Dragon Quest 2 Name Calculator/Finder

[Deozaan]

This will be of interest to virtually nobody, but I'm announcing some new software I made here anyway.

As mentioned previously, in recent months I've been playing some old emulated console games, including the original Dragon Quest games, which were known as Dragon Warrior in the USA on the NES. Dragon Quest 2 randomizes the names of the two other party members who join you on your journey, based on the name you give to the main character.

I remember as a youth feeling particularly fond of the names of the two party members I got, who were named Glynn and Gwen, but couldn't remember the hero name I had chosen to get those names. So I did some research and found the formula used to calculate the names of the hero's cousins (they're all descendants of the hero from Dragon Quest 1). After manually calculating a few of my best guesses and not getting the results I wanted, I decided to write a utility (using Godot 4) where I could enter in a name and it would calculate and display the names of the hero's cousins for me, significantly speeding up the process of guessing.

After I finished that, I still couldn't find a hero's name I might have used to get the names I wanted. So I also added a feature to brute-force search all possible hero names given a specific pair of names for the cousins.

With the brute-force searcher, I found the hero name I had entered as a child and also found a new hero name I wanted to use that still gives me the companion names I want and have started a playthrough of the game. Now that I've done that, this tool will probably never be used again by anyone, including myself. But I've decided to make it available anyway, because it might be useful to someone, somewhere. Especially considering the games have somewhat recently been re-released as a collection on Nintendo Switch and probably other consoles. Speaking of which, I've only tested this on the USA version of Dragon Warrior 2 (for NES), so I make no guarantees that you'll get the same results on any other version.

Here's a couple of screenshots showing how it works:

Dragon Quest 2 Name Calculator/Finder

Dragon Quest 2 Name Calculator/Finder

If you want to play around with it, you can do so here:
https://deozaan.itch.io/dq2namer

[KynloStephen66515]

What was the original name you chose as a kid?

I have no idea what this game is, and have no use for the tool, but I'm invested in that part of the story haha

[Deozaan]

It was a nickname I was often called as a child which I'd prefer not to share for privacy reasons. 🙂

I had actually tried the same name with the calculator as one of my many guesses, but I got different results because as an adult making guesses of all the names I recalled using in games as a child, I was capitalizing the first letter and no others. Whereas the name I wrote as a child had no such regard for proper capitalization of names. 😅

[KynloStephen66515]

It was a nickname I was often called as a child which I'd prefer not to share for privacy reasons. 🙂

I had actually tried the same name with the calculator as one of my many guesses, but I got different results because as an adult making guesses of all the names I recalled using in games as a child, I was capitalizing the first letter and no others. Whereas the name I wrote as a child had no such regard for proper capitalization of names. 😅

-Deozaan (May 16, 2023, 04:58 PM)

Haha that's fair enough, and a cute story

[Deozaan]

Well, after about 15 hours (and liberal use of the emulator's fast-forward feature when grinding levels), I can say my quest is complete. 😁

Dragon Quest 2 Name Calculator/Finder

And I got all the RetroAchievements for the game, too. 🤓