Air Chrysalis (Day 234)

Dragon Quest II has a vast world map, especially for a game that was originally released on the Famicom. Granted, it doesn't have twisted labyrinthine dungeons like Faria, but the map itself does cover an extremely large area. It's much bigger than the world maps of games like Final Fantasy VI. In a way this is pretty cool. There's a lot of stuff to explore. However, when your travels take you from city to city it gets a bit tedious to sail all the way between them--especially since the developers declined to include a map of any kind. I've had to resort to using a map online, which gets pretty annoying. I wish I had a printer.

The game is definitely more about exploration than its predecessor. Once you acquire the ship it becomes incredibly non-linear. It reminds me a little bit of the World of Ruin in Final Fantasy VI or the latter portions of Chrono Trigger--except it happens a lot earlier. Even at these early stages of the game, I'm tracking down important items that I assume I'll be needing for late game like the Water Flying Clothes and several of the Erdrick armor pieces.

I'm not sure exactly how much longer the game is, but I'm enjoying it pretty far despite the tedium of traveling all over the world. I'm looking forward to Dragon Quest III since it has a class system and a four character party. After that, I'll be moving on to the DS remakes of IV, V, and VI. Now, there's a very good chance that I stall out right in the middle of this process, but at the very least I'm going to beat this one. For right now I'm not really tired of the series so I'd like to continue on. 

I'm not really certain why I keep taking on these ambitious video game projects. I think maybe once I'm an old man I will have finished everything but it's pretty unrealistic to think that I'm going to beat the entire Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy series--at least not in a timely fashion. Granted, I'm almost done with Final Fantasy but I have this way of getting sidetracked. I have at least 50 games I still need to finish and that doesn't include any of the games I plan to tackle in the future. Maybe I'm going a little crazy here.

Why do I have this compulsive need to finish so many games? I guess it's just sort of an obsessive tendency that I have coupled with this desire to have something to write about. Coming up with something to write about every day when my life is so uneventful is actually pretty challenging. I have to come up with new things so I play a ton of games. I can't just play the same old games all the time because I run out of things to write about. It's not like I don't enjoy playing all these games--I really do. It satisfies my completionist compulsion and gives me writing material at the same time. It's a win-win.