i played a lot of this game when i first got it, cos i heard this was a huge series in japan and i wanted to check it out. this is before i realised about the problem japan has with liking absolutely godawful bullshit.

anyway, this game does have an appeal. if you are into getting a thrill out of running free through a huge overworld map while an excellent sweeping soundtrack soars over everything, then i guess you will find that to like about this. thinking back on it, it's definitely the thing i enjoyed most in this. the world feels very big and sweeping, and there are enough hidden places and items to make exploring worthwhile. apart from the characters the world looks really nice, too. if the soundtrack was bad though, the whole experience would just fall flat.

so that's what i liked. i liked the exploring, and i played it for an hour or so a few months ago just to see if it held up and it did. the game done a great job of creating a world to explore, it's probably the best example of a good JRPG world in terms of how fun it is to explore, how well designed the thing is. and then getting the flying bird god thing at the end and gliding around the sky while another great song plays is also a lot of - well i don't want to say fun, but it's kind of enthralling! you know, for a video game.

but apart from that stuff, this game is a honking pile of undiluted faeces. the gameplay outside of walking around is atrocious - the battle system is evolved no further than the first dragon quest, the menu system is extremely boring and skills/levels/stats all go up in exactly how you'd expect. if you can't be bothered with that old shit, then you will have no tolerance for this game. this is the kind of game which, in 2006, made you go to a church and ask a priest for how much experience you had to get for the next level. i do not have time for this crap! too many things you don't really even want to do but have to are made really tedious and slow in this game.

the story, and the characters, are among the worst i've ever seen. some evil jester turns a couple of royals into animals and you've got find the big meanie and turn them back. it is marginally more complex than that - the jester was actually possessed! but it is no more interesting. the female characters in the game are typically offensive. you get one female member in your party - her tits bounce when she moves, she's the only character who gets costume changes (SELECT: bikini, bunny suit, waitress outfit - i am not fucking kidding!), and she's relegated to the usual she's good for magic though! position in battle. the main character is a nameless mute, the sidekick is a cockney stereotype and the rebellious womanizer is a rebellious womanizer. these characters don't interact together in any interesting or meaningful way whatsoever. everyone character in the game is white, i think even every npc in the game is white.

it is low level pandering fantasy bullshit at it's worst, the whole attitude of the game is pathetic. it just revels in it's own mediocrity and rejection of progress. the thing is, the presentation of the game and the world map exploration is pretty damn appealing and i totally fell for this when i first played it, i thought it was 10/10 great rpg. it isn't, when i replayed it again recently i found i couldn't get over all of it's flaws and stupidity, it's a game which expects you to love it on the basis of nostalgia, because it stuck to what they knew! none of this newfangled action battle system or "FMVS". it's behind the likes of FF7 in every way, and the only reason it done well is because people are stupid and gave it props for being retro.

fuck dragon quest viii.






 

i played it for a while, but goddamn it was such a boring game...i have no idea how anyone can like or play this game for more then a day. It's like eating an egg without the yolk comparitively.

Man, you guys . . . this is my favorite video game.

I guess all of the bad things jamicus are basically all the reasons why I love the game (I am racist).  What I really love about Dragon Quest games is that they are sublimely balanced.  JRPGs are all about making your numbers go up and putting your numbers against the enemy's numbers, and the DQ series always does a better job of that than any other game around.  I guess a lot of people don't really figure out the nuances (even though it's obvious like use your buff spells etc) and assume that you have to grind a lot, which is the opposite of the way the game is designed (this is why the experience curve is so sharp).

But I don't know DQ8 just made me feel so happy while I was playing it.  I never got tired of fighting random battles (even though I think they are a stupid game mechanic) and I never got tired of exploring and I never got tired of the characters and the only music I got sick of was the battle theme because it plays every five seconds.  The main characters were fairly vapid I guess but the game was hardly about them - aside from their brief expositions they are just numbers that you make go up - so I don't even know if its fair to criticize them.

The thing that bugs me when people slam games like this is that half of the time they have played all the way through them or halfway or whatever.  If a game was able to keep you interested for several dozen hours it must at least be okay right?

I'm nearing the end of this (~65 hours) and I love it, but I won't deny that I take long breaks. It's an excellent old-school game with fun extra things to do and an awe-inspiring landscape.

<what Him said, repeated>

I consider it the Oblivion of jRPGs.

Dragon Quest VIII took me at least 80 hours to beat (half of that time was spent either leveling up at the Dragon Cave, or figuring out where the hell to go next, but in the end I was satisfied with the results, the game was really fun and had very interesting plot twists I didn't expect, and there were some that I figured that was gonna happen. The bosses in the game were one of the main reasons this game was fun, you needed to think of a good strategy to take down that nasty boss that blocked your path, some being difficult others being sub-difficult, I recall the only boss I lost to in the game was Dhoulmagus and Kalimari[\spoiler] But other then that, the game was pretty good, there were however two things that bothered me a bit, I don't know why but the ship music would always seem to put me asleep, like zzz... it sounds nice and all but damn... and my other one was the leveling, while I hate to rely mostly on Metal King Slimes, I hate that it takes (close to) so much exp to level up, its like an MMO but like a few levels down to even be called that....

Though I felt like I accoplished something when I beat DQ7, that game was long as fuck though... seriously, that game took me at least a month to beat... X_X;