"It’s Dragon Quest 1000.B.B Part II."

This is the second part of a series of rpgs by the recently death company Data East, released because of the success of the Dragon Quest saga in Japan. But even if it’s just a clone doesn’t mean that it’s a bad game, if you come to think, a DQ in the ancient Greece can be cool, and believe me, it is.

Story 10/10:
Loosely based on the Greek mythology (very loosely based but based anyway), your goal is defeat the Dark Lord. As you can see it is a very standard plot, but it is really nicely done, with lots of interesting and original things to do and see, plus a kick ass ending. Among the best plots I have seen in a Nes game.

Graphics 10/10:
Great. The characters have very nice designs and the monsters during the battles are splendid. The use of color is also very great, it isn’t as bright as it’s usual in the Nes.
The only thing that I miss here is a background for the battles, as well as animated magic spells, but even DQ IV lacks that, so aside from that everything is great, and a titanic improvement from the first game.

Music 7/10:
Surprisingly good, with nice and catchy tunes the music is quite good, and there’s quite a lot of variety (for a Nes game). As I said before, surprisingly good.

Gameplay 9/10:
Dragon Quest. That’s all anyone can say about it, because it’s exactly the same: to perform an action you’ll have access the menu and select the action, fortunately there aren’t doors in this game, so you are not going to exasperate every time you enter a building like in DQ.

Like in almost every rpg for the Nes you can’t see what are you buying, so you’ll have to guess or try it after buying it, and the same happens with the weapons, armors, items, and magic spells.

The encounter rate is very high, too high, and while thankfully the areas where the enemies are weak compared with your actual strength are basically free of enemies it is still too high. This is the only serious flaw, and with a lower encounter rate this could’ve been a perfect game.

But the most important thing is that the game progression is excellent, sometimes you wont know what to do next true, but I have only got stuck once during the whole adventure, the “go town and then to a dungeon” routine is still there also, but the game has some good twists that prevent it from the monotony most Nes rpg suffer from, specially during the last part of the game, and here I have to say again that the ending rules, really, it is totally cool.

This game was a nice surprise, no doubt about that, highly original, interesting, varied, entertaining, and one of the most important thing, with an excellent plot. As I said before for me the only flaw is the high encounter rate, but that is something almost every single rpg for the Nes has, and even with that it still a marvelous game. If you like true (or old school) rpgs or you are a Dragon Quest fan you’ll absolutely adore this game, go get it now.

”My lack of vocabulary and grammatical errors (if there’s any) are because I’m not from an English speaking country, sorry about that.”

Reviewer's Score: 9/10, Originally Posted: 08/08/03, Updated 01/07/04