Trivia / Dragon Quest II

• Absurdly Short Production Time: The game was created in just six months, in an attempt to release it around Christmas. However Horii realized that it was simply not enough time for play testing and the release was extended another month, so the game was released after seven months of development. Even then, this was not enough time as it was realized later on that nobody on the production team had even completed the game when it shipped. Horii admitted that he himself had only reached the part of the game where the party acquires the ship.
• Late Export for You: The NES version was released in North America three years after it was originally released in Japan.
• No Export for You: Neither the NES version nor the GBC remake were released in Europe.
• Port Overdosed: As with the first game, this one has been rereleased many times.
• What Could Have Been: DQII originally had cutscenes which were cut because of memory limitations:
  Yuji Horii: The memory limitations we had with DQII caused us no shortage of strife.
  The first unfortunate victim were the large kamishibai-esque pictures we planned to use for cut scenes and such. We put them in at first, but as the graphics memory got larger and larger in the end we had to remove them and abandon the idea. I imagine few people have noticed this, but we stealthily printed one of those images in the story section of the DQII instruction manual. Of course on the famicom it would have actually been in color.
  • Horii's original ending of the game was a massive Downer Ending. In it, the Prince of Cannock would have died during the fight with Malroth. At the celebration at the end the Princess of Cannock, insane with grief, would have killed the Prince of Midenhall by stabbing him in the chest.
  • Akira Toriyama's original rough artwork for the Prince of Cannock depicted him as a Beast Man in a musketeer-esque outfit, possibly indicating that he was not initially intended to be related to the Prince of Midenhall whatsoever.

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