This is what role playing is all about!
Before I played Dragon Quest VIII I had a few inklings of what I imagined the game to be like. It is widely known (in the RPG community) that the Dragon Quest games are very traditional in their old-school gameplay, so I was expecting an RPG with a real old-school feel to it, a feeling other role playing series like Final Fantasy have more-or-less lacked since the turn of the millennium. And I got that; Journey Of The Cursed King is an old-school RPG through and through… but it also felt so much more than that. I've not felt this good playing an RPG since I played the last traditional Final Fantasy game, Final Fantasy IX, for the very first time back in 2001, and that is a huge complement.
With Dragon Quest VIII been very traditional I wasn't expecting a massively engrossing story full of multiple plot twists and unusual events because that isn't what traditional Japanese RPG's are like. Most JRPG have a story that doesn't really push any boundaries but does its job of keeping the game flowing very well. Well, Dragon Quest VIII's story does its job as well as any of the better known JRPG's, but I also found it very engrossing.
The game starts with the shot of a castle been attacked and engrossed in vines. This is done by the effects of a curse put to by a jester known by the name of Dhoulmagus. Only three people survive the attack, the King and Princess of Trodain (who get transformed in to a troll and a horse) and a lone guard, the hero of the quest (who you name yourself). The unusual thing about you surviving was that you neither froze from the curse or changed from altogether, you remained human and living throughout. The three of you then set off on a mission to track down Dhoulmagus and return Trodain Castle, all its inhabitants and the King and Princess back to normal again; and along the way you'll meet other characters that'll join you and aid you in your quest.
You'll be thinking that it sounds pretty much like a usual JRPG story won't you? Something happens, you chase after the person responsible, defeat him and return everything back to normal; well you're right to some respects, it is a proper traditional JRPG story, but some how I managed to get dragged in to the story easier in Dragon Quest VIII then I have been in other JRPG's. I can't really explain why this is, but because of this I found the story to be very engrossing (albeit it containing a lot of typical role playing clichés).
One of the best aspects, for me, about Dragon Quest VIII was its character development. Throughout the game you only have a six characters in you're party and only four can battle. You start the game with the King Troad, Princess Medea, the Hero and Yangus and as you get further in to the story your party will grow to include Jessica and Angelo, and each person has their own personal reasons for wanting to find Dhoulmagus. Some might find it weird that Dragon Quest VIII only has a tiny amount of main characters but I think the reason the character development was good was because of the small party. In Final Fantasy games, for example, you get loads of main characters so you can choose the party to your liking, but because of the amount of characters the game gave you less time to hear more about the characters personal feelings and their back stories, but because Dragon Quest VIII doesn't mess about with too many party members Level 5 (the games developers) had more time to better develop the characters and their back stories. I can't go in to the details of each characters back stories because they each contain spoilers, but each of them come together to make you feel more in tune with the characters you're controlling.
Despite the game story one of the other biggest reasons why Dragon Quest VIII is a traditional JRPG is because of its game play. You control the characters in two scenarios; in the games overworld where you trek across the world map and explore towns, caves and other locations, and in battle. The battling aspect is more old-school then the adventuring elements of the game but together they fill you with a lot of nostalgia from playing older JRPG's. The battles are random in encounters and are in the traditional turn based fashion with battles phases like in the first three Final Fantasy games. You give commands to each of your battling characters, then they and the enemies exchange blows and then the battle phase starts again. The battles are over quick too most of the time, but I'd advise any casual role playing fan to maybe give Dragon Quest VIII a miss. The reasons why is because the game can be menacingly hard. Even though the battles can end quickly, they don't always go in your favour. Early in the game you'll encounter enemies that can easily wipe out your party, and this sets the trend for the rest of the game.
The enemies, and bosses, stay consistently hard throughout the course of the game, and beating them more easily requires you to grind your characters, but grinding is another difficult thing the game has in store for you. I don't know if all the Dragon Quest games are like this, but growing your characters levels in Dragon Quest VIII can be very difficult, sometimes grinding for an hour will only grow your characters one level each, and when you compare that to Final Fantasy, you could grow your characters two or three levels in the same amount of time. Now I didn't mind this one bit. I like challenges, yeah I found it hard to grind sometimes, but I also enjoy grinding (which some people may find a little weird) so I just put my head down and got on with it. I only got beat twice in the whole game, once to the first boss and once to the last boss, but I still struggled in battles and was close to been wiped out multiple times. But some people hate grinding. If you're one of those people who play Final Fantasy but hate the grinding then you should stay away from Dragon Quest VIII. My argument though with grinding is this; if you're going to complain about grinding why do you even play RPG's?
Something else I found interesting about Dragon Quest VIII was something called 'skills'. Now each character does learn magic spells and special abilities from levelling up, but not all the moves are gained from levelling up alone. Each character has something called skills and what the skills basically do is make the characters stronger and let them learn new moves on top of the ones they already learn from levelling up. To make characters skills better you need skill points, which you get each time you level up (or from rare items that give you skill points) ad then you add the skill points to the skills you want to increase. Each of the Hero, Yangus, Jessica and Angelo have five skills and each of their skills differ; but there is one skill that each character has, and this one is fisticuffs.
So, with Jessica (for example) her skills are Knife, Whip, Staff, Fisticuffs (meaning un-armed) and Sex Appeal. If you add skill points to, say, Whip eventually when that skill has accumulated enough points she'll get an upgrade like Whip +10, and this makes her attack power rise by ten points when she is using a whip, and this also applies to her other skills to, so adding skill points to her Knife skill will eventually enable her to use Swords as well as knives and make her stronger using them. And this applies to each character, so getting the Hero's sword skill high enough will make his more powerful using swords, or getting Angelo's bow skill high enough makes him more powerful using bow weapons, but each of the characters fifth skill (their own unique skill) aids them each in different ways to the others. Like I said Jessica's unique 'Sex Appeal' and this is her fifth skill. What this does is, as Sex Appeal accumulates more points it'll make enemies fall in love with Jessica, rendering them unable to attack for a turn (it's just like in the Pokemon games, where if you use Charm it makes the opponents fall in love with your Pokémon making them unable to attack), and as her Sex Appeal stat increases the chances of enemies getting 'infatuated' by Jessica increases. Also as her Sex Appeal increases she'll learn new battle abilities too, like a move called 'Puff-Puff' where she basically pushes her breasts together and shows her backside to the enemies and this will make stronger enemies (who would usually be immune to her Sex Appeal) fall in love with her as they'll be infatuated by her 'assets'.
I really liked the skill system in Dragon Quest VIII as I feel it makes your characters feel more customisable. There is no right way to increase the characters skills, you could spend all the game just building up one skill and none of the other, or you could evenly distribute the skill points between all five skills (as I did on my save file), and I liked that they gave you that freedom, as usually by levelling up alone you have no control over what stats increase the most.
Another thing, well two things, I found impressive about Dragon Quest VIII was its presentation and music. The games character and enemies were all designed by veteran Dragon Quest artist Akira Toriyama (also known by Dragon Ball fame) and everything in the game looks superb. A lot of the enemies look quite cute and child-like, but they battle nothing like that. And to complement the character designs Level 5 opted to choose a cel-shaded graphics engine to power Dragon Quest VIII (like they had done for some of their previous games like Dark Cloud) and this results in the game looking stunning. It's like a cartoon, it looks brilliant. If you've seen Dragon Ball before imagine that made in to a videogame… Dragon Quest VIII is exactly how you'd imagine it that look. And the music complements the game very, very well too. Composed by Koichi Sugiyama and performed by the Tokyo Metropolitan Symphony Orchestra the music has a very epic feel to it, and it sounds similar in some circumstances to the music in The Lord Of The Rings film, which is nothing but good.
Length-wise, to complete Dragon Quest VIII, in my personal opinion, you're looking at it taking over seventy hours to finish. My actual game time when I completed the game was ninety two hours and fifteen minutes, but the game time could surpass my total (and really should surpass my total) if you attempt to do all the other optional stuff on offer to you. A lot of the games optional stuff is good, but it doesn't hold up as well as the actual main quest itself. You could easily sink twenty or thirty hours into the game simply by playing games in the Casino. Also after you beat the game some more optional stuff opens up for you, so there's plenty to do after the game is finished.
How can I sum up Dragon Quest VIII: Journey Of The Cursed King? Well in my review I think I've said three times that the game can probably be avoided by people who are either casual, don't like grinding or people who don't like old-school RPG's, but really the game is that good nobody should avoid playing it. Dragon Quest VIII is one of the most thought out and richly rewarding RPG's I've ever played. After playing it I would go to bed thinking about it, I couldn't get it out of my head, and I can't even say I felt the same as this when I was playing other RPG's like Chrono Trigger or Secret Of Mana. If you own a PlayStation 2 get it, if you won a PS3 get it. Actually if you don't own either of those consoles buy one just to play this because I think it is one of the very best RPG's I've ever played.
Review by: James Widdowson
Score: 9.5/10