(also hi I'm alive)

Gotta say, I'm very impressed with this remake.

It's really pretty, first of all. Really, really pretty.

I liked the extra flashbacks that gave Ortega some characterization.

It made it hurt harder when he died.

(And seeing the mom at the end of the credits definitely hit hard. That poor woman.)

They didn't go over the top with re-localizing it, too, which meant it felt familiar and wasn't as overwhelming as modern Dragon Quest can get with the horrible puns.

(I grew up with the GBC version.)

I liked the extra minibosses they added in, mostly. Sometimes they felt a tiny bit shoehorned, but mostly they were good checks to see how the party was doing.

For the record, I ran Monster Wrangler->Warrior (super late), Cleric->Sage, and Thief->Martial Artist. Optimal? Probably not. But it worked.

The Monster Wrangler class is so good.

The scavenger hunt for the friendly monsters was honestly my favorite part. ^^

(So says she whose favorite game of all time is one of the monsters spin offs, but.)

The game was pretty well balanced, too, I think.

Prayer rings are plentiful and I swear they lowered the chance for them to break by a lot, which made it easier to not have to worry as much about MP.

But at the same time, some of those boss fights it was important to think about strategy and what you were equipping. Like, some of them hit super hard, so you wanted to up your defenses, while others liked certain statuses, so defense against those is good. Or at least, I found it less "just press A" than the GBC version.

There are a couple of nitpicks I have, of course. The items you can find on the map and in secret spots, while fun especially at first... later on it becomes kind of sad to find just a copper sword when you're on your way to fight Zoma.

And like, the Mage spell list still contains Unlock (or Click, I guess they're calling it now), learned at level 35, and like, it made sense back in the day because then you could store your keys in the bank and not have to worry, but there's no need for that now because inventory is limitless, so like, unless you're going to level grind... why?

But those are ultimately nitpicks, and I very much enjoyed my time with this game.

(Though I might do enough of the post game to find the rest of the post game monsters to add to my collection.)

I very much look forward to when I+II HD-2D comes out.

(And not that they'll do it, I know they won't do it, and even if they did Squeenix is a bunch of cowards who would never localize it... but if they remade Monsters 2 in this style, with the mechanical improvements from Dark Prince... that might actually have a shot of surpassing the original. They won't... but I can dream.)