Day Three is now finished.  This was an odd chapter.  At the end of Day Two they had stumbled upon Maeda, a Japanese scientist who seems to know a lot about Eve and mitochondria.  Our group joined forces with Maeda to try to figure out what is going on.  Maeda needed equipment from a lab so it was off to the museum once we raided an abandoned ammo store and a pharmacy.

Once at the museum, Maeda was able to determine that Aya has the unusual ability to repel Eve’s mitochondrial assault.  How did Aya get this ability?  Hmm?

Once done there, it was back to the police station only to find that Eve had attacked the boys in blue.  Cops were down all over the place and Barret (err… um….I mean Daniel of course) discovers that his son has ran off in search of the police dog Sheeva.

As a side note, it seems that Square has some fixed ideas about black men.  Much like Barret, Daniel is loud, gruff and usually handles things by force.  At the ammo store he shoots the lock off the door, prompting Maeda to remark “Are you sure he’s a cop?”  Daniel also has a son and is effectively a single parent.  Swap his suit for a Mohawk and a machine gun attached to his arm and he could slip pretty easily into Barret’s shoes or vice-versa.

As Aya progressed through the station she eventually came to what was left of Sheeva.  In another thoroughly disgusting CG movie, we see Sheeva’s head split open and turn into some sort of nasty, three-headed Cerberus creature.

I beat Sheeva the first time after dying twice and being Revived by an item I was carrying each time.  I didn’t want to waste these Revives as I only had two of them so I tried Sheeva a second time and died once.  That still wasn’t satisfactory for me so on the third try I put poor Sheeva out of her misery without dying once.

And that brings me to my main complaint about fighting in Parasite Eve.  I hate the fact that they give you cramped quarters to fight sometimes three or four different enemies.  I’m not the most dexterous person out there and I spend most of the battles running from the enemies, waiting for my energy to recover so I can heal myself and try to get a few shots off when I can.

I really like turn-based battles.  They are a good match for my ham-hands and slow reflexes.

So here I am at the end of Final Fantasy VIII after 44 hours and two previous attempts to finish the game.  After all that, was this game worth almost two whole days of my life?  Here’s my review.  The Presentation and Gameplay sections should be safe to read if you haven’t finished FF8 while the Story section spoils the whole dang thing.  Beware!

Presentation

After the well-received Final Fantasy 7, all eyes were on Squaresoft as they were preparing to release their follow-up.  What would it be like?  And could it top the visual feast that was FF7?  I remember watching the television ads for Final Fantasy 8 and being wowed by the characters I was seeing.  Of course I knew it was a computer animated movie that I was watching but it was still impressive.  I think a lot of people bought Final Fantasy VIII because they wanted to see something spectacular coming out of their little grey Sony box.

And they weren’t disappointed - Final Fantasy 8 is a gorgeous game.  Blah, blah, pixellated characters, blah, blah, prerendered cutscenes, blah, blah, doesn’t age gracefully and so on.  Well bite me because Final Fantasy 8 was and still remains a visually stunning game.

I have to admire the developers for taking a risk (I will be coming back to this idea frequently).  Final Fantasy 7 featured very stylized, anime-inspired characters.  They gave the game a certain look, a visual consistency even with the big heads and the low-polygon bodies and the lack of noses.  That became the look of Final Fantasy for most people.  FF8 chucked all that and gave us realistic looking characters with (well almost) normal clothes, believable movements and a much more “mature” look.  When I first saw Squall laying on the bed in the infirmary I thought “He looks real.  How’d they do that?”

Now the truth is I much prefer unique, stylized characters.  I didn’t mind Cloud’s spiky hair and Zidane’s tail was alright by me.  Looking back, I think the PS1 did a better job representing those sorts of characters than the realistic chaps populating Final Fantasy 8.  While it lost some of the traditional fantasy trappings, the technical skill involved in creating FF8’s characters is undeniable.

The backgrounds are also, once again, simply gorgeous.  Obviously they are low-rez by today’s standards but I remember what it was like when these games were released and they were beautiful.  I’m impressed at the amount of work that went into creating each screen in the game.

Final Fantasy 7 set the bar high with its CG cutscenes and everyone expected amazing things on FF8’s four CD’s.  The opening cutscene as Squall and Seifer face each other with swords and feathers and grass and Rinoa and the beach was marvelous.  Another high point is the dance between Squall and Rinoa which was lovely, overflowing with warmth and perfectly set up the contrasting lead characters.  Now I have to say that the ending cutscenes were jarring and unpleasant to watch.  Maybe they weren’t explained well by the story, but they seemed to drag on and on and had definitely lost the “wow” factor by that point.

My main criticism of the visuals in Final Fantasy 8 is that Square has created a gorgeous world that seems somewhat generic and bland.  The steampunk-meets-fantasy worlds of FF6 and FF7 were immediately appealing and made me want to learn more.  FF8 presents a standard sci-fi world that was uninspiring to me.

However, I really can’t criticize Nobuo Uematsu’s musical score.  Maybe FF8 didn’t have quite the same number of memorable songs as its predecessors but they also didn’t have Liberi Fatali - a stunning song, made more so by the fact that it sounded nothing like other Final Fantasy music.  As always, I grew tired of some of the repetitiousness of the music and Balamb Garden’s theme song was a particular culprit.  I actually liked Laguna’s battle theme more than Squall’s and Eyes on Me was okay the first time I heard it but once was enough.  But on the whole this is another superior production from Uematsu-san.

Final Fantasy VIII gets an 8 out of 10 for presentation.

Story

Most good stories have both a compelling protagonist and antagonist, someone to identify with as he or she struggles against obstacles.  Like most console RPG’s, you don’t get to choose your protagonist, you’re stuck with Squall for better or worse.  A lot of people didn’t like Squall’s whiny “dark” nature and were quickly turned off from the game.  I sympathize with them as he is a big butthead for most of the game but I really didn’t mind him.  I knew he’d redeem himself and eventually he did.  Along the way Square took an interesting approach with Squall by showing us his thoughts.  Most of the time in console RPG’s we don’t get an insight into what characters are thinking.  Instead we get the infamous “…” response.  I can’t say that knowing Squall’s whiny “dark” thoughts made a huge difference in the game but it was an interesting change for Square.

His progression in the game came mostly from his growing romance with Rinoa.  While Squall is brooding and dark, Rinoa is all smiles and lightness.  it was amusing to watch them interact and to see her gradually work her way into his heart.  They don’t really answer the question of why she would find this asshole so attractive so we’ll have to leave that question for her therapist to answer.

The supporting cast is good but doesn’t really stand out.  Selphie is the typically cute but silly female with the short dress.  Zell pumps his fists in the air and acts brash.  Irvine mostly disappeared into the woodwork and Quistis seemed like she might have had a lot of depth to her character but they never really took her there.  I wish she’d had a more clearly defined love triangle with Squall and Rinoa.  It would have been nice had there been a stronger focus on an ensemble cast as Squall just wasn’t charismatic enough to carry the game.  Cloud wasn’t either but Barett, Tifa and Aeris more than made up for it.

What about an evil villain?  There was definitely no Kefka in the background of most scenes cackling maniacally.  Edea made a respectable baddie for the first part of the game and the scene where they tried to assassinate her was a lot of fun.  But eventually we realize she’s just a tool of the evil Ultimecia who is mostly faceless and nonthreatening until the end of the game.  Seifer had the potential to be an excellent counterpart to Squall but he disappeared quickly and when he did return he was relegated to The Big Bad’s Sidekick.  Instead of being held together by a nefarious villain, FF8 emphasizes a more personal story involving Squall, Rinoa and their friends.

And the backstory with Laguna?  It was an interesting diversion but ultimately felt distracting from the main plot.  Without any clear connection between the two until much later, Squall & co.’s story completely lost momentum whenever Laguna made an appearance.  While all the loose threads with Laguna’s group eventually came together, the whole side-story felt unnecessary and should have been left on the cutting room floor.

Ultimately, Final Fantasy VIII had a merely average story that lacked the depth and breadth of other games in the series.  I appreciate what the developers were trying to do and a change from the norm is always welcome but it just didn’t work very well.  The game suffered from trying to make the story both big and small at the same time.  A good game could be made from a focus on Squall’s story, his background, his inner demons and his relationship with Rinoa and his companions.  Another good game could be made from the story of a group of students fighting the evil plans of a time-travelling sorceress.  Trying to do both, the game succeeded at neither.

Final Fantasy VIII’s story gets a 5 out of 10.

Gameplay

The gameplay in FF8 is an odd mixture of awesome and frustrating.  Once again, the developers decided to break from the traditional and do something different.  And they definitely did something very different.

Honestly, at first blush (and second… ) the Guardian Force system was practically impenetrable.  Part of that were the tutorials which threw out a massive amount of text and stats without really showing how to use them.  But the biggest part was the nature of the beast - the GF system is completely different from what came before.  The closest to it was FF5’s job system but it was nowhere near this complex.  I think another reason why I was so bewildered by it was that I typically hadn’t paid attention to character statistics in Final Fantasy games either before or after FF8.  I could complete the game and never really needed to know what Edgar’s strength statistic was.  Not so in FF8 where stats become very important and junctioning GFs are the way to increase them.

And now that I understand the system, it all seems very easy and sensible but I think a lot of gamers spent an hour with the game, got confused and gave up like I did.  I’m glad I stuck with it though as building my GF army and my characters became quite addictive for me.  I’d spend a lot of time avoiding battles and changing enemies into cards to avoid obtaining experience points.  Why?  Because the levels of monsters and bosses scale with you.  If you are low-level then pretty much all the monsters are as well.  And if you grind for experience and spend a lot of time levelling your characters you can easily find yourself facing nearly-impossible bosses later in the game, particularly if you haven’t mastered junctioning and improved your stats.  So, much like Oblivion, I tried to keep my levels as low as possible.  I made it through 80-90% of the game under level 25 and only got up to level 32 shortly before the last dungeon.  It’s an strange gameplay mechanic and I really wish the developer’s decision to level enemies along with you was made very clear from the start of the game so you could plan accordingly.  I wouldn’t have known until later in the game if I hadn’t read about it elsewhere.

Another odd design decision is that your stats are increased by junctioning magic to them.  Magic spells become a commodity in this game which is completely different from any other game I’ve played.  If you want a high HP statistic, you’ll need to junction Cure magic (or Cura, or Curaga… ) to your HP.  The more you junction the higher your HP gets.  But what if you need to cure yourself after a battle?  Then you’re taking away from your junctioned pool of magic and your stat decreases accordingly.  The end result is the system punishes you for using magic and encourages you to hoard spells like precious gold.  I grew so used to not relying on magic that even in the last couple of battles I had a difficult time forcing myself to cast those Ultima spells I’d squirreled away.

Instead I used GF attacks a lot, particularly the awesome Cactaur once I figured out where he was hiding.  The problem with GF attacks is that there’s no way to skip or shorten the summoning animations.  Some of them take the better part of a minute while others (like Cactaur) were blessedly short which meant I used them a lot.

What all this means is that if you don’t really understand the game’s mechanics you can easily paint yourself into a corner where you are high level but have poor stats and the monsters and bosses are wiping the floor with you.  Or you can deliberately keep your levels low, maximize your stats and the game becomes a cakewalk.  At the end of the game Squall was routinely doing 2,000 to 3,000 damage with basic physical attacks.  One Renzokuken limit break was enough to wipe out some bosses.  It seems odd that you are basically encouraged to “break” the game and punished for playing it traditionally.

I liked that FF7’s minigame-happy trend didn’t carry over to FF8 but the minigames that we did have were irritating.  I never want to go through Squall’s mid-air fighting game again.  And, as I mentioned before, the last dungeon sucked.  It was unnecessarily punishing and filled with somewhat obscure puzzles and boss battle after boss battle.  I can’t think of another dungeon I hated more. 

Final Fantasy’s gameplay truly had a split personality, alternating between fantastic and irritating.  I’d love to see the GF/Junctioning system make another appearance in a more polished game but I’m not sure we’ll see that happen.

Final Fantasy VIII’s gameplay gets a 6 out of 10.

Conclusion

FF8 is known as the black sheep of the franchise but there are also very zealous fans out there.  Now that I’m finished with the game I can certainly see why.  There’s a lot to like in this game but there are equally frustrating and questionable design decisions.  Kudos to Squaresoft for not resting on their FF7-colored laurels and trying to break the mold.  While they succeeded in creating a unique game, it’s difficult to overlook its shortcomings.

Final score: 6.3 out of 10.

Yes it does suck.  Sucks badly in fact.  But Paul, why does it suck?

Once you enter the final dungeon, the game cancels out pretty much every command except for attack.  You can’t save, use items, resurrect dead party members, draw or summon GF’s.  And you have to fight a string of about eight bosses.  After you defeat a boss you get to choose one option that had been cancelled out at the start of the dungeon.  So I chose GF so I could spam Cactaur.  I love that little green dude and he does 4,000 damage and arrives really quickly.

But Quistis died during the next battle.  I can’t use a Phoenix Down to bring her back, I can’t cast Life as magic is out and I can’t go back to a recent save as I haven’t been able to save in the castle.  Without her, I died in the next boss battle so I had to start over at the beginning of the castle.

So I fight the first boss all over again not letting Quistis die this time.  I’d really like to be able to save but I also want to use Draw and all the other options.  But if I chose to recover the Save ability then I’m sorta gimping myself for the next battle as I can’t cast Magic or Draw new magic or use items or…  You get the idea.

It sucks badly.  It basically guarantees that you have to repeat the dungeon several times, re-fighting the same bosses over again and hoping you haven’t chosen your skill setup poorly.  If so, you’ll be starting all over with the dungeon again.

Man this game is puzzling.  On the one hand there is a really interesting character development and battle system.  I wrote about this before but if I let myself, I could spend most of my time fiddling with characters, increasing their levels and stats and min/maxing to my heart’s content.  But I’m not sure I’d really enjoy it, ya know?  That sort of thing only carries me so far.

On the other hand, there’s the story and the characters.  I’m nearing the end of disc 3 so I’m guessing I’m less than 10 hours from the end of the game and my desire to finish the game is fading.  Last night I watched an overblown, long, drawn-out scene where Rinoa was floating through space, thinking to herself.  Then Squall arrives to save the day and it continues to drag on and on.  I was hoping for an asteroid to collide with them after about 5 minutes.

And it’s not really Squall that I don’t like.  Sure he’s a big penis-head but he’s manageable.  It’s the ensemble of characters that don’t work for me.  It’s the setting that seems very generic and without soul.  I can’t help but compare FF8 with both FF7 and FF9 and its shortcomings are getting more and more noticeable.

I’ll finish the game and I’ll write a review when I’m done.  But it’s starting to get a bit tedious for me.

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.

I never even got to play Iron Lore’s Titan Quest and the Immortal Throne expansion before they shut down. Reading something like this by Michael Fitch at THQ is both fascinating and also makes me very sad for the sake of PC gaming:

So, ILE shut down. This is tangentially related to that, not why they shut down, but part of why it was such a difficult freaking slog trying not to. It’s a rough, rough world out there for independent studios who want to make big games, even worse if you’re single-team and don’t have a successful franchise to ride or a wealthy benefactor. Trying to make it on PC product is even tougher, and here’s why.

Piracy. Yeah, that’s right, I said it…

Titan Quest did okay. We didn’t lose money on it. But if even a tiny fraction of the people who pirated the game had actually spent some god-damn money for their 40+ hours of entertainment, things could have been very different today. You can bitch all you want about how piracy is your god-given right, and none of it matters anyway because you can’t change how people behave… whatever. Some really good people made a seriously good game, and they might still be in business if piracy weren’t so rampant on the PC. That’s a fact.

I did buy legitimate copies through Steam so I tried to do my part. There’s plenty of people who play the game and don’t pay for it. I paid for it and haven’t played it yet but I don’t think that balances things out very much.

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.