You could use many adjectives to describe Omega Force output from the PS2 onward, but definitely not “ambitious”, as Koei first and then Tecmo Koei keep them just as the “Dynasty Warriors” guys, a stigma that just got worse over time, even when they don’t make a Warriors title.
Can’t say its unwarranted either as there are dozens upon dozens of Warriors titles, all iterating from a formula now decades old, to the point there are entire sub-series alongside the well milked mainline Dynasty Warriors and Samurai Warriors franchises.
But Dragon Quest Heroes II is the rare exception, as we will see.
Regardless, its not too surprising this exists, as the first DQ Heroes did well, was received quite well (especially for a musou title), so of course Koei put immediately Omega Force back to work on a sequel, which dropped the ridilicously long subtitle of the first one, and came out the following year, thought we had to wait until 2017 for a western release.
A sequel in DQ or FF fashion, in the sense it’s not a direct story sequel, this isn’t even the same world as the first Dragon Quest Heroes.
the gist is than 2000 years ago a great war was waged, and it was so catastrophic the seven kingdoms swore eternal peace to each others. This is also connected to a prophecy about two twins kings, bloodshed, and a conspiracy to make the Seven Realms fall into war again…. truth to be told, i didn’t really care too much about the plot, the one in the first DQ Heroes was simpler, yes, but it was more enjoyable.
Sure, it isn’t that predictable as far as narrative progression, but what it gains in unpredictability and complexity it loses in providing a more satisfying narrative in itself, and while i still enjoy the DQ sense of humour, but i really don’t care for this particular ensemble of protagonists, a bit too “happy go lucky” the boy, and nagging the girl, and arrogant the prince Kisar. The other characters are more interestings, especially the guest characters from mainline titles, with the exception of the wolf kid, i really find “Toriyama toddlers” to be annoying both in design and personality, at least for boys.
anyway, the peace is broken when the Dunisia kingdom attacks the Kala capital, and the main character, cousins knights in training from Dunisia who just happened to be in Kala, have to fight off the monsters sent by their own kingdom’s army to protect the citizen and the castle. They then aid an envoyee called Lady Desdemona, sent to act as mediator between the kingdoms that now suddendly are at odds (with the Dunisia prince himself attacking Kala for no clear reason), and apparently for no reason.
Plus a lot of “guests” due to the usual “isekai’d by chance” portal bonanza… ok, more guests than usual, but i will say the story gets a bit better as it goes on, i ended up enjoying it more than i figured i was going to, but i wish the villain was better. Kinda disappointed by it, a bit. Meh.
I still prefer the one in the first DQH, maybe it’s the simplicity to it that made it more endearing, but i did enjoy the plot and characters (main characters made specifically for this crossover included, which i can’t really say for this) more in that one.
Sorry, just didn’t quite grab me as the one for the first Dragon Quest Heroes did.
Gameplay is where DQH II goes “even more PLUS ULTRA” than its precedessor in marrying the elements of both a musou game and a JRPG, to the point this is straight up both, the hybridization complete, for better and ill, as we’ll see.
The combat system is the same one found in the first DQH, which was and still is a good variation of the Dynasty Warriors typical set-up for combos and attacks, with heavy use of mechanics taken from DQ, like the magic/special attacks using MP, the Tension system working like an early Samurai Warriors musou attack (which also curbed the spam of musou attacks), a 4 characters party you can switch to at any time during battle the protagonists being fairly similar but with an opposite elemental specialization (actually, the girl uses a sword and shield, so she also has a different moveset from the guy), and the return of Monster Medals, who let you use fallen monsters as temporary allies: evoking a mummy that stands and fights for you, evoking a golem that unleashes a powerful attack, etc.
Also, some of the monster medals can be useful outside of combat, as in you can use a Substitute medal to transform into a winged/flying monster, like the “condor-viper” to reach otherwise inaccessible areas, and they also added a Switch Combo feature of sorts, the “Multiattack”, which works as a Switch Attack in the style of WO3, but handled as a spell, so it costs a lot of PM.
Now there also a new type of Monster Metal, “Substitute”, which lets you directly transform into a monster for a limited amounts of time, and letting you go to town on your foes as a frigging DQ Golem, and use their attacks. This system was awesome in the first title… here is even better, i’m impressed. Even if the monster medal system is less emphatized by lower drop rate for the Monster Medals themselves… and the (almost complete) lack of the tower defense element from the previous game, which explains some monster having a different use here, with most of the previously Sentinel types now letting you control them directly for a while.
Heroes 2 further adds on the integration of RPG elements, with each character belonging to a certain class, and each class can use multiple weapon types, for example, the Warrior can use swords and axes, with exception or particular cases, as in the hero has Twin sword as the basic starting weapon, the heroine starts with a sword and shield. Regardless, here you also hone proficiency by using a certain weapon, and while most characters belong to a specific class and that’s it, the hero and heroine can change vocation/class, going from default “warrior” to the traditional rpg standards of Thief, Sorcer/ress, Priest/ess, Brawler, Monk, etc.
And yes, you can play as the frigging DQ merchant and beat up people with a goddamn abacus. Math, son.
A small gripe is that while you have new characters and new guest characters from other DQ stories, there is some overlap, like, we really need Terry again (which was in the first DQH) when we already have a elemental swordman with Kisar? It’s not that their clones or anything, but you could have picked another DQ character from the main series that didn’t appear in the previous game or accidentally caused “swordmen paradise”? It’s noticeable since most of the new characters just reprise the playstyles occupied in the previous one, like here Maribel uses the boomerang instead of Isla, Desdemona has an axe fighting style reprising Angus…. oddly the previous selection of playable characters was more complimentary to each other.
Actually, in the later game a lot of characters from main DQ games that were also in the first one return (with no memory of that, but they do of course remember the other guest characters from their own games), like, you couldn’t pick someone else, the series is not this small, come on, and this overtime causes a bit overlap, like having Carver and “Zarina”, the punching princess.
It’s a minor niggle and a good problem to have, comparatively so, since this remedies the relatively short roster of the first DQH, and it’s worth noting that they added the entire roster of the first game in here via patches. Yeah, like that, for free, in a patch. If it was just Koei being involved, they would have sold them back to you in a Season Pass costing from 15 to 50 bucks.
Sadly they can be used only in the multiplayer online mode, not in the story or side missions, but it’s nice to have them all back and playable if you want.
A new feature are the open world areas, which you must travel to in order to reach the story battles and various hub towns and cities in the world….. Ok, maybe “open world” is a bit deceiving to say in this time and age, it means that there are “wild areas” outside of the towns/kingdoms/places, and you explore them to progress in the story, with some areas inaccessible until a certain point of the story, so yeah, it fits more the borrowing of RPG elements, especially since you still have to access the other regions by traversing a hub town.
They aren’t amazing, but they are far from bad, you basically run around these “open wild areas”, with the option of attacking innocent slimes and monsters (with some occasional “wanted monsters” that are far tougher but also give you better quality items and more XP), talking to NPC or saving the ones attacked by monsters, often having to do quests and explore the open area at hand to proceed in the story. It’s actually better than i expected, even at the very least when you aren’t fighting or brandishing (even in the War Zones), you can just run to move faster, no stamina meter. Such a simple feature, but it helps in the long run, alongside the fact these wild areas are big but not really that big, not “open world big” each, and thank christ for that.
Oddly, when you encounter story battles in open wild areas, the game tries to implement… i guess “stealth mechanics”…. not for you, but for the monsters, so in battles where there are bushes rattling, it’s an obvious giveaway a medium or powerful monster is hiding, so you can kill them in one hit and avoid fitting 3 or 4 of them at once if you hit them when they are “hiding”.
Even though i only saw this thing work like that at the beginning of the game and just for that battle, but i guess it can be useful, since the IA for enemies (and their variety of enemy types, for that matter) is noticeably better than most Warriors titles, so don’t think it will take the game very long to get challenging, you may think that but even 2 hours in, a battle with a boss type enemy will teach you not to fuck around too much, or let your guard down because it’s a Warriors game.
Of course, now the Zoom magic is used for fast travel instead of it being used in-map like it did in the first DQH, and you can also directly go from the hubworld to the story battle without teleport near the mission marker. Nice, quite nice.
As previously pointed out, they didn’t quite kept the mixture of hack n slash with tower defense gameplay for the story maps/battles… kinda. There’s still emphasis on having to defend important NPC or objects in some specific missions, there are still monster spawning portals, so leaving Sentinel type monsters to defend critical objectives is still essential or highly useful, since you’re often needed to go back to them while exploring and dealing with traps or battles around the map.
And yes, the enviromental hazards are back, so you can use fire attacks or specials to set oil veins on fire, and such, since the map design is more keen on using those, alongside new ones like poison swamps, or using group of archers that spawn on high ledges and must be dealt with because they will punt you relentlessly if you don’t dispose of them, though there are still wave structured battles, where the mini-boss will keep appearing and retreating while sending more mooks and strong monsters alikes.
The main story battles are now called “War Zones”, as in each of these major battles is divided on a map divided in multiple, stand-alone mini-stages. Not a bad solution, and the game gives you the option to change equipment, spend upgrade points or abandon after each segment of the battle is done, which is useful since if you lose you’re NOT gonna have to do the “War Zone” from the beginning, which is good because these “war zones” are not short, and even the first one is quite hard, with tough enemies, a tough boss, reinforcements.
I don’t mind them doing the maps and stages this way, i would have kinda preferred a more traditional DW approach, but it’s just personal preference, and eventually you find some maps eventually go full campal and feel more like traditional DW battles, so can’t complain there.
I was thinking that giving you 4 item for resurrecting the other party members on the fly and the 3 cure gems were too much… i was quite wrong. This is quite hard by Warriors standards, i’d say the harder of the modern ones.
And now the bad.
While the RPG elements being even more relevant and active part of the gameplay improve the experience, the downside it that it gets a bit TOO faithful in splicing a hack n slash and a JRPG together, meaning you also get to deal with the less beloved JRPG traditions of having to backtrack or getting side-tracked a lot in order to proceed on the main story.
And i’m sorry, these istances are just tiresome here, and makes me wonder if they really got that much pushback from the mash of musou and tower defense that was at the core of the first DQHeroes, because that was better than some of the “RPG padding” this game pulls. It’s not even to avoid making you fight enemies, because its fun enough that you just find yourself fighting King Slimes and such even when unprompeted in the “wild areas”.
Later you also get one of those “find the right sequence of portals to proceed in the weird forest maze”, but oddly is not that obtuse, gets less cryptic as you proceed, and there also a bit of stealth, just a tiny bit for variety, and despite some moments where this doesn’t go too well… well, the game actually does provide quite a lot of variety, and good variety, always adding something new, even some puzzles, the enemy variety is huge, and the combat is always satisfying.
As previously said, when the story calls for it, you also get more typical Warriors style maps, with many armies moving about the maps and fighting, and a FUCKTON of enemies and giant monsters on screen, all running quite smoothly, even more surprising since the game looks better than usuals Omega Force joints. So i can’t say this game doesn’t deliver, it does, and what it does right it makes up for some of the RPG bulldonk: like telling you to prepare before proceeding… then letting you go to a wild area for some contrived reason and 4 minutes later calling you back and AGAIN telling you to prepare for the battle ahead.
It’s a shame because the games feel caught in an thinly veiled attempt to make itself less of a Warriors game… despite being also a Warriors game, made by Omega Force, even, so it’s kinda absurd how it doesn’t want to committ to that, which brings some variety as it wants to avoid the usual criticisms these game get (and to a point, deserve), especially the being repetitive.
The result if far from bad or boring, but at heart it’s a game seemingly a bit…. confused in how much exactly it wants to be Dragon Quest and how much Dynasty Warriors, it never manages to make a perfect balance between the two, so the two “souls” of the game are in an odd.. not exacly “conflict”, due to how quite well entwined for the bette they are… for the most part. It’s weird, i guess because the first DQH was more of a balanced mix of the two with a peculiar twist on maps (the tower defense emphasis), while this one wants to offer more variety and further marry the musou and RPG elements, which works even better on paper, not as much in practice.
On the upside, most of the variety in the battle stages themselves is good, sometimes not so much in the overworld quests, where the enemies roaming around can be more of a pain in the ass than anything else, especially later in the game, and specifically talking about the trials to enter the Icy Mountain where the legendary weapon… yeah, maybe this “mini-boss” encounters could have used the mini-bosses themselves having less chunky healthbars.
On the downside, the open world areas don’t differ that much from each other, aside monster population and biome, but…on the upside the game doesn’t force you hand or forces you to spend too much time there if you don’t want, so they’re not really a problem for the overall game, i don’t think so, so i don’t know exactly why they are so lamented, to the point of being one of the main points of negative criticism for DQHII. I don’t get it.
What i do lament is that often you feel this game is stretching itself longer, not by recycling stuff but instead trying too hard to have variety, almost as if someone on the team did want to vindicate the criticisms of Musou games being very repetitive, even if it means keep introducing stuff or trying to have something new constantly, regardless if it’s good (like the new monster variants) or if it bogs down what’s already a fairly long game, i woulda say.
Some things aren’t great but are neat one-off things, like the kaiju style battle, or the classic “sliding arrow tiles” puzzles reminescent of the old Pokemon games, but then there’s plain baffling stuff like labyrinth towers that borderline on being too cryptic, or rare tower defense style missions where you have to protect a NPC that can’t defend themselves (not the norm for this game at all) and the map/area shaped exacly to make the battle insanely hard to control.
It’s stuff like these and other absurd difficulty spikes (like the boss gauntlet that becomes a boss marathon) that makes upgrading the Monster Coins number of slots a necessity in the latter half, nothing you can’t do with some resolve and effort, but it goes overboard and honestly feels like a “fuck you” to years of people saying Warriors games are too easy, and it feels spiteful because it’s like they wanted you to grind for the final stretch, since until then the game doesn’t force you into it.
Then some stages seem to exist just to take the piss, like when you have to reach the long staircase leading to the top floor of the highest tower in the world…. ok, i get the joke, the characters do too, but in the part where you just have to traverse LONG, LONG staircases… at one point i just killed a Koguar to get it’s Monster Medal, and use the transformation given by the medal to rush as a Koguar through 6 ranks of winding spiral staircases full of enemies and where you could fall to the ones below if you didn’t pay attention. I couldn’t imagine doing this bit proper,
I genuinely feel this game could have gained some overall more enjoyment if it did cut 5/6 (or more) hours of bullshit or stuff that’s there for variety but either disappointing, annoying or made harder and/or more time consuming than it should be. Or contrived another reason so you have to go to another place, fight one more battle then come back to the place, or stuff like this, that the game often does “because a RPG does it” regardless if it makes the experience better.
Despite not regretting playing this one till the end… i can see many people just giving up midway, and for the last act i was just waiting for the game to be over, not because it’s “bad”, but because we should have been here at the finale 10 hours ago, and the overall experience would have been better. Just better.
And mind you, it took me slightly less than 40 hours to beat it, there’s a lot more to do in the post-game, and this time around there’s online multiplayer, with dedicated special dungeons for 4 players co-op, no chat system but there’s a set of premade phrases for communicating.
You can do a dungeon by yourself with the IA partners like in story mode (and the ally IA is pretty good), but even the first one is not that well balanced for solo play, and will “punish” you with stuff that wasn’t in the main game, like double boss who can summon a heal circle for themselves. They don’t in the story mode or side missions. Yeah, didn’t bother, it’s really not that fun alone anyway.
You can also play the story missions co-op for 2 players, but you must select the “ask help” option before the main battle, and it’s online reliant, no local co-op. Bummer, but the first one didn’t have any kind of multiplayer, at all, so whatever.
Honestly, one wonders if they overstuffed DQ Heroes II because Omega Force was “afraid” Squeenix wouldn’t make them do a third one, so they put everything in here?
Dunno, but it feels overburnered, and after the midpoint it fluctuates between being cool and almost a chore, even with the pivoted, improved and revised Warriors gameplay at the core, at times the side effects of this being a full fledged RPG work against what the game otherwise does really well, as in giving you lot of enemy variety, a challenging ensemble of bosses and tough enemies that can’t be overcome just by grinding… but the meandearing back and forth, the storyline making the game incredibly long for Warriors standard… well, they weight the experience down.
It’s a shame this suffer big of “sequelitis”, made worse by the fact this one further tries to do both a proper big, long winding rpg and a musou title, without wanting to sacrifice quality for neither, because otherwise i could understand some players preferring it to the first DQ Heroes title.
I still recommend checking it out as it’s a very ambitious musou title, but play the first Dragon Quest Heroes then try this one out, they’re kinda cheap at the moment.
As you might know, there is a double pack of DQH I and II for the Nintendo Switch, but it’s Japan only and apparently it doesn’t run that well… not that i would look out for later rereleases.
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