Dragon Quest VIII: Journey of the Cursed King is the first Dragon Quest game I finished since the original Dragon Warrior. It was one of those games I started, got distracted and nearly gave up on. But once I returned to it, I was completely hooked and played until I finished it. Here are my final thoughts.

Story

I have to admit that I wasn’t particularly gripped by the story at first. Sure the characters were funny and Dhoulmagus was an interesting villain but I wasn’t sure why he had cursed King Trode and stolen the sceptre. It took awhile for the story to develop but once it did, I was much more involved and wanted to see what happened. It was pleasantly surprising to realize why Dhoulmagus had been killing people and the revelation of the actual evil presence behind the story was a lot of fun.

The story was fairly simple (or should I say straightforward?) and ultimately boiled down to “bad dude wants to destroy the world and good guys must defeat him.” There were no complicated, interweaving subplots and things seemed almost grade-school level compared to something like Final Fantasy VII and its complex and confusing narrative. But that was fine with me as DQ8’s story was told well, with a lot of personality. It’s nice to not have an angsty, dark hero at the center of things.

The real charm of DQ8’s story lies in its characters. All the major characters were great and I enjoyed finding out their backstories and watching their interactions. I think the developers did a great job of creating a party of three supporting characters that were distinctive and enjoyable to spend time with. Yangus, in particular, was a riot and I’d overhear my children saying “Cor blimey!” from time to time.

Dragon Quest VIII’s towns and their inhabitants were also a highlight of the game. I enjoyed all the side stories from Prince Charmles’ adventures to Yangus’ interaction with his love/nemesis Red to relatively minor characters like the ultra-virile Morrie. Usually I hate running through towns in RPG’s and talking to the residents there but I thoroughly explored every town in DQ8 and enjoyed speaking to every resident.

Dragon Quest VIII’s story gets a 9 out of 10.

Presentation

What can I say? I love cel-shading when it’s done well. Ever since I played Jet Grind Radio on the Dreamcast I liked the look of a cel-shaded game, and Dragon Quest VIII has to be one of the best examples of the technique. Playing through the world of DQ8 is like taking part in a high-quality anime, like a Miyazaki movie. Everything has this distinctive, consistent style from the cities to the characters to the monsters.

And I have to say the crazy monsters were one of the best things about Dragon Quest VIII. I couldn’t wait to find a new creature and my kids and I would grin at the silly animations. How many RPG’s have monsters that turn around and spank their bottoms, leaving your party members shocked and unable to move for the rest of the turn? The quality of the humor and the animations were definitely a high point of the game.

I understand that some gamers were turned off by the silly design and humor and wanted a “serious” game. That’s fine. There will always be games like Oblivion for them. But games overflowing with style like DQ8 are rare and something to be treasured.

Also remarkable is the draw distance in the game. I noticed this early on when I could see an object off in the distance and gradually work my way over to it, with no loading whatsoever. That’s just an amazing feat of programming for a system as “simple” as the Playstation 2. And even when there were loads, such as when we entered a city or a dungeon, they were brief and infrequent.

Almost as impressive as the graphics is the audio in DQ8, particularly the voice acting. With the exception of King Trode, who always had an irritating voice, every character was voiced in a very professional, brilliant way. Yangus was particularly great, but even the run of the mill characters were well-voiced. I don’t understand the reasoning for the Hero remaining silent, so the game gets a small knock for that. But otherwise I almost never skipped past a character’s speech and I usually get bored with dialogue and can’t wait to move on. Compared to Final Fantasy X, the voice acting in DQ8 was nothing short of a revelation.

Last comes the music. I know the Japanese version of DQ8 didn’t have the symphonic score that we North American types get, and that’s a shame for them as the music was uniformly great and the orchestral score really gave the game this grand scope, making it really feel like an epic adventure. It’s a testament to a game when I find myself humming tunes through the week while I’m at work, and that happened all the time with DQ8.

Dragon Quest VIII set a high water mark for presentation for a role-playing game. I give it an amazing 10 out of 10.

Gameplay

Here’s the thing about Dragon Quest VIII’s gameplay: it is, for lack of a better term, old-school. There are random monster encounters that happen frequently. Not so frequently that you can’t take ten steps before fighting but it’s definitely not a system like Final Fantasy XII where the enemies are visible and you can choose how to approach them. Battles are turn-based and can take a minute or two to resolve. This drives some people crazy but DQVIII allows several different strategies during combat. Do I put my enemies to sleep, beat the crap out of them, hit them with a fiery inferno or perhaps do the underpants dance and shock them into submission? I like this system but I understand that others don’t.

Character development is also a bit… barren. You can equip armor and weapons. You can spend points on any of the four different skill tracks for your characters, making them better at swords or bows or even magic abilities. You get new skills at prescribed times based on your level or your skill points. But that’s about it for character customization. There are no classes to change and no jobs to develop. You don’t really have a lot of choices that will influence the story or even some of the subplots.

DQ8 also suffers from being unnecessarily vague and could have benefited from more information given to the player. The alchemy pot was a big mystery and I spent (wasted) a lot of time trying to make something useful. Though the recipes were helpful, more clarity would have been nice. I also didn’t know what skills my characters would develop as they progressed up certain skill paths. I would like to have known more clearly what I was aiming for with my skill point allocations. I chose to specialize rather than spread my points among the four options so I was happy but I could see being really frustrated if I hadn’t done that and didn’t have access to some of the higher-level skills at the end of the game.

But despite all this there’s something very compelling about Dragon Quest VIII. The developers have managed to tickle that addictive nerve in me that makes me want to keep playing just a bit more. Part of it is that your characters are always learning new abilities and attacks. Part of it is the ability to make things in the alchemy pot that can give you a tremendous advantage in combat. I personally got quite addicted to the monster arena and enjoyed scouting around for notorious monsters to recruit and improve my monster team. And as I progressed I could take my monster team and call them into a battle which helped a lot with some of the later bosses.

It’s difficult to specify what makes DQ8 so addictive for me, besides just listing the things I liked. Part of the charm is just how “traditional” the game is. There’s a certain simplicity that I found really appealing. Compared to the overly-complicated systems in a game like Final Fantasy VIII, DQ8 almost seems juvenile but there are layers of depth that I discovered as the game progressed.

Dragon Quest VIII gets an 8.5 out of 10 for gameplay.

Conclusion

The true test for me of how much I liked a game is the replay factor. Would I ever want to replay this game again? And with Dragon Quest VIII the answer is definitely “yes!”. Even as I was going through it I was thinking of things I’d like to do differently on a second run-through. All in all, Dragon Quest VIII was a very polished, fun and surprisingly deep game. It had characters I liked, looked flat-out gorgeous and gave me a large world to adventure in. It’s honestly one of the best role-playing games I’ve had the joy of playing.

Final score: 9.2 out of 10

So I’m now finished with Dragon Quest VIII in just a little over 62 hours. It was a great, great game. One of the best I’ve played and I hope to have my review up in the next couple of days.

Two things I want to say now that I’m done. First, the strategy guide is absolutely fucking useless. It’s amazing that they had the audacity to release a strategy guide that is almost completely devoid of strategies or guidance. They say in the introduction that they didn’t want to spoil anything. Great. Thanks. If I don’t want to spoil anything I’m probably not going to be using a strategy guide. But even if they don’t put plot spoilers in the guide, there are still ways to include strategies, a walkthrough, hints on defeating the freaking bosses, something. Instead, we get a picture book with lots of lists and a couple of sentences here and there. What a lazy, useless money-grab. For my occasional walkthrough needs I ended up using Adagio’s well-done walkthrough. The official guide sat on my shelf and collected dust.

Second, I have a funny story about the final boss. I’d tried to defeat him once and got wiped out. I then tried again and got wiped out. I decided I’d give him a third try and if I couldn’t get him then I’d level a bit and work on improving my characters. So on the third try I was doing well. I’d managed to give him a good chunk of damage with my monster team and when my characters got to him we kept our healing up pretty well and were able to quickly resurrect characters that were killed. But the battle went on for a long time and I started to think that I wasn’t going to make it. I had several characters that were on low health and I needed to heal, especially Jessica who was near-death. When choosing my commands, I meant to select her Caduceus ability to heal her but for some reason I selected Attack instead. There was nothing to do at that point, the actions were committed. My other characters started healing themselves and when Jessica’s turn came up, she hit the boss with her staff, did something like 25 points of damage and killed him! My sons who were watching me all started whooping and laughing and I just was dumbfounded that I not only didn’t die but that my weakest melee fighter delivered the killing blow. Good stuff.

Anyway, great game and I’m glad I’m done with it. I know there’s the extra trials and I may give them a shot sometime but for now I’m going to move on to something else. I’ve been wanting to play Dreamfall: the Longest Journey for awhile so I may do that to break things up. It’s not exactly a RPG but I’ll bend the rules a bit as I want to play it and it seems like it’d be a fun game to write about. Plus I may be able to figure out how to take screenshots which would be nice.

I can now turn into a bird and fly anywhere. Pretty sweet, huh? It’s fun exploring places I couldn’t reach before. It also got me thinking about how many RPG’s start you out on foot, then give you a boat and eventually give you some way to fly. Boats and airships are fine but what I really want is to drive a Porsche.

I also think I’m getting near the end of the game as I’m hitting boss fights left and right. I just defeated Marcello and now the sky is a funky shade of red.

For some reason, DQ8 makes me want to explore. I spent an hour last night just wandering around the countryside. I activated the spell that makes weaker monsters avoid you so it was an hour without fighting. Just Ratch (that’s what I call him - Ratch) walking around, looking at stuff. I found a couple of chests laying around and I opened them. I found a structure of some kind on a steep hill. I can’t figure out how to get to it but I’m certain that I’ll wind up there. I sailed a bit. Mostly I just wanted to see stuff.

And that’s the beautiful thing about this game - there’s lots of stuff to see if you want to. Or you can just follow the main plot and stay focused. Insert Credit’s review sums it up quite well:

Dragon Quest VIII’s world map is a hero. It is large, and wide, and persistent. It does not let you go. There are paths to take from each town to the next, and there are countless things that catch your eye and pull you off the path and into a little grove where you’re then killed by gorillas with clubs. Sometimes you find a river emptying into the ocean from a continent you can’t access; you sail up the river between a few fjords, and there, carved into the side of the rock, are the letters “C-A-S-I-N-O.” Inside is, well, a casino. Sometimes you might be an hour into a foot-voyage from one town to its neighboring castle, only to encounter a special monster that can be killed for bounty-hunting purposes. You fight him, are significantly weakened in the process, and then continue on, only to find that you can get up the mountainside the way you’d though you could. Eventually, you find an alternate route up, only to be told at the gates that you look suspicious and aren’t welcome. Nearly out of magic points with which to heal yourself, you’re stuck in the middle of nowhere. It’s at these helpless moments that the game feels like a brilliant piece of work.

 

The instruction manual warns you, on page one, “Try not to get lost.” It is not chiding you about your poor sense of direction. It is sincerely warning you that this game is staggering in its scope.

I couldn’t agree more. It’s quite clear that the developers lovingly crafted this place to play. One of my favorite things to do the last couple of days is to roam around looking for Infamous Monsters to fight. You never quite know where you’ll find one so you have to go looking for them. When I do see one off in the distance, I’m happy to see him but I’m also happy just exploring and seeing what’s out there.

I bought Dragon Quest VIII within a week or two of its release. I had never really played a Dragon Quest game before, with the exception of the first one which I did finish. I was excited for DQ8 and tore into it as soon as I got it and played compulsively for about 20 hours. That seemed like a long time to me until I realized that I was not even halfway through the game. Maybe not even a quarter of the way through. Other games came along and I let DQ8 sit on the shelf for two years.

But the thing is, I wanted to play it. I found myself thinking about it from time to time. I wondered where the story was going to go. I’d remember a dungeon or some of the enemies and I’d really want to get back to it. So when I rearranged my gaming area so I could have easy access to my Sony Wega CRT, I hooked my PS2 up right away and began playing once again. That was roughly two weeks ago and I’m now over 40 hours into DQ8. We just made it to Orkutsk if that tells you where I am in the game.

And I’m completely hooked at this point. The game is so polished, so beautiful, so streamlined and fun that I can’t see stopping until I finish the game.