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General Chat / Crystalgate's DW III logs and whatever

« on: February 17, 2010, 07:57:21 PM »

Dragon Warrior III

Part 1: I've previously given up on the NES version, but I figured I'd give the GBC version a chance.

Anyway, backstory. Once upon a time there was a hero who went out to fight a demonlord. Like the player controlled heroes, he believed in wandering around randomly a lot before engaging the target. At some point he had a talk with his wife. She brought up the subject of their child. In response the hero starts talking about how defeating the demonlord requires sacrifices. I take it he wasn't to pleased about having a child. Eventually he makes it to his destination.

The battle against the demonlord takes place on the top of a volcano. He does a lot of jumping around, dodging fireballs and sometimes even fires some fireballs himself. Several times he manages to jump from one side of the hole to another which is impressive since the hole is at least 50m wide. Finally, the demonlord hovers above the hole and the hero decides to jump at him. The maneuver succeeds, but has the side effect of transferring a lot of momentum to the demonlord, momentum which was needed to get him to the other side. Down he goes for a hot bath.

Some years later and the hero's child reaches not quite adulthood yet, but run around with swordhood. The child hears a disembodied voice calling.

I decide to try a female and name her Lia. Let's see if the GBC version will refrain from calling her a son.

The disembodied voice tells her he will ask some questions and that she should answer honestly. This is the personality generator. I have another idea, I just pick the personality I want and consult el-FAQo. Valiant sounds good. The disembodied voice agrees, in fact so much he twice tells her that she's basically shitting rainbows. After that the heroine awakens.

Lia's mother is standing at the bed telling her to get up. It's time for her to talk with the king. Yay! Even more yay, Lia's mother does unlike the NES version not call her daughter a son.

The king does call her the late hero's son though, but retracts that statement with "I mean daughter". I don't believe that was a honest mistake. In any case, the king tells Lia the demonking is still alive and she's all "I wanna follow my father's footstep" while the king is all "no, skip the falling into a volcano part". The king suggests that she gets some companions, with added firepower she may actually kill the demonlord instead of getting killed. A good idea since Lia is a girl and therefore can't just impregnate someone before committing suicide. The king also tells her not to mention the fact that the demonking is alive to anyone in order to avoid panic and finally gives her 50 gold to get some equipment. That's almost enough for two clubs!

Lia sets of to get her companions. She skips the preset clowns and registers her own companions. Turns out every companion gets five seeds to distribute among the stats and I can choose to distribute them manually or have them randomly distributed which is probably gonna include a lot of fighters with intelligence seeds fun. I choose to skip that fun.

I make one fighter named Harl who I may change into a soldier later. I distribute two of the seeds to strength, and the rest to vitality and agility. That makes him a macho which I can buy. Next I make a cleric named Mye who I may or may not change into a fighter later. She gets two strength seeds and three intelligence seeds. Apparently she's a romanticist. The third character is a dealer named Kara. I don't care to much about her seed distribution, but puts them on strength and vitality. For that she becomes a silly person. To bad she wasn't a man and had one of the seeds on agility instead, then she wouldn't have to be silly and could instead have been a macho. Anyway, last I make a wizard named Seth, who may change into a cleric or a thief later. He gets intelligence and vitality seeds, in other words, he's a coward. Yeah, that's what you get for being bright and healthy!

I pick the fighter, the cleric and the dealer. My experience is that wizards aren't to strong early on and I thought the dealer will make money grinding faster.

Anyway, I get a club, grind ten gold and get another club. I also talk with the townspeople. Turns out that not telling about the demonlord is in vain, everyone and their grandma seems to know about it.

After five battles the dealer manages to once find 20% extra gold. That's makes 4% extra gold if that keeps up. I admit the dealer may have been unlucky and that that the 20% may have been the game rounding a bigger number down. Still, I decide the extra gold isn't worth a party slot and exchange her for the wizard. The wizard doesn't disappoint, he quickly gets enough MP to cast offensive spells in any battle with anything that resembles resistance.

After playing a bit more, the GBC version appears to be much less of a pain than the NES version. Getting the heroes ready to go anywhere without dying doesn't take as long as I remember. The spellcasters are getting much more MP when leveling up and I seem to need much less expensive equipment. That or I'm simple making a more liberal use of the frame-skip button.

Part 2: The Heroine Lia begins her journey for real. The first goal seems to be to get out of her country. This turns out to be more complicated than expected since there's neither a ship in the whole kingdom nor a way via land to go to another country. By talking to her fellow countrymen, she eventually figures out what she has to do.

There's an underground path leading out of the country, but it's blocked by a wall. Since the wall was most likely erected by the king to prevent people from fleeing to greener pastures, asking him to send a few miners is out of the question. There's a magic bomb which could blow the wall to rubble, but the man who owns it has his door locked both daily and nightly. Fortunately, the door is red and there's a key which can open red doors on the top of a tower. Unfortunately, the tower is on an island and the lack of ships has already been mentioned. The solution lies in a secondary underground path, one that leads to the island.

While gathering the necessary information Lia also builds some levels and acquires better equipment. The fighter starts to disappoint, he has both less strength than the heroine and cannot use any weapon properly. He is actually doing the least amount of damage of all party members. I nevertheless decide to stick with him since sooner or later a fighter friendly weapon has to show up.

Anyway, travel underground to the tower. Climb the tower to get the thieves key (if you have problem with burglary, make sure your door isn't painted red) and then get the magic bomb. Use the bomb to blow up the wall and get the heck outa the country.

Lia emerges on another country far away. The first town she spots happens to be the capital (there seems to be about a 50% chance that a randomly selected town is a capital though) and she decides to speak to the king. The king recognizes her as a heroine and has a request. The request has to wait though, because it's time for a rest so Lia quits after the king records her journey.

Eventually she resumes her adventure, but the king isn't programmed to make his request doing his opening dialog. Lia has to talk to him again to hear his request. Turns out that a thief named Kandary or something has stolen the kings crown and the king wants Lia to get it back.

Just like with Lia's home country, this kingdom has one castle town and one village. Since nobody in the castle town knows where the thief is, it's time to go to the village. Sure enough, the villagers manages to both tell her that the thief is holed up in something tower and that something tower is to the west. Other than that, a villager stands on a grave which he claims belongs to a fighter who defeated a bear with his bare hands. Chance is the fighter was using one of the few fighter friendly weapons so Lia decides to return nighttime for some grave robbing in case the fighter toke the weapon with him to the grave.

Unfortunately, that's not the case. The fanboy is still one the grave, sleeping however. The ghost of the fighter is also there, probably to watch so that the creepy fanboy doesn't do anything horrible to his corpse while everyone is asleep. The ghost confirms that he indeed used a weapon, an iron claw. The iron claw is sold in the village weapon shop meaning Lia has to buy it. Oh well, buying is not as good as finding, but still not too bad. She does buy the claw and a fighter armor as well. The new equipment coupled with the fact that Harl the fighter is lately getting better stat gains upon level ups means he stopped sucking. His strength is even starting to catch up with Lia's, although he's not quite there yet.

First some exploring. Other than something tower, there's some sort of gambling installation where you pay a token to walk some gauntlet. You roll a dice and walk the corresponding number of squares and depending on where you stop something will happen. Lia only gets gold and a herb which is good enough since there's still plenty of equipment upgrades left to get. For clearing the course she also gets even more gold and a sword stronger than the currently strongest available weapon in stores. Score!

Eventually she tackles the tower. That takes her two retreats before she makes it trough, one retreat because Lia suddenly needs anti paralysis herbs and has few of them and one retreat because the enemies decided to gang up on the wizard. After that and a quick equipment upgrade (it's actually now that Harl gets his fighter friendly armor) she makes it to Kandary.

Kandary is standing close to two treasure chests and Lia intends to get them as well as the crown. However, Kandary pulls a lever or something and Lia and her party is sent a floor down via a pitfall. They quickly climb back up, but Kandary is gone and so is the content of the two treasure chests! Well, there's only one way he could have gone and the party quickly catches up with him. Battle time.

The wizard stacks Increase and Kandary and his goons becomes less and less efficient for every turn. Speaking of increase, I realize that if I'm going to class change the wizard it should be to a thief so that I can get an Increase of before the enemies attack instead of after. Surely if the thief has a decent attack he won't need as much MP since he can save some by attacking instead of casting offensive spells. Anyway, Kandary loses and yields.

He offers to return the crown if Lia lets him go. She says no since she wants whatever was in the chests too, but Kandary pulls a "but thou must". Grudgingly she allows the content of the treasure chests walk away and settles for the crown. She returns it to the king.

The king offers her the throne as a reward. At this point it should be clear that's not a reward at all, but the king insists. So, Lia becomes a queen despite there already being one.

The first thing Lia does as a queen is to chat with queen 2. She thinks it's a good idea to put a woman on the throne. If she wants a female ruler and the king doesn't want to rule, why don't they just have her do the ruling? Anyway, Lia doesn't want to find out and seeks out the king. He's busy gambling away the royal treasury which he apparently didn't see fit to leave behind. Fortunately he complies when Lia demands he resumes his duties as a king and the madness ends. It's pointed out that at her short time as a queen she already built a reputation of being a good ruler which doesn't bode well since she did absolutely nothing.

Quest complete and I have no idea why I had to do any of it. Next time, I head east? Going there wasn't a good idea earlier, but now the party is stronger. The game is definitely an improvement over the NES version. This version is less "spellcasters should use their spells wisely" and more "spellcasters will want to cast spells every battle."