played this after III and I which makes it evident this is where the growing pains are. the skeleton of a better game is here in that the JRPG mechanics are as airtight as ever but it really suffers with some balancing issues; the prince of cannock wasn't well thought out in his role as a party member (supposed to be a "jack of all trades" character but the game doesn't commit to making him a strength powerhouse or a full on mage so he's kind of just mediocre at both), the endgame is an insane gauntlet that sort of requires some good RNG with encounters or else you wont be fully equipped to deal with the final boss and it's a pain to traverse the open world without a reliable fast travel after a certain point

a lot of the missteps can be attributed to a short dev time and luckily a lot of the ideas presented here are fine tuned and made 100x better in DQIII but in hindsight maybe i shouldve saved III for last instead....