Dragon Quest 2 CD Theater/CDシアタードラゴンクエスト2

Dragon Quest 2 CD Theater

If you’re interested in other books in the series, check out my other overviews below!

Dragon Quest 1 CD Theater/CDシアタードラゴンクエスト1

Here we have part 2 of the Dragon Quest CD Theater series! The Dragon Quest 2 CD Theater follows in the same footsteps as the first volume (the rest of the series does too, naturally…), you’ll follow along with the story and events that take place in Dragon Quest 2 with a narrator explaining what’s happening. The illustration booklet that comes along with the CD is once again filled with various illustrations of areas, people, monsters, and important events that you’ll come across during the course of the game.

 

 

 

 

Considering there’s a lot more Story going on in Dragon Quest 2, the illustration booklet for the Dragon Quest 2 CD Theater provides a lot more illustrations of story-related events and  important characters that you’ll meet throughout the quest, whereas I feel the booklet for the Dragon Quest 1 CD Theater had more pictures of items, environments, and random fights with monsters (they were fights with special monsters, at least!).

I definitely felt that Dragon Quest 2 did a much better job presentation-wise of the story events in the game compared to Dragon Quest 1. The same goes for the Dragon Quest 1 and 2 CD Theaters – the Dragon Quest 2 CD Theater book had quite a few illustrations that looked almost exactly like how I imagined the scenarios looked like in game, which I thought was really cool!

They definitely went all out for each character they drew, even characters that you only have 1 or 2 quick interactions with. Definitely something they didn’t even need to do, but I personally really appreciated it a lot!

Length-wise, the Dragon Quest 2 CD Theater runs for about pretty much the same as the first, clocking in at a little over an hour. There’s definitely a lot more variety going on this time around, as there are 3 main characters instead of just a single one from the first game. While I didn’t particularly find the first one boring or monotone, there just seems to be a lot more going on this time, which should be expected when you have a party of 3 adventuring together!

For anyone looking to pick up a physical copy of the Dragon Quest 2 CD Theater, you won’t have much trouble if you live in Japan. While these are still rare overall, you can still pick one up for a reasonable price, probably around 1,000 yen, or $10-ish USD. If you’re wanting to try to buy it online from overseas, it looks like it’s even worse than the first one – I just checked Ebay (March 2019) and it looks like pretty much all copies are going for around $80-$100 (8x-10x the price you’d pay in Japan…).

I would imagine that people bought less and less of these as the series progressed, meaning that there are probably a lot more copies of the Dragon Quest 1 CD Theater floating around compared to the later entries, hence the lower price. As the games’ presentation got better and better, a need for something like this probably disappeared altogether, meaning that probably only the most hardcore of fans went out of their way to actually grab a copy of these each time they came out.

If you do buy it, however, you might get lucky and find a copy with the original sticker included! My copy of the Dragon Quest 1 CD Theater didn’t come with one, but it might not have had any extras included to begin with, hopefully.

Once again, there’s a channel that has the audio for the entire CD uploaded to Youtube, so i’ll use that again. If you had fun listening to the first CD, you’ll probably have even more fun listening to this one! While giving it a listen, you should check out my review for the SNES/SFC Remake of Dragon Quest 2!

If you have even more free time, i’d love it if you’d check out my review for the SNES/SFC Remake of Dragon Quest I & II (Dragon Quest 1)/ドラゴンクエストI・II (ドラゴンクエスト1), too!