Dragon Quest VIII E3 2005 Hands-On Impressions

Dragon Quest VIII: Journey of the Cursed King was playable on the E3 show floor, with a short sequence of town exploration, and a free-roaming pass at the game's wide-open spaces and monster battles. It was the same initial area we canvassed earlier in the year in the import version of the game, only this time it was the North American version, in English, and it had some changes from the original. This release will feature voice-overs during some story segments, while the Japanese version had no speech and was entirely text. And while the Japanese version of the game had the traditional Dragon Quest-style menu system, which brought up a small box onscreen with a number of different options, the menu in this game brings up a full-screen menu. We noted the changes and then set about investigating the world.

Our first stop was the town sequence, set in a small village called Farebury. Our intrepid band of heroes included our main character, Yangus, a portly barbarian fighter, and the small green Trode, the cursed king himself. The group was in town in an effort to locate a man named Master Rylus, who taught the dreaded Dhoulmagus (chief baddie of the game) all he knew about magic. We ran around town, conversing with the locals and seeing the sights, which included the charred shell of a home that had burned to the ground. On the upper level of town, we eventually discovered the tavern. In the tavern was a man named Kalderasha, who was busy drinking himself to destruction at a corner of the bar. Apparently Kalderasha has the gift of prognostication, and he foretold the house fire we'd discovered the evidence of earlier. To add tragedy upon tragedy, Master Rylus was the resident of that building, and he perished in the flames.

Just as we learned we wouldn't be finding our friend the magician, a man burst into the bar yelling about a monster. Apparently, the townsfolk discovered Trode and weren't too pleased by the unsightly midget. The whole group is then kicked out of town to the tune of much grumbling. Many of the story-based character-conversation scenes (as opposed to the casual conversations with the villagers) are fully voiced, using a range of European accents for the various characters, such as English and French. Though it's easy for such affectations to sound hokey, the speech didn't sound over the top from the pieces we heard. It's hard to come to a conclusion about the voice just yet, but the experience we had didn't seem to detract from the game at all.

The battle sequences let us roam the beautiful outer world of the game, with rolling fields, winding streams, and forests that dotted the meadows and clustered on the horizon. The battle system is straightforward, turn-based combat, where you can choose to attack individual enemies or groups of a single type of enemy, depending on the ability you use. For the fighting portion of the game, we controlled a party consisting of the swordsman hero, the bare-fisted Yangus, and the fighters Angelo and Jessica, who used a bow and a whip as weapons, respectively. Each character has a normal melee attack (Jessica's whip is capable of hitting multiple enemies in a single strike), special abilities that are stronger magic-based attacks (the hero uses a fiery sword against monsters), and some of them can use magical spells.

After our very first fight, some of our party members leveled up, and we were awarded skill points to distribute into various areas. Each character has a full list of skill categories that we could apply the points to, like swordsmanship for the main hero or fisticuffs for Yangus. Yangus has another skill category called "humanity," which professes its ability to make other characters more likely to help him, and that something special will happen if it is maxed. We're interested in playing with the feature more in the full game to see how the characters can be customized.

How will the North American audience react to a game that's sold more than 3.5 million copies in Japan? That remains to be seen, but the bits we've seen of this epic RPG only make us want to play more. You'll find future updates on Dragon Quest VII: Journey of the Cursed King in this gamespace, so keep checking back between now and the game's release later this year.