both 3 and 4 the protagonist is explicitly stated to be 16, so I think puberty is expected to have happened already. It's just a stylistic choice, perhaps because they knew these games were intended for children and would relate more to manga illustrations of children.

>>11815965
By the time of the SFC remake they were portraying the DQ2 protagonists as taller and less childlike than the original Famicom version. The same happened with DQ3 and it's remake.

Dragon quest 4 already had a taller, more grown up looking protagonist on the Famicom, so actually I suspect the shift in how DQ protagonists were depicted coincided with the time skip in Dragon Ball that led to Goku becoming tall, which happened shortly after the release of DQ3.

>>11815984
Which is ironical considering gameplay wise this version is for babies

Frankly I think I am at my limit this game is beyond bullshit.

>>11818050
why not just grind some more

>>11818050
Sit tight in the first turns until you have full buff-debuff and then hope you get lucky with his healing. Cannock should use the spear (not the falcon blade) if you want him to actually help to hit after the de/buff. But you do need to be at an acceptable level, like Hero between 26-29

the old guy keeps telling me to come back in a day or two because the Water Flying Cloth isn't ready. What am I missing?

>>11815984
The decline of Toriyama art.

>>11818912
You need to save and load that save (or password in the Famicom version)

you can abuse this to get another Water Flying Cloth if you go get the "ingredients" again while he's making one

>>11818923
I've been grinding for a week already, wanting for the cloth to be ready. what do you mean with saving/loading? I'm playing with emulator btw

>>11818932
You need to go see a king or priest to save, hit reset, and load the save.
The idea is that when the NPC says "a day or two" he means IRL days and expects the player to save when he's done for the day and load his save the next day.

>>11818936
it worked, thanks.

>>11818936
This game is so freaking great. What a game.

>>11815942
Doesn't matter because the other influence is shounen manga and aimed at Japanese kids

>>11811154
Do not imply the hints in the game are that helpful. Several key areas aren't named AND even if you guess the right location you'll have to do something weird like walk through the walls to a hidden area.

>>11818995
The game established early on what a Monolith is when you have to meet up with the old guy south east of Midenhal. Then it's only a matter of putting two and two (or one and one) together to figure out that the "fire monolith" is the one which has fire in it.
As for going outside of what looks like the map's boundary, it's only natural once you've indentified the monolith or know something is there after using the flute, and having secret-ish stuff on the outskirts of areas was already an RPG trope at that point (DQ1 did the same for instance)

>>11808973 (OP)
I can now answer my own question - yes they are worth it get them even though I only got 2 and had to swap the Princess's to the Hero to beat the game

>>11821458
>lvl 27

Good job.

>>11821461
Thanks, by the end I was basically running from every random encounter every time I wiped, pretty sure I'd have hit the 40s if I actually fought every battle on the way to the castle each time.
>>11809297
Any word on this? Would love to play with the original translation.

>>11821564
>Any word on this? Would love to play with the original translation.

I had a look and I was hoping it would be as easy as copy pasting a few bytes here and there from the reloc, but sadly it's not that simple; I'll have to get back to it

>>11821587
Ahh it's ok I don't wanna give you any unnecessary work.
I'll just play with the delocalization, doesn't seem like it's that bad all things considered.

>>11821650
I'm interested in doing it though. If I manage to do it the save files should be compatible btw so you can start the game with any other version.

>>11812073
Literally weaker than some of the swords people sell. Hell, isn't it as strong as a sledgehammer or is that only the SNES version onward? That's a common ass weapon.

>>11821458
Pour one out for Elani.

>>11824063
You only get that sword about halfway through the game, and technically it can be missed completely as entering the Dragonlord's old castle is fully-optional. The remakes at least give it a little more use by letting the Cannock kid wield it.

>>11821564
This guy was an unexpected plot twist, and story bits like this or the other descendant of Erdrick being a coward in hiding really elevates DQ2's story and make it feel more grounded.

>>11824063
It was lost in a dank cave for god(dess) knows how long since the original Erdrick disappeared, then remained in an even danker mustier ruin for another 100 years after that. I think the in-lore explanation is that it's worn and dull.

I hope in the HD2D version they put in a side-quest where you can fix the Erdrick's Sword.

>>11824303
>the other descendant of Erdrick being a coward in hiding
Isn't that just the King of Tantegel? I thought the DQ1 hero had no interest in ruling that kingdom as he wanted his own instead and so this King is unrelated to Erdrick's blood line (in-law at best).

>>11808973 (OP)
it may not be obvious but the buff / debuff defense spells stack.

in other words you can cast Increase more than once and do the same thing with Defense (on bosses that are vulnerable). if you hit Atlas 4 times with Defense, he'll be weak enough that even Moonbrooke can do a few points of damage with a physical attack.

Atlas is also vulnerable to Surround (or the Light Sword) and the miss chance to that will stack with the dodge chance from the Clothes of Hiding so he'll whiff about 3 attacks out of 8. and because of the way damage is calculated, definitely give Midenhall and Cannock their stronger weapons rather than the Falcon Sword for boss fights.

critical hits or OHKO effect from Chance are impossible in the fight with Malroth because he's a dick. grind more levels and good luck!

>>11825141
I'm pretty sure I read in game he's another cousin of them but I couldn't tell you who says that

the PCs in DQ2 are all descended from Princess Gwaelin and therefore King Lorik, so they'd still be cousins in the "my fourth cousin six times removed" sense or whatever, but the king in Tantagel might have zero DNA from Erdrick.

or maybe their royal lines intertwined in the centuries between games, that was common enough in Europe and we presumably have no way of knowing.

I don't see anything in the JP script about the king of Ladatorm being cousin so I wonder where I got that idea...

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/msx/934784-dragon-quest-ii/faqs/48108