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Review: Dragon Quest VIII
from the here's-slime-in-your-eye dept.
- Title: Dragon Quest VIII
- Developer: Level 5
- Publisher: Square Enix
- System:PS2
- Score:9/10
Dragon Quest's focus is on entertaining and enjoyable gameplay, and so for the most part the game's plot can be forgiven for being fairly weak. The game's subtitle, "Journey of the Cursed King", is almost everything you need to know to understand what's going on. You, an unnamed heroic adventurer, are on the hunt for a power-hungry sorcerer. The spellcaster has stolen a potent magical artifact, and pair of royals present when the artifact was stolen are turned into a frog-demon thing and a horse. They hook up with you and your buddy Yangus (a burly fighter-type), in hopes of finding the spellcaster and reversing the magical effect that imprisons them. Along the way you encounter some typical RPG stereotypes (like the scantily clad mage Jessica), but for the most part that's the hook that drives the story. While this doesn't sound like much to go on, the NPC characterizations are so well-written and over-the-top that it's hard not to like them.
This sense of exploration is only broken by the occasional encounter with wandering monsters. The pace of encounters is well spaced out, to ensure that you won't have to fight through several encounters just to proceed a short way down a trail. The combat is a traditional RPG line-up, with enemies on one side and heroes on the other. Players navigate an intuitive menu to instruct their characters in who and how to fight, but attacks are far from the bland or ordinary. Both monsters and heroes have an array of visually interesting attacks and spells to take out opposing forces. Giant tongues seem to be a weapon of choice for the enemies, who have an array of quirky appearances and behaviors. Besides the title-identifying slimes, there are a bevy of beasts and monsters to face down. Some of the early beasts actually forgo their turns to calmly lick their fur. This variety of choice, animation, and behavior ensures that even the most jaded RPG fan is unlikely to get bored with combat. Trying to one-button push your way through combat, if you do start to glaze over, will teach you the error of your ways quickly. The challenge level here is high, and you can expect to wipe more than once at low levels. The tenacity exhibited by a gang of cute little kitty cats can easily end in tragedy.
Dragon Quest VIII is not an evolution in the genre, nor is it likely to convert a dyed-in-the-wool anti-RPG nut. It's a challenging old-school game that appeals directly to traditional fans, and does so with personality, levity, and a lot of style. The hack and slash, turn-based combat system has never been so lovingly displayed as it is in this title. If you ever find yourself pining for those long-past grind sessions, gaining levels outside of Elfland by slaying ogres, this is a game you simply must play.
and a playable demo of the next FF? (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:and a playable demo of the next FF? (Score:5, Funny)
If you don't buy it, you're a nazi.
Godwin's Law makes an appearance on the first post - Amazing!
Parent
Weird graphics (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Weird graphics (Score:4, Informative)
If you ask me, they could have used 8-bit sprites, as long as the gameplay was good.
Parent
Re:Weird graphics (Score:4, Insightful)
There are *tons* of profitable games that don't have top of the line graphics. They just aren't super hyped with multi-million dollar marketing budgets, because they don't need tens or thousands of copies to sell to make a profit. You need cutting edge graphic and a huge budget to justify outrageous hype fueled by a huge amount a advertising dollars, but the the need for big budgets and fancy graphics is a complete myth that only people who need to be spoon fed their content buy into.
Profitable games *don't* need cutting edge graphics. If you disagree, I'd point you to Puzzle Pirates, Popcap, Kingdom of Loathing, or one of the dozens of others of low-profile profitable games that have some out in the last year or two. If you don't know this, you're missing out. Spend a few hours to search around and see what you're missing when you don't look at games that don't advertise on television or in pay-for-reviews gaming rags.
Parent
Top-notch Voice Acting? (Score:5, Informative)
Just a fair warning: The voice acting is very over the top in a cartoonish way. If "top-notch voice acting" means realistic and dramatic to you, you'll be sorely disappointed with the voice acting in DQVIII. The accents and the content of the dialog is so silly and uninteresting, that I ended up skipping story sequences (a major RPG sin in my opinion) after a dozen hours of the same crap. You've been warned.
Great game otherwise.
Re:Top-notch Voice Acting? (Score:2)
You can turn it off (Score:3, Informative)
Great Review (Score:2, Funny)
Good! (Score:5, Insightful)
You know, just because people have come up with new gameplay mechanics doesn't mean we should abandon the old ones. It's about time some tried and true turn based RPG came back on the market. The game market has grown, and there's room for the old style and the new style out there. I think it's fair to say that the old turn based style games offer different types of strategy than the newer real time games, and I was getting a little tired of every new RPG testing my reflexes and jacking up the pace. Those are good games, but sometimes you want to slow down and relax a bit, or add in the increased complexity that having turns allows.
If somebody came up with a real-time version of a game like chess that was sufficiently fun that it became popular, I bet people would still play the old version too. Why should video games be any different. While they're at it, let's get some good old style 2D (the environments, not the graphics nescessarily) platformers back out there for non-handheld systems. Perhaps something that uses the Symphony of the Night engine. Maybe the Revolution will bring some of these types of games back.
Re:Good! (Score:5, Funny)
If somebody came up with a real-time version of a game like chess that was sufficiently fun that it became popular...
It's called war.
And it seems to be extremely popular nowadays.
Parent
Re:Good! (Score:2)
Re:Good! (Score:2)
Excellent Game (Score:3, Interesting)
Loving the game (Score:4, Interesting)
And lest we forget, Jessica is rather, err, bouncy... o.o
I don't know if it's that it's old school.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Bad example, Zonk! (Score:3, Interesting)
And that's not a Dragon Quest/Warrior game - that was Final Fantasy!
The better analogy would have been fighting Wyverns in a swamp while carrying Princess Gwaelin back to King Lorik...
Re:Bad example, Zonk! (Score:2)
Re:Bad example, Zonk! (Score:2)
People still play Wizard of Wor? Cool! ;)
Re:Bad example, Zonk! (Score:2)
kypper (Score:2)
Re:Bad example, Zonk! (Score:5, Funny)
After getting my ass roasted by that damned dragon, the least the bitch could have done is walked herself.
Parent
Re:Bad example, Zonk! (Score:3, Funny)
"Dost thou love me?"
Yes
>No
"But thou Must!"
"Dost thou love me?"
Yes
>No
"But thou Must!"
"Dost thou love me?"
Yes
>No
"But thou Must!"
"Dost thou love me?"
Yes
No
>Smack the needy bitch
Need for Games Like These? (Score:3, Insightful)
Endless zombie gore
pales before the epic thrill
of asterisk spam
-A haiku for MUDs.
Re:Need for Games Like These? (Score:2)
Three games in point:
1)Lineage 1. Best selling MMORPG worldwide of its time. America didn't like it but the rest of the world did. Horrible graphics. Killer gameplay.
2)Lineage 2. OK selling in the US. Better graphics than WoW. Horrible gameplay (well, not horrible, but not very questy, and the main point of the game - grinding to get high lvl to siege - welll when you get to the point where you'd make a difference in siegin
I knew it! A.T.'s handiwork... (Score:2, Interesting)
I did a little research and he designed the monsters and characters
Re:I knew it! A.T.'s handiwork... (Score:5, Informative)
Yuji Horii has done the storyline and scenarios for every game in the series.
Koichi Sugiyama has done the music for every game in the series.
They, combined, are the "DQ Team", and are responsible for the entire series, having come together to create it after enjoying Wizardry and Ultima, but thinking they were too complex for the mainstream.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dragon_Quest [wikipedia.org]
In addition Toriyama and Horii did quite a bit of work on Chrono Trigger -- Toriyama did the art and designs, Horii did the storyline and scenarios, and several experts from the original Final Fantasy team did the battle engine, music, etc.
That's why CT was so great -- it was basically a new spin on the Dragon Warrior series of games.
Bewarned, even though DQ8 is arguably the easiest game in the DQ series, it's still leaps and bounds above the difficulty arc of modern Final Fantasy games. If you've never played a DQ game before you're in for a treat, but you *will* die a few times.
Parent
Question: (Score:2, Funny)
Not quite (Score:2, Informative)
I love this game. (Score:4, Informative)
Toriyama is the Liefeld of Anime. (Score:5, Informative)
If memory serves, Toriyama's done the design on all of the DQ titles... which was vastly more palatable back in the 8-bit days, when you couldn't tell how atrocious his "distinctive" character design was. He's also responsible for the aesthetic of Chrono Trigger - a game that plays great but in my opinion looks absolutely horrible: his grotesque "anatomy" and facial design seriously hampered my enjoyment of the title.
The lesson here is that a "distinctive" look and feel can alienate gamers as well as attract them - I won't play or watch anything modern that Toriyama's involved with simply because I just can't stand to look at it.
Re:Toriyama is the Liefeld of Anime. (Score:4, Informative)
There's nothing remotely new or surprising about this--edgy art has always appealed to a smaller audience than "mainstream" art.
Frankly, I'd rather "suffer" through the occasional bizzare-looking game than have designers bend their vision for the sake of mass appeal. Take, for example, Hieronymus Bosch. Bosch made plenty of "regular" art, but he is best remembered for his utterly mind-bending depictions of demons, Hell, and Judgement. Had he abandoned his artistic direction and not composed some of the most truly exotic, horrifying pre-modern art ever created, he'd be remembered as a talented--but only marginally significant--artist, and our society would be missing out on some geuninely unique and amazing art.
Art doesn't always appeal, but it's almost always more valuable than uninspired works designed for mass comsumption. There's a seemingly endless supply of well-painted, arrow-riddled St. Sebastians out there--but there's nothing else quite like the Garden of Earthly Delights...
Parent
Re:Toriyama is the Liefeld of Anime. (Score:2)
Re:Toriyama is the Liefeld of Anime. (Score:3)
I can't speak for Dragon Ball [Z/GT/WTF], but as far as the DQ games that made it to the US, I have to say you've got to be joking.
DQ II - Princess of Moonbroke (Name generated at random) -
You seem to be a little confused (Score:5, Informative)
You seem to be confusing this with the Final Fantasy series. The only changes made to the first Dragon Warrior was an improvement in graphics to make it look as pretty as Dragon Quest II ("ZOMG, I can face in four directions! Look, a shoreline!"). Later games had you dragging along ghosts instead of coffins when somebody died, but Enix didn't pull any of that EasyType crap on us like Squaresoft.
Which is why it didn't sell. Dragon Quest never apologized for being Dragon Quest.
Re:You seem to be a little confused (Score:3, Informative)
That confusing password system was the save function. It was there because the Japanese version came out before they started putting batteries into Famicom games. It's no worse than what we got with Metroid and Kid Icarus (though those passwords weren't clever little haikus).
Enix nor Nintendo toned down the length of the game, the complexity, the difficulty, and they sure as hell didn't give us "Dragon
Uh that's not how you levelled (Score:3, Insightful)
As others have noted, this more FF1 than DQ1. Additionally, you didn't fight ogres outside elfland; you go to the top of the peninsula just northeast of Pravoka. Due to the map design and the way the monster distribution is laid out in a grid across the map, in these two squares you find monsters from across the next continent. With decent buff skills, and the fact the Pravoka area is very early in the game, you can gain levels very quickly here.
(The Dawn of Souls port for the GBA makes this even more trivial with the addition of MP instead of static spell counts. I was able to complete the game in barely 13 hours with 999999 gold, level 60+ characters, and all the items, using this method followed by harvesting the dungeons out of order for items and exp.)
In Dragon Warrior, you could gain levels very quickly by fighting Metal Slimes, which gave tons of exp and had very little HP... but were very hard to hit.
Re:Uh that's not how you levelled (Score:2)
Exit Elfland, walk around in circles. If you're on an NES, the Ogres will often be accompanied by "Creeps", if it's Final Fantasy Origins for PSX the Creeps are named something else.
But there's definitely Ogres surrounding Elfland, and they'll appear all the way to Astos's castle.
But you are right about one thing, they do appear north of Pravoka.
Re:Uh that's not how you levelled (Score:2)
DQ8 Is a Case Study On "Old School"... (Score:5, Insightful)
DQ8 combat engine is simplistic. I mean dirt simple to the point you can predict with "in your head math" whether you can win the fight or should flee before damage is even exchanged. This leaves a system where the only way one can challenge the player is by trying to use "Surprise! Your Dead!" rare super attacks or the equally rare chance that given 4 targets, the size of your party, they will all chose to hit just one. Neither of these senarios features much intelgence nor does it dictate any strategy or stance player should take (beyond "overwhelming forces"). In any event, you are left with no strategy to play with. No tactics to leverage. No action to minimize risks or maximize bonuses. Simply put: there are no real decisions in DQ8. You either determin in the first round if you can win or leave.
DQ8 tries to promote mindless "grinding". This sort of aimless wandering around hoping for random encounters is an artifact any level based system which DQ8 is strongly tied into. Nominally, grinding happens when a player "lucks out" or out flanks the game to arrive a place the game didn't content on seeing at this particular time or level. The problem with DQ8 and their guerilla style strategy is that by the time you disembark a city, travel to the dungeon entrance, work your way to the bottom of a dungeon, spending resources and energy along the way to do so, it is too late to show the player "Oops, you should have been a higher level!" Grinding should be tuned and supressed as much as possible. Tasked based quest systems give much more satisfaction than vague "see you when you get there" systems DQ8 uses.
Randomly wandering around, randonly bumping into creatures that may randomly kill you off just isn't fun. I seriously question they were fun back in the "old school" days too (I don't ever seem to remember thinking "oh joy! another random encounter" in any console RPG). We now have the knowledge and technology to actually instill some more complex logic and real challenges into games instead of relying on random acts of "fickle fate" to try to trip up players. If I wanted to play a game that featued such randomness, I would rather play poker.
DQ8 is a great looking game. The plot is sometimes amusing even if it is cheesey RPG fare. The music is a bit repetive but otherwise is awesome. I even like the touch that the SFX are old school. It is the wet dream of a designer who lived 20+ years ago who thought this is how these games should look like. The problem is we are play this game now instead of then and are left wonder "Why is this fun?"
Re:DQ8 Is a Case Study On "Old School"... (Score:3, Insightful)
Sure, you can play Dragon Quest VIII by simply choosing Attack with all your characters, "grind" hours to overpower the dungeon which you should have tackled 5 levels ago, but that is onl
Short short review. (Score:2)
(I just wish I knew what it meant)
I agree 100% with the review. (Score:3, Interesting)
Despite the paper-thin plot (as it appears to me currently, at least) the game is challenging, and encourages the players to utilize tactics other than "button mashing" to get through battles.
The monsters are detailed and adorable, and the Bestiary feature allows you to look at monsters you've already fought and reply their battle animations as many times as you'd like if you just can't get enough.
The voice acting and the localization effort are top-notch. I can't remember feeling sorry for a character in recent memory except while playing DragonQuest VIII. Additionally, some of the jokes are incredible.
I'm glad I bought this game, and I am extremely happy that one of my favorite console RPG series is pulling in such stellar reviews in America. I look forward to many copies being sold so the game is re-released as part of the Greatest Hits series in 6-12 months.
Things that buggged me (Score:4, Interesting)
The monster encouter rate for monsters too weak to damage (or help) your party is much too high. Those monsters should stay away unless called (And yes, you can call them.)
The monster treasure drop rate is WAY too low. And the skill you can get to increase it doesn't help much.
The voice acting is... well it's terrible. They should have not had voice acting and used the extra time and money to put more stuff in the world and increase interaction with NPCs (A la Morriwind.)
Occasionally the writing was heavyhanded in a very typical RPG and Anime way. It's that whole "Oh look the bad guy is gearing up to cast a spell that will destroy my party, I'll just stand here with my thumb up my ass and let him" mentality. NO! Put an arrow in him before he can launch his attack! Or "We just beat down the big bad boss without breaking a sweat, but the next scene is of us all gasping for breath while he attacks again/does a move that makes him stronger/limps off to lick his wounds" wtf?!
All in all it's a reasonably fun game that will keep you busy for a while, but I'm still holding out for the next Morrwind game.
What!?!?! (Score:5, Insightful)
BS, BS and more BS. The CRPG genre was well established before Square [wikipedia.org] or Enix [wikipedia.org] were even founded as companies. Heck Ultima III [rpgdot.com] (Richard Garrot's forth CRPG) had already been released before those companies came into being, Ultima IV [rpgdot.com] was out before the first Dragon Quest [wikipedia.org], and Ultima 5 [rpgdot.com] was out before the first Dragon Warrior [dragon-warrior.com] Game.
Dragon Warrior was a dumbed down newbie to a mature and established CRPG genre when it was released.
Re:I don't get RPGs (Score:2)
See, I don't think you've actually laughed at the writing of each and every RPG you've ever played.
So, could there ever be any RPG plot you approved of?
Re:I don't get RPGs (Score:2, Funny)
Re:Characters (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Dragon Quest VIII (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:awful review (Score:3, Interesting)
In an RPG, when the building is on fire and you have to rush to another floor to save somebody, do you rush to the other floor to save them? Instead of mucking about opening boxes, running around in circles, standing in front of