YMMV / Quest for Glory II

• Anti-Climax Boss: The last elemental, the water elemental, is talked up as the biggest threat but is actually the easiest to beat. With the other elementals, you have to search for something to exploit their one weakness. With the Water Elemental, you already have what you need as a result of just playing the rest of the game. The only thing that might slow you down is needing a reminder from Aziza which element to use against it.
• Anvilicious: The message that wizards get from the Dervish ("Wizards sit and study problem while a hero solves it") and Erasmus ("What good is magic or knowledge unless you use them?") and the Nonstandard Game Over that they get if they decide to stay at the Wizards' Institute of Technocery might be laying it on a bit thick.
• Complete Monster: Ad Avis, the Big Bad, is a cruel, misogynistic wizard who takes over the city of Raseir, where he turns it into a hellhole where slavery is permitted, women are forced into harems and treated as dogs while Ad Avis slowly drains all the magical life force in the city. Seemingly defeated, Ad Avis returns in the fourth game.
• Demonic Spiders: Like So You Want to Be a Hero, the worst monster you can run into is a bigger, meaner variety of saurus, this time the terrorsaurus. Very quick and very strong, they can take a lot of hits and there is utterly no reason to fight one besides puzzle points for the Fighter class (and proving how badass your character is).
  • The Fan Remake take that up to eleven by turning the Ghouls into spellcasters. Oh, and they still retain their chilling claws ability.
    • Also from the remake: one jackalman is a joke. Two or three jackalmen are annoying, but manageable once you've learned how to kick them away. Four or five jackalmen is an utter nightmare that will surround you from all sides and cut you to pieces.
• Funny Moments:
  • Every time your Saurus barges in the city to find you, and a guard comes to tell you to bring it back to the stable.
  • Culminated by the moment when the Saurus barges in Aziza's house and the Hero makes a Face Fault. Given how big Aziza is on good manners, it is understandable the hero is utterly ASHAMED at the scene his Saurus is making.
    • Even more hilarious is how Aziza retains her cool and merely greets the Saurus. After all, he passed her tests since he managed to open the door!
  • The Cutscene Power to the Max moment where the hero pulls a Cloud Cuckoolander moment after beating the brigand horde.
  • A hidden little scene takes place in the remake between Shema and Shameen if you give the former a certain amount (over 200) of flowers. (The gesture boosts communication and honor, so many players buy truckloads of flowers and overload Shema with them in order to grind stats) First Shameen reveals to Shema the exact amount of flowers the player's given her over the last few days. Then Shema starts openly wondering whether the hero's suffering from a compulsion, sharing a little story about a merchant who had to tap his pouch after every sale he made. Then Shameen points out he's seen the hero looking at his stat sheet after giving the flowers and suggests the hero's grinding honor points. This causes Shema to point out that gestures of kindness purely for the sake of gaining stats are not very honorable after all. Shameen then mentions it'll probably stop once the hero's honor and communication stat hit 200 (the maximum value) and the two of them decide that humoring the player in order to boost the livelyhood of the flower merchant outside their inn is the honorable thing to do.
  • The Thief PC being ordered by Ferrari to steal the black bird statue for him. When it's time to give it to him, the vast majority of the players will type: "GIVE FERRARI THE BIRD", which the text parser and Ferrari will interpret as Flipping the Bird.
• Narm: The Water Elemental's Non-Standard Game Over. The Fire Elemental burns down Shapeir, Air destroys it with a hurricane, Earth causes an earthquake, so you'd think Water would summon a tidal wave or something. Instead, it just wiggles in place for a few seconds and the city spontaneously crumbles.
  • When you consider what the water elemental actually does (suck all of the water out of its immediate vicinity) and what the Dervish says about magic and water ("Without it, Shapeir is like sand"), it's pretty clear that the Water Elemental destroys Shapeir through lack rather than surfeit of water.
• Scrappy Mechanic: In the original, you could only rest (to quickly advance time) in your bedroom. Since the sleeping rooms in Raseir were only available at night, this meant you had to stand around doing nothing for a long time, since there was very little to do. The remake fixed it by letting you rest in most places and putting a few convenient time-skips at points where the developers knew people would run out of stuff to do.
• Tear Jerker: Completing Julanar's quest was impressively moving for the limits adventure games had at the time.
• That One Attack: The pizza rain attack is the single greatest reason the Pizza Elemental in the AGD remake is the hardest fight in the game. Its punches are easy to evade, the extremely high defense just prolongs the fight, and even the One-Hit Kill attack can be easily broken free of, and in fact doing so prevents the boss from healing itself and leaves itself open when it tries to do so. But the rain of pizzas has no pattern (other than when the boss is setting up the One-Hit Kill attack) lasts the entire fight, can hit anywhere (though it's less likely to hit directly in front of the boss) and can sometimes fall in such a way that there's no way to dodge everything. It also knocks the player down when it hits, and can hit multiple times, easily pinning the player down and forcing them to take a ton of hits before they can move again.
• Underused Game Mechanic: The climbing skill is hardly used in the game. Fortunately, the fan remake remedy this by allowing you to train it by climbing the Dervish's tree.
  • Throwing skill for fighters. As in the first game, you can pick up rocks from the wilderness and throw them, or throw daggers at approaching enemies; however, there are no puzzles in this game that require a fighter to throw anything. (Every problem that a fighter can solve by throwing something can also be solved with brute force.) Even worse, throwing is essential in the next game, which means you'll either be grinding it here, or grinding it later.