Musou-ing On Dragon Quest Heroes II’s Colourful Hacking & Slashing

The most important thing to do when you start playing Dragon Quest Heroes II and, in fact, almost any RPG that lets you, is to pick the right name for your character. In this case, though, you get two characters, a brother and sister called Lazarel and Teresa by default, who you can get as creative as you like with. After much teeth gnashing from the PR that looked on despairingly, I settled on something rather tame. A girl named Pritt and her brother Stick were ready to venture forth and hack and slash every Dragon Quest-themed enemy that stood in their way.

Though there’s nary a mention of Warriors or Musou in the title, this is very much Omega Force’s bread and butter, throwing tons and tons of enemies your way and giving you the cathartic release of carving your way through them with a variety of weapons and some huge screen-clearing attacks.

Dishing out damage, taking hits and picking up certain things on the battlefield all add to your character’s Tension – AKA Musou. Fill up the Tension meter and you can temporarily turn invincible, able to spam as many of the magic attacks as you possibly can in the time before the meter drains. Just be sure to tap Circle as you’re about to run out to unleash one last Finishing Blow.

A brief tutorial where Pritt and Stick engage in some friendly sparring while the soup simmers on the stove, their catching up and reverie while sat at an unusually high table is interrupted by a huge explosion at the city gates, the city suddenly under attack after years and years of peace between the Seven Realms. They’re not yet knight of Harba, but now that they’re all warmed up, they dash towards the unfolding chaos to help out the city guards as best they can.

Truth be told, I actually kind of suck at this game. I’m not someone that’s overly familiar with the Musou niche that Omega Force have carved out for themselves, and so I simply charge in there with gleeful abandon, hammering away at the simplistic attack combos, occasionally breaking out one of the big spells when my MP has recharged, and so on. It’s not exactly tricky to pick up and play, especially after years of experience reading and editing our steady stream of Musou game reviews, but I’m always getting caught out.

What I’m not expecting is for the game to require any real concentration. Certainly, the opening encounter is fairly trivial, but when the Night Clubber shows up with sweeping attacks that knock you flying, I realise I need to start trying to figure out how to dodge his attacks. Later, going up against burly guys with hooded capes and what are, to all intents and purposes, googly eyes, I’m also getting hit, and the game throws a number of these tougher enemies at you and your party all at once. Luckily the AI does a half decent job of keeping them preoccupied, but I’m still taking hits. Then again, I’m distracted by trying to figure out how these hulking guys can manage to hide in bushes, often two or three to a bush, and what they were doing to make the bushes rustle so noticeably…

I really should have learnt my lesson, because we soon move on to trying out the cooperative dungeons. Supporting up to four players online, you can team up to take on bespoke multi-stage timed labyrinths, which essentially drop you into relatively nondescript rooms and ask you to batter everything you can see.

It’s here that I got to really feel the effects of the levelling system, which is much more nuanced here than it is in other Musou games. Having blazed a trail to reach level 3 and be able to access the online co-op, there’s an awful lot of enemies here, and it takes time to churn through them all. It’s made tougher still when the Mawkeeper pops up, opens a portal and brings more enemies through, some of which can be particularly big Golems that can soak up tons and tons of damage.

Again, I’m getting caught out by my seeming inability to learn how to read the enemies and dodge them, but now it’s worse, because some of these can wipe out well over half of my health. Co-op play lets you resurrect fallen buddies using Leaves of the World Tree, or just wait the 30-odd seconds until you respawn, and while you’re in these dungeons, you have three healing crystals to use throughout its length. You can, however, pick up coins and items from the fallen enemies, allowing you to summon them back to fight alongside you and serve as a distraction, pull a one-time attack, or even transforming you into one of them, able to use a handful of their attacks until you run out of health and return back to your more human form.

Even with that, it was a long and torrid struggle to battle through these areas, and we eventually succumbed at the final hurdle, with armoured quadruped Dungeon Masters firing seemingly endless streams of arrows at us or swiping with their long blades. It forced us right back to the very beginning of the labyrinth, but now at a higher level from having battled hard for the last fifteen minutes. It made those first couple of rooms much easier to deal with, but… we still died to the Dungeon Masters. Perhaps it’ll be easier with four of us? Or, more accurately, three people to revive me?

Dragon Quest Heroes II does an admirable job of taking elements from the mainline RPG series, helping to make it stand out from the crowd of other Musou games. There’s much of an action RPG underneath it all, with character skills opening up as you play, a game that has you venturing out into the open world between towns, the bright and colourful graphics, and the barmy characters, many of whom have cheesy regional accents, even in their subtitles. To my untrained eye, it’s a game with the body of Omega Force’s Musou games, but with the heart of Dragon Quest.