Dragon Warrior II, known in Japan as Dragon Quest II, was developed by Chunsoft and published by Enix, again written and designed by series creator Yuji Horii with Koichi Nakamura directing, character art from Akira Toriyama, and music by Koichi Sugiyama. It released for the Famicom in Japan in January 1987 and reached the NES in North America in September 1990 through Enix’s American subsidiary. The sequel expanded meaningfully on the original’s simple one-hero formula, growing the party to three playable descendants of the first game’s hero, introducing battles against multiple enemies at once instead of strictly one-on-one encounters, and spreading the adventure across several distinct continents reachable by ship. Players guide the Prince of Midenhall and two allied royals as they hunt down the pieces of a sacred artifact needed to stop the resurrected evil wizard Hargon, working through a much longer and more demanding quest than the first game offered. Its bigger scope and party-based structure pushed the fledgling Dragon Quest formula significantly further and helped set the template the series, and the wider JRPG genre, would keep building on for years afterward.