Dragon Quest Heroes II Reviews

  • KinglinkKinglink322,917
    25 Feb 2018
    2 0 0
    Dragon Quest Heroes II was supposed to be an easy game to review. I love the Dynasty Warriors series as well as all the offshoots. I like Dragon Quest, and I loved Dragon Quest Heroes.

    Yet I can’t recommend Dragon Quest Heroes II. While I like the concept there are some serious issues that cause me to have to say it’s a no-go, but first, let’s go over the game itself.

    Dragon Quest Heroes II is a “sequel” to Dragon Quest Heroes, but like all Dragon Quest games, there are tenuous links at best. In fact, it appears some characters (or all of them) will carry over, and they appear in the menu, but oddly enough the game doesn’t seem to have a way to unlock them, yet. I’m sure they would show up. It’s one of a few odd design choices of Dragon Quest Heroes II.

    There’s also a single town this time, creating a hub location, somewhat similar to the original game. Though there’s no map system, from that town you set out in multiple directions getting the feeling of an open world game, and it does seem to live up with that, yet most of the game is limited at least early on. You can revisit old areas, but you’re going to mostly focus on specific areas. It does have a great feeling of exploration especially allowing players to revisit locations that you already have walked through, with new characters that open new locations, as well as complete quests in them.

    You’ll also get a mostly new cast of characters. Like I said I did see a list of the original characters, but out of the twelve characters I picked up in the first twenty hours or so I only saw two from the original game. One had a new connection in the game, and the other is my favorite character from the first game (Terry). Both appear to have all new move sets as well.

    There’s actually not much I dislike about the game itself, the hub world is cool, the amount of enemies on the screen is great. Like every Warrior game, it’s a great use of licenses, characters, and gameplay. It will be repetitive for the most part but that’s what you expect. But it does feel like a Dragon Quest game even as it is a Warrior game.

    At the same time, it’s a warriors game, you’re going to wade through great crowds of enemies, killing hundreds of enemies on a map, usually only required to focus on a few strong enemies to take them down. The game uses the motif of Dragon Quest, so you have an HP and MP bar, and almost every enemy is plucked straight from one dragon quest game (if not all of the games, like the slimes).

    So let’s get to the problems. The first problem is after about twenty hours I got to a quest that is ninety minutes long. This is the fourth or fifth “war zone”. Only thing is, the previous war zones are broken up into bite-size chunks, this one was at least a sixty if not ninety minute beast of a level. It’s a good level, and in fact, I felt the previous levels were simplistic (usually three different levels taking between ten minutes) but between each of those levels are a space to change skills and re-equip weapons as well as save. In the final level, I played three times, there’s a change in the map, but it doesn’t allow saving, and a wipe requires you to start at the very beginning. But the break feels like it should have a save point. It doesn’t so it’s rough on the player.

    I’d complain about this for sure, but this wouldn’t be as big a problem if the game ran consistently.

    Now I hesitate to claim a game is problematic technically. I actually thought long and hard about this, because it could be my machine. I run an Alienware Alpha, an R1 i3, and it’s a great little machine and it should be above the required hardware and even the recommended. I’ve only had problems on a few games, I’m actually able to run a small number of games at 4k, I’ve only dipped below 1080p because I wanted a bigger UI, and most games run reasonably well. I’m not the guy who is going to yell about 20 fps vs 30 fps, I might not notice it in fact. The 60 fps vs 30 fps isn’t my style either. I care about gameplay over graphics or framerate.

    That’s to set this up. I tend not to talk about framerates because that’s not how I grade games. The fact is this game runs horribly, and it’s not just me saying it, there’s a decent amount of complaints. I updated drivers, I tried a number of settings. I dropped it to low graphics, I lowered the resolution from 4k to 1080p to 1280x720, while on low-quality settings. I kept having huge frame drops. But I also was inconsistent. I ran a level, at 1280x720 and had a lot of problems, I restarted the game not in big picture mode, at 1080p and got better frame rates. A couple hours of playing and the problems started again, Another night I had problems in non big picture mode, so I switched to big picture mode, and it worked better, for a while.

    The one thing I had was consistently bad experiences, and as someone who really doesn’t go crazy over framerates, having to say it was consistently bad, is a major problem. If it ran at 1280x720 and was playable, I’d mention it, but every time I went into a battle, it was like rolling the dice. I could get 40fps and no problems, I could get a very sluggish 15, I might hit 11 fps. It didn’t seem to matter which battle, how many people were on screen, or what I was doing at the time. And when the battles hit 15 to 11 fps, it feels like battles were taking twice as long because of how bad the controls were.

    When I hit 60fps or a constant 30fps, this game is great. I mean I really like this game, but when I hit 11 fps, I couldn’t stand it, and take that 90-minute battle, sitting through it at a slow FPS for half the battle meant what could take 60 minutes might have taken me longer because of that.

    I’ve fought with this for twenty hours (maybe fifteen hours of gameplay stretched out over twenty hours because of FPS issues). It’s gotten so bad that I can’t play a game I heavily enjoy and want to play. If it was only a long level I’d probably have pushed on, but tying a long level with the fps problems I had for the twenty hours before it made me give this up.

    Still, I hope maybe I’ll figure out something in the future, or maybe I’ll grab new hardware that works better. Maybe I’ll just live with the bad framerate but I find it impossible to recommend the game with all these problems. I mean when people are saying “Play a youtube video in the background” to somehow make this work, I can’t believe my ears.

    But if we want to talk about the game itself, I can give this advice, if you aren’t a fan of Dragon Quest or a fan of Warriors in any aspect, this game is probably not for you. If you have a strong dislike of either franchise, this isn’t going to turn you around, but if you like either franchise this was a strong crossover for the parts I could play.

    Overall I am forced to give this game a non recommendation, not due to gameplay but rather a really poor port in my opinion. That’s the sad but honest opinion I have about this game. I like it, and I want to play it, but when a game forces you to stop playing it through bad optimizations., there’s really no way you should recommend it.

    If you enjoyed this review or want to see my opinion on other games you can find my curator page at this link. http://store.steampowered.com/curator/31803828-Kinglink-Revi... Give me a follow.
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