The Saints are the Super Bowl champs beating the Vikings by a field goal in OT and sticking it to Peyton Manning's Colts. Sophia, my beautiful daughter, is now 3 1/2 months old and just tried her first bite of rice cereal something or other. The vacation time of a teacher/coach is easily filled up, but I found the time to beat Zoma and Baramos and all the other "Last Guys" this tedious game has forced me to endure.
Over the past 7 months (holy crap) I have spent time leveling up my guys and plodding my way through this 3rd edition of Dragon Warrior. When I sat down tonight, I knew I was going right to the last guy strong enough at levels 40-45 to whip him, with a little challenge. A few hours later, I had attempted to beat Zoma approximately 5 times when I took a glimpse at the walkthrough on gamefaqs.com which conveniently reminded me to use the stinking sphere of light that has been clogging up my inventory for months now. I hate when that happens................I immediately found my way to Zoma and whipped him senseless on the first try (6th try).
Reflecting on the gameplay, I love leveling up my guys and enjoy the cheesy music when important things happen in Nintendo RPGs. The limitations of the inventory and the options to make new types of guys were options that can definitely hinder the pace of finishing this game.
I really like when sequels return to the original or past versions of the game. In this one I got to go back and see the history of Tantagel and all the lands from Dragon Warrior 1.
Something I'm left wondering is, did Akira Toriyama ever design any more characters or monsters? J/K but I do so enjoy watching the long list of foreign names scroll by as every Nintendo game ends. I often wonder if some of those names are made up, or if they are the same names from every game. They seem like "Smith" and "Jones" in the US. I love it.
All in all this game proved tedious, slightly challenging but only because of time constraints, enjoyable at times and well designed and written. The challenges in my life definitely subtracted from long RPGs. I hope I will have the desire to go through DW4. It is looming and I don't want to start another RPG for a while.
Sidebar-The Dragon Warrior series is actually based off the foreign Dragon Quest game series. The PS2 version of Dragon Quest (8, I think) is the only link to Erdrick and the history of Dragon Warrior. It holds little resemblence, but it is the same game evolved into the more graphically advantaged systems. The NES versions go 1-4, I don't really know what happened to 5-7, but 8 and 9 are pretty cool on the PS2.
Enjoy all and I will hopefully be dominating a few more games before my summer vacation threatens to be over.
