System: Sega Saturn
Date Published: 1998
Company: Sega
1998: Dragon Force II was another game which I’ve ferociously language-bashed through during my Saturn days. No English release, but I was deep into the 1st Dragon Force (in its English form), so naturally I’m pumped to crack the sequel.
The game is largely similar to its predecessor: Choose one of the eight rulers available, conquer the remaining seven, recruit and expand your forces, and watching 200 soldiers on field killing the hell out of each other. Once everyone is beaten, seek out the big bad boss behind the whole thing and end it all.
Thankfully even in Japanese, the interface is somewhat similar and the new characters are mostly descendants from the previous heroes/heroines. The tedious part was randomly wandering the whole map to trigger story events.
While it lacks in colors compared to the 1st game, it makes it up by oozing buckets of personality: now every commander has unique portrait, sprite and voice acting. The cutscenes are high quality artworks wallpaper-worthy, and the story flows is as brilliant. Getting awards and items to expand your troops is way easier now with auto-search and caverns full of battles. The game can be a real drag when you start grinding in those caves, but it will be a challenge to do without since a lot of resources to create weapons and new troops depends on the rewards gain from them. Speaking of new troops, it’s been 500 years since the last game, and now you got robots (on foot, air and cavalry) giving the setting a slight steampunk flavor. There’s some cool additions like chimeras and ghosts too. The mage troops are now very much improved, with ranged attacks and able to counter a lot more unit types than before. The titular Dragon troops are nerfed, being much harder to find and not as overpowering.
The bad: Since the majority of foes and end-game consist of goblin armies, beating this game mostly boils down to using cavalry/centaurs and mages/archers. Which is very unfortunate since the other more interesting unit types were made almost useless.
Don’t you just hate it: Enemy spamming all their magic points on you before retreating from the battle?
As of post, I’ve completed Sanice’s campaign; maybe I will work on Evers’s next?
Kampong Video Gaming 