Today on the final post of Dragon Quest II (ever), I must Rock The Dragon.
Before anything else, I have waited many DQ games to see a bard actually prance gaily, and it has finally happened.
Mother of God.
It's Spectacular.
Here we go, the first postgame boss, Xenlon. As noted in the previous post, I have to defeat this guy six times to get all of the wishes he can grant. Much like Dragonball Z, some of the wishes are jokes.
What isn't a joke is this fight; he's quite formidable, probably comparable to Malroth. Maybe a little bit easier, since he can't full heal like Malroth can. He's got some devastating AOEs, though.
Have to defeat him in 35 turns to get the first wish (then 25 for the second, then 15 for the last four). Well, needless to say, I over-prepared for this and crushed it on the first go.
Here's the actual fight. 13 rounds. Boom. Now to refine and focus the laser-like DPS of Midenhall and bring that number down.
THE WISHES:
Powerful Weapon - Gives you the Sword of Rubiss, a super-strong weapon. Yep, even stronger than the reforged Sword of Erdrick. The only thing better is the Supreme Sword of Erdrick, which is later in the postgame. In any case, this is huge on Midenhall, and makes those boosted double Cutting Edges do even more damage. This is crucial for defeating Xenlon even faster, and probably what one should go for first...maybe. Can pretty much auto-battle him once everyone's buffed, after that.
Damage Ability - A scroll of Critical Claim, which is critical (hyuck) for farming Liquid Metal Slimes. Put it on the fastest character, along with a Meteorite Bracer, and if their speed is above 750 or so you're guaranteed to kill one LMS per turn. That means two kills by the time a Puff! dragon breath goes off.
Magic Magnifying Ability - A scroll of Channel Anger, which boosts magic attack damage. Moonbrooke is the only one who can really benefit from this, and she already has it from leveling up. The other 3 characters all do more damage with physical techniques than magic. So this is easily the least-useful wish.
The Secrets of Puff-Puff - A scroll of Power Puff-Puff, which teaches the art of performing a succulent Puff-Puff on some unsuspecting lad.
Further Secrets of Puff-Puff - Another wish, that's hidden at first, gets you a second scroll so both characters can learn it. This is required for the "all abilities" trophy, since the two count as separate abilities.
Tombola Stall - The most unassuming wish might actually be the best. This unlocks a Tombola in Cloudsgate Citadel that can give you Liquid Metal equipment, the best armor in the game. It'll take lots and lots of money spent on tickets, but you can make the party basically invincible by decking them out in Liquid Metal equipment from farming the Tombol many times over. This is probably the best thing to get first, but I'd say the Sword of Rubiss is better because it speeds up the Xenlon kill time so much. Go for that if the fight is fine and just needs to be sped up; go for the Tombola if the fight was difficult and the characters need more defenses.
Liquid Metal gear also makes the rest of the postgame significantly easier; unfortunately I didn't get this one until I was pretty much done with everything else, so it didn't do me much good.
Ask for the Puff-Puff tutelage, and the Eternal Dragon isn't amused. This scroll is like the secret book in American Pie that was full of female-pleasuring techniques, except it's for male-pleasuring.
These Puff-Puff techniques are so potent, they'll cause a guy's eyeballs to roll back like The Undertaker.
This is a particularly skilled version of Puff-Puff, and again you need two of these to get the "all abilities" trophy.
Power Puff-Puff makes Midenhall's puffing more rough and damaging, while also making Moonbrooke's puffing more slow, succulent, and passionate.
...........Why we needed the Eternal Dragon for this bullshit, I don't know
I managed to get the fight way down into the single-digits. The key is to just get Midenhall buffed (and the dragon sapped) quickly and unleash Cutting Edge x2 a few times.
The secret Tombola stall. Whoa, there's a Liquid Metal Sword as well. It's a distant third place behind the Rubiss and Erdrick swords. Not much point in getting it, except maybe for Sasha. This looks like a huge loot pinata, but not so fast...
...the rewards are actually EXTREMELY RARE with this Tombola, and you mostly just get the most basic rewards. Over and over. Rather than burning through my limited funds, I just saved and reloaded a lot trying to get something decent. It was a PITA, so I didn't bother with this for too long.
Managed to get a Liquid Metal Armor, which is a marginal upgrade over the Exotoga (another postgame armor). It does have protection against all elements, so that's good.
...ignore the Supreme Sword, this was taken later. We're not there yet. I did the Tombola stuff last, I'm just looking at it ahead of time.
Next up is unlocking the other postgame dungeon, which requires doing that weird sidequest of finding memories on the ocean floor. It isn't completable until now.
I have to hunt down this ghost ship, which moves all around the ocean floor. It has a set route it follows, so once you find the route, you can camp out and wait for it to make its way back around. Takes about 15-20 minutes for it to make a full lap.
Thought the Ghost Ship would be another substantial dungeon, but nope, it's basically one room. There's some treasure here, but most importantly:
Octavian is a pretty damn strong boss, and is commonly regarded as the game's toughest fight. It wasn't bad at all with my party at the current strength. I'd say Hargon/Malroth (and especially Hargon/Malroth/Final Form) gave me more trouble. So did the Dragonlord's Grandson, for that matter. This guy is a close third though.
As for the other treasures...here's the Empress' Whip. Hot.
This gets me the final memory, which unlocks...
The Cave of Confusion is the second (and last) postgame dungeon, and it's MUCH more substantial than the Cloudsgate Citadel tower. This is a 25+ floor monstrosity of a dungeon, where each floor only has one exit that moves you forward. A bit like Deep Dungeon in FF Tactics, only a lot less annoying.
Palette-swaps of bosses regularly appear as regular enemies in here, and they attack in groups. The crazy thing is that their stats really aren't any different from their boss versions.
Surprised that DQ1 didn't have any sort of of postgame or super-boss. Then again, the Dragonlord himself was so beefed-up over the rest of the game that they basically made him a superboss just for the lulz. Needing to be level 50 to comfortably topple him was kind of ridiculous.
The 25 floors are all copypasted from other areas, in Square-Enix postgame tradition...and it's one of my least favorite tropes of theirs. The mash-up postgame dungeon with no rhyme or reason, just a bunch of strung-together copypasted areas.
However, this one is better than most, because it uses areas from all throughout the Erdrick Trilogy. That means you get places from Dragon Quest III popping up here, in DQII. Along with bosses from DQIII, even. Makes this a great culmination of the whole trilogy and almost a montage-like tour of places you've been.
My nemesis, King Hydra, appears here as a regular foe. It gives massive EXP, and is a PITA to fight as usual. This party is much stronger than my DQIII party was at the end, though, and handles business.
This gets me thinking. In DQIII I never really properly beat the game, and I certainly didn't do any postgame. King Hydra was essentially the end of the line, since I didn't "do it right" with classes and lacked Wild Side on my characters. I had to turn the difficulty down to Gimp Mode where you don't have to do anything, and I think I just autobattled my way through King Hydra and the last couple fights because I was over it by then.
That's no way to end a top-tier game. Which means that after this...I'm going to swing back around to DQIII and wrap up some unfinished business before I move on. That's right, after I get this platinum, I'm going to go get that platinum. This means doing the final battles right, and finally seeing the postgame.
The fights in this place, while very tough, aren't the worst part. The worst part is the return of these damn floor tiles! I quickly sussed out a method to do this, since the tiles confuse my brain. I just turned the controller on its side so that the "up" button was pointing in the direction of the arrow that moves you forward. Then you're sync'd with the tile and can just move the way you want to. Have to turn the controller with each new tile that faces a different direction.
Reaching the end of this ridiculous 25-floor dungeon gets you the Sphere of Light, of DQIII fame. I believe this last room here was also the first room of the DQ3 remake, the place where the Powers That Be ask you a bunch of questions to determine your character personality.
Fighting everything in this dungeon was important too, as it gets you a lot of levels for the remaining two postgame bosses, which are pretty tough.
Next up, back to Alefgard to face the Dragonlord's Great Grandson. The Sphere of Light wakes him up to his true, Dragonlord-y powers. Now he wants a friendly spar with our heroes, of course, and he's waaaaaaaay stronger than the original Dragonlord.
.......wait, I can't fight him unless I have all of the pieces of Erdrick gear. I...don't have all the pieces already?
Yeah, I guess I missed Erdrick's Shield entirely, and it just went totally unnoticed until now.
After trudging through Charlock Castle yet again... Much like the first game, he has two forms. The first isn't too tough, basically just a redux of Hargon.
The second form, though...is a gleaming white dragon, and if you hold back at all, you die.
Now THIS is a fight. It's definitely a "toughest fight in the game" candidate. His AOEs are devastating and he's clearly intended for higher levels than what I brought.
After barely eke-ing out a win, our heroes are exhausted. This gets me the ultimate of weapons:
Erdrick's Supreme Sword is even stronger than Rubiss' Sword, and ascends Midenhall to his ultimate level of power. This lets me absolutely thrash Xenlon.
NOW THAT'S A LOTTA DAMAGE
One thing left to do. Go through Hargon's Castle yet again, defeat Hargon and Malroth again (it's much easier now with postgame equipment), and now you get the TRUE final boss:
A giant ball of darkness! It's like something out of a Kirby game. The darkness manifests in the form of...
Super Godzilla Malroth, which is so gigantic (and airborne) that our heroes have to fly on Ramia just to reach and fight him. This is the final postgame superboss, the true final boss, and the ending to the entire Erdrick Trilogy. This, right here, is it. The end.
Rather than talking much about the fight, I'm just going to post it. Another great back-and-forth battle in a game that's had a bunch of them. Can save some time and trouble by just using the Supreme Sword of Erdrick right off the bat. I didn't know, and luckily it eventually prompted me to use it. For that first minute or so of the fight, I thought it was gonna be unwinnable without a ton more level-grinding. Nope, just had to dis-empower him. Really outstanding remix of Zoma's Theme from Dragon Quest 3 for this fight. Outside of that...it was a pretty standard superboss fight, went about how I expected.
Cutting Edge x2, boosted by Wild Side, Oomph, and Egg On...is basically an insurmountable onslaught. This might be the most OP party I've seen in an RPG in a long time, and nothing in this postgame stood a chance. Granted, 90+ percent of the DPS is from Midenhall, but regardless, it was pure destruction.
He breaks apart, shattered by the power of light. And that's it, the Erdrick Trilogy is closed.
This form kinda reminds me of the Kraid fight that was supposed to be in Metroid Prime. Would have been viewed from this angle. They ended up dropping the fight and replacing it with the relatively lame Omega Pirate fight instead. Also Thardus (Phendrana Drifts boss) was supposed to be the Magmoor Caverns boss. Maybe Omega Pirate was supposed to be in Phendrana, or maybe Phendrana was supposed to have something else entirely.
Anyway, after a quick DQ3 revisit, I can finally move on to DQ7 after all these years of bouncing around the first six. I'll only be playing that one once; it's way too big to play every version of it.
We get a new ending with our heroes conversing a bit. Moonbrooke and Sasha talk about bathing.
Sasha would go without baths forever if it meant more adventuring. Alright.
....alright, Yuji, I know what you're doing here. Just back away from the game, Yuji.
The new ending has our heroes taking off on Ramia and flying through the ceiling of the world, to reach the plane above (aka our world).
I did NOT expect anything like this from this game. Wow.
They arrive in Aliahan. The surface world isn't that different from their world. This is where Erdrick set off on his journey many generations ago, the one he'd never return from.
Oh yeah, real quick, got my final trophy by throwing the second of these scrolls onto Midenhall, thus finishing the "collect all spells and abilities" trophy.
That's it, 100%, platinum added to the collection. I love these, they document when you succeeded at a game, and which games were worth doing everything in.
Here's the finished Platinum Trophy Video. I love doing these compilations. They take no time at all to throw together and they basically document the win. Shows the order of collection, as well.
Erdrick's equipment is proof enough of our identities, and our heroes are welcomed. Here in Aliahan, Erdrick is the stuff of legend for defeating the dastardly Baramos. Not sure if they know about how he went a step beyond and dealt with a much bigger threat in the underworld.
This leads them to Ortega's House, the historic home of the kid who saved the world.
A woman is in here who looks just like Erdrick's Mom, and we go to a flashback of Erdrick returning home to hug her.
Of course, in DQIII, Erdrick never returned home.
Welcome home, Muffin. Indeed.
...............Wait a minute, what was that? What just happened? Was it just a flashback of an emotional moment from the distant past had by no one in particular, or was that actually Erdrick's mother, recognizing her son in these visitors? Which would mean that time hasn't passed nearly as much in the Earth world as it has in the many generations of the underworld.
It was probably just a flash showing the last moments Erdrick had at home before he went to fight Zoma and was trapped in the underworld forever, and not what any of the characters in that room saw.
One thing is for sure, I absolutely need to revisit DQIII and do the postgame. I have a wrong to put right for Ortega.
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