A game made by the creators of Dragon Ball + Square Enix = EPICNESS...
DQ8 plays well... standard RPG gameplay i guess. I never considered RPG games to have good gameplay. There is grinding to level up, buying new weapons, armor, and the usual turn based fighting stuff. I do like how the world is fully open for you to explore on foot, by ship, or even by... air.
The story is not the best, but its ok. It does get more interesting half way into the game. At the start of the game i found it a bit boring.
This game wont win any sound awards. Your main character doesn't even talk, and the people who do talk mostly sound bad. The rest is reading text.
Long game with lots to do. I put over 100 hours into it and did pretty much everything there is to do. It was cool after you beat it not only do you continue playing before the last boss battle so you can continue to explore with all your items, but it also unlocks a new area to play and explore. If this game was released today... that area would be... DLC lol.
What makes one franchise more popular than another? Quality games would be a great starting answer, but it goes much deeper than that. Advertising? Sure, that definitely helps. Truthfully, though, it's a combination of the two. Final Fantasy has become one of the biggest role-playing franchises in the world over its fourteen numbered entries thus far. Some claim that the seventh game in this beloved franchise was the key to its overwhelming success. Of course, the previous six games were downright legendary in their use of storytelling and role-playing elements, but it was Final Fantasy VII that got people talking. Over the course of just a few months, VII's legacy grew, and to this day it remains one of the greatest games of all time. Even if it wasn't entirely due to this game's overwhelming success, the Final Fantasy franchise has gained a global fan base that's hard to ignore.
Here's the weird thing: the Dragon Quest franchise is made by the same developer (Square Enix) and is the most popular franchise in Japan; arguably more popular than Final Fantasy. In fact, Dragon Quest influenced a lot of what made Final Fantasy such a success. Not only was Dragon Quest the first RPG (the acronym for "role-playing game") to establish a class based system (which eventually lead to paradigms in Final Fantasy XIII) its monster training system lead to one of the greatest selling franchises of all time: Pokémon. Gamespot went on to call the original Dragon Quest, "one of the fifteen most influential games of all time." It's really a shame, then, that these games don't receive as much attention in other parts of the world as they do in Japan, because my first foray into the franchise, Dragon Quest VIII: Journey of the Cursed King, is among one of the greatest games that I've ever played.