A surprisingly good RPG!
The first thing you notice are the graphics, and there really good. The cell shading is great and the characters and monsters, designed by Akira Toriyama - maker of Dragon Ball, look fantastic.
The game starts off with a short cutscene in which they show a ruined castle, where everyone has been killed by an evil wizard with a powerful magical staff. All except 2 people, the King - who was transformed into a toad - and the main character of the story. Like most older RPG's the Hero is a silent character, but he has a nice background story, which is revealed as the story goes on.
The story basically revolves around the King and the Hero going after the wizard, Dhoulmagus, to get revenge and take back the sceptre. On the journey they are joined by 3 other characters - Yangus, Jessica and Angelo. The story may not be amazing, but its interesting enough.
The gameplay of Dragon Quest 8 is fantastic. The battle system is easy to get into, but hard to master. You have 4 characters to fight the monsters you run into with. Each character has different jobs - the Hero can heal and deal damage, Angelo mainly heals, Jessica casts magic and buffs and Yangus deals damage. You can bend there roles a bit however, when the characters level up you can choose between various weapons and skills for them to master. For example, the Hero can learn courage to learn more spells, or his swords to do more damage.
The battles sound easy, but they'll require serious thinking, expecially against boss battles. The game is by no means easy, even the first boss might kill you a couple and bigger bosses such as Dhoulmagus are so hard you'll have to spent a couple hours just leveling. DQ 8 is also quite merciless, there are no save points before the bosses, instead, you have to save in a church in a nearby city. If you die, you start back from there and lose half the gold you earned! Not only that, but you have to go past the difficult dungeons all over again to reach the boss.
One thing that really stood out to me was the world map. Final Fantasy games usually have an overview of the world map where you look down on your character and navigate him through it. Dragon Quest's is much better, much huger. There are so many places to go to its ridiculous. There are treasures hidden all over the world map and its usually worth going for them. Later in the game you get a ship to explore the seas and even later, you get the godbird to explore the skies.
Among other things in the game, theres monster teams - a huge minigame where you find monsters around the world, collect them, then pit them against other monster teams. Theres also Alchemy, Gambling and many side quests which take almost 20 extra hours to do. The game in itself took me 40-50 hours to complete.
From the charming world map music to the amazing godbird one, the audio of this game is beautiful.
Though you might get stuck on a few hard parts I suggest trying out Dragon Quest 8.