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Reviews » Dragon Quest 8 [PS2]

Dragon Quest 8 is a game filled with contradictions. It's old-school but modern, simplistic but complex, streamlined but varied, shallow but deep. I'm not entirely sure how Square-Enix managed to cram all of these aspects into the same game and not end up with a confusing mess, but somehow it all just works, and it works far better than other modern RPGs which have attempted to just tackle one side of each of these pairs.

Dragon Quest 8 is - obviously - the 8th iteration of what I'm rather sure is the longest-running series of Japanese console RPGs. We've previously seen Dragon Quest [originally known as Dragon Warrior in the US] on pretty much the same set of consoles Final Fantasy games have been on: NES, SNES, GBC, GBA, PSX, PS2. I'll have to admit, it's been awhile since I last played a Dragon Quest game. A long while. I can't peg an exact date on it, but I distinctly recall playing Dragon Warrior several aeons ago. I wasn't infatuated with the series at the time, and I didn't keep up with it as well as I could have, but can you really blame me? Enix did a really horrible job of consistently bringing the games stateside. Despite all the remakes that have been made, we've still never seen any versions of 5 or 6, and 7 was released for the PSX at a point where everyone was too busy playing PS2 games to bother with a game from the previous generation.

Luckily, you don't need a whole lot of Dragon Quest experience to appreciate 8. DQ games tend to be linked in small chunks, and DQ8 is a stand-alone game. If you've been doing your best to follow along, you'll find some similar themes from previous games, and the same monsters that've always been around, but this isn't really a direct sequel to anything, so don't worry about missing anything.

The story of Dragon Quest 8 is a really pretty straight-forward one. The world was relatively at peace until one day Dhoulmagus, a power-hungry jester, came to the castle at Trodain and stole an intensely powerful scepter from its ornate protective display where it had been chained to the ground. Upon stealing this scepter, Dhoulmagus gained immense magical powers, and started his reign of terror by casting a curse that transformed the King of Trodain into an impish little monster and turned his Princess into a horse. After that, a curse was cast on the castle itself, summoning giant thorny vines to over-grow and ruin the castle. Furthermore, all inhabitants of the castle were frozen. Not quite turned to stone, not really frozen by ice, but still stopped in time. All except one, a lowly castle guard who remained completely unaffected by any of the curses, who conveniently turns out to be the hero of our story. The Hero is named by the player at the start of the game, so for clarity I'll just be referring to him as "The Hero", even though I named mine "Eight", because I am an unimaginative loser.

King Trode and horse-ified Princess Medea meet up with the Hero shortly thereafter, and quickly set out to find Dhoulmagus to try and reverse this curse. Along the way, they meet up with others, starting with Yangus, a reformed thief. As the King and Princess aren't exactly fit for combat, Yangus and the Hero are your only fighters for the first few hours of the game. As you progress from town to town, you come across other people who have had their lives ruined by Dhoulmagus, two of which - Jessica and Angelo - will join your party. The game is largely spent wandering the world seeking out Dhoulmagus, but everywhere you go there's always something else to do, some other side quest to help out with, and this pretty much doesn't change for the entire course of the game. Despite the fact that it's quite linear, I really haven't been bothered by it. Usually when the plot stays really consistent in a game, it gets boring and repetitive, and the characters all seem to lose interest in your goals [for example, Final Fantasy X], but this kind of stuff really doesn't come into play in DQ8. I'm not entirely sure why, but I'm not going to question it.

As this is an RPG, the combat system deserves quite a bit of attention. The combat in DQ8 is, well, it's like Dragon Quest. If you've ever played any previous Dragon Quest game, it's like that. If you haven't, it's like Earthbound [seeing as Earthbound's combat was an homage to the DQ series]. If you haven't played Earthbound, I suggest dropping everything and doing that instead. On the surface level, combat in DQ8 is about as simple as you could possibly expect from a turn-based RPG. Encounters are random and happen anywhere that isn't a town. When a random encounter starts, you line up and are presented with a quasi-first-person view of your opponents. The turn starts by having you navigate through a menu and queue up commands for each of your characters. Choose to attack, and pick which opponent to attack, or pick some spell to use, or use a skill or item, whatever. Once you finish queuing up your commands the turn plays, with enemies and allies attacking in order roughly based on their agility statistic. Once everyone has had their set number of attacks for the turn, you're back at your menu and queue up your next turn's worth of commands.

It seems really simple, but there's really a lot of depth and variety in there. First off, there's tension. For any turn, you can choose to have a character raise their tension level. Tension is a variable attack/spell modifier. If you raise your tension level, attack damage goes up, spell damage goes up, and restorative spell effectiveness goes up. It isn't permanent, though, it only goes up until you use it, and gets reset for each random encounter. Initially, I completely overlooked this aspect of the game, but if you start intelligently using it boss fights can become incredibly simple, since it's a relatively easy method of artificially inflating one character's attack to ridiculous levels.

Though it isn't exactly combat related, the ability for character customization contributes to the variety of combat. When a character levels up a few things happen. First, they get stat upgrades. Agility, Strength, Defense, HP/MP, etc. Then they may get some intrinsic skills or spells associated with that level for them. Then they get skill points. Skill points can be allocated to one of five skills for each character. Generally these five are three weapon classes, fists, and Something Else. For instance, the Hero gets the choice of Swords, Spears, Boomerangs, Fists and Courage. The first four are self explanatory, and lead to skills pertaining to those individual weapon classes. Courage is the Hero's "other" category, which gives some quite useful spells as you progress through the levels. Weapon skills are special attacks which may or may not cost MP to use and have some kind of special benefit over a normal attack. Some examples are Metal Slash [do more damage v. metal-based enemies] and Executioner [50% chance to get a critical attack]. Weapon skills and spells are generally unique to a character, though there is some overlap depending on how you choose to allocate your limited skill points. But not always. Hero and Angelo both have a "Swords" category, so they get all the same special sword techniques, but while both Jessica and Angelo have a "Staves" category there's nearly no overlap in spells between Jessica and Angelo.

Just as there are different categories to allocate skill points in, there are tons of options open when it comes to equipment. Each character has five slots for equipment: weapon, shield, armor, helmet and accessory. What you can equip is different for everyone. Hero and Yangus have a lot of overlapping armor and helms, Jessica and Angelo tend to have the same shield requirements, and Hero and Angelo can both equip swords, but apart from that everyone tends to have their own stuff. But even then, within those sets of exclusive equipment there are choices to be made. Do you want Yangus to fight with an axe, scythe or club? Each has its own benefits, own skills, etc. This means when you hit a town you might have to make some tough decisions when it comes to equipping your characters, not only is it common to not have enough cash on hand to get what you want, but it might not even be possible if that town doesn't sell your character's preferred weapon class.

To complicate the equipment issue even more, DQ8 has an Alchemy Pot, which lets you mix together stuff you've collected using recipes gathered in the world to create better [or worse] gear. Not everything can be used in alchemy, but it's pretty close to everything. This makes buying stuff even harder, because it's not always easy to keep track of what gear you've got in your bag, what of that gear can be upgraded through alchemy, and furthermore if the resultant gear would be more powerful than what you can buy. On top of that, if you're desperate for cash you might be tempted to sell rare stuff that you aren't actively using but could be used down the road. At the start all this seems really simple and easy to deal with, but when you start really thinking about it it all goes downhill and you end up spending hours on end with a rubber band around your analog stick waiting for the alchemy pot to ding so you can get new gear way ahead of time. See, the alchemy pot takes time to work. You put stuff in and will find out if it's going to work at all right then, as it will reject your ingredients if they're a bad mix. But once they go in it takes time to finish, and time only passes when you're moving. Which leads to running into a wall in town for several hours while doing a lot of complex multi-step alchemy.

Another thing to worry about is the day/night cycle. As you run around in the game, time passes. Every 15-20 minutes the cycle changes. During the day, there's not much to be concerned about. You'll get normal random encounters that'll be roughly at your level, unless you go running off where you shouldn't be. If you're out after dark, though, all bets are off. At night you can run into all kinds of stuff. Higher level enemies, more enemies per encounter, etc. This can be a pain, because your average random battles can be hard if you're not taking your time to level up, you'll get absolutely owned and end up lucky if you can flee the battle before having your ass handed to you.

Which brings us to our next issue. One of the two things that Dragon Quest 8 is not split on is difficulty. DQ8 is hard. Most RPGs ease you in as far as difficulty goes. They start you off in a puddle before considering letting you move up to an inflatable kiddy pool. DQ8 does this for one match. The absolute first fight of the game is against some blue slimes. They can't hurt you much, you can kill them with a few hits, it's no big deal. After that, though, the gloves are off and the stakes are pretty high. I've had a lot of time to think about exactly why DQ8 is hard, and most of this time came while gambling or hunting metal slimes, so here's a short list of what exactly makes DQ8 so soul-crushingly hard.

1. Infrequent Save Points. The only save points in the game are in towns, and even within towns they aren't readily accessible. You have to go find the town's church, find the priest, talk to the priest, and start one of the longest and clumsiest PS2 save procedures I've encountered to date. Oh, and if you hit Triangle at the wrong time during this process you quit the game.
2. High Death Penalties. If you die you don't just get a game over screen and have to reload your last save. No, you get to save your experience but you lose half your gold. Half. And you end up back at your last save area. All the fun of having to reload from your last save, with a bonus kick in the junk. It wouldn't be that big of a problem though, if it weren't for . . .
3. Lack of Healing Spells. Sure, healing spells exist, but it takes a long time to get to them. You won't have a single restorative spell until you get Angelo, your last party member, so for the first ~15 hours of the game you're forced to use 30-hp-per-use medicinal herbs. Oh, and even once you get Angelo, you STILL won't have a method for resurrecting people during or even outside of battle. No, to do that you have to go to the church. And even when you DO get a resurrection spell, it only has a 50% chance of working, and when it does you don't get full health back. And since there isn't a dedicated healer in your party, you have to pick, "Do I want to waste an attack turn for the Hero so I can heal two party members this turn, or do I want to risk more people dying, potentially resulting in loss of half my gold?"
4. Actual Monster Difficulty. Enemies are actually hard. Unless you spend every chance you get to go powerlevel by hunting metal slimes, you're probably going to be underleveled. This isn't some game you can just burn through without taking your time in areas to kill stuff and level up. You might be able to squeak by some random battles, or strategically escape, but eventually it's going to catch up with you and you'll hit a brick wall when bosses completely destroy you repeatedly before you have a chance to determine what you're doing.

This list is conveniently also my list of "The only things that really bug me about DQ8", except for the last one. I've come to terms with monster difficulty, it was just something I had to adjust to, as it's been a long time since I played a game where you had to spend some time power-leveling or else you just wouldn't cut it.

It should be noted that I came up with this list when I had logged around 50 hours. I was only halfway through the game, and had somewhat underleveled characters. Early in the game, everything I said was true. Later in the game, the list evolves into this:

1. Infrequent Save Points / High Death Penalties. These issues didn't magically get resolved, but they did get easier to deal with. Once you get into the game, it's trivial to Zoom to a certain chapel to heal/save, and then Zoom/sail/fly/walk/whatever back to wherever you were. Death penalties more or less go away once you have access to banks and can safely store your cash there before boss dungeons. This, however, doesn't really eliminate the unbelievable frustration that comes from having to decide "gee, do I want to keep the experience I gained walking from the last save point to where I died, or do I want to keep half my gold I would lose if I don't reload my save?"
2. Waves of Ice and Death Dance. Possibly the two most incredibly frustrating spells in any RPG I've played in recent history. Waves of Ice is a spell nearly all mid-to-late game bosses have. It negates all buffs on the party. Similarily, nearly all mid-to-late game bosses get two attacks per turn. This means they can both beat the crap out of your party AND kill all your buffs. This turns all your standard tactics on end, since it means using any buffs like Oomph, Kabuff, Accelerate, or using Tension whatsoever is pretty pointless, since there's no guarantee that any of it will still be there by the time you get to attack next turn. Death Dance gets special mention here because it's a spell a couple monsters have which can randomly insta-kill your entire party. Nothing spells fun like running all over a dungeon, just barely finishing it, and then having your entire party wiped out by a sentient dancing tree.
3. Tedium. I'm not sure if this should really count as something that makes the game difficult, but it definitely falls under "things that bug me about the game". I can't really pinpoint when this started, but during the last quarter of the game, it felt like things just started to get unnecessarily long. It's one thing to have random battles, but to have VERY frequent random battles in the middle of an area I'm trying to explore that's full of puzzles and dead ends is just mean. Furthermore, some stuff feels like it was thrown in just to make the game that much more unnecessarily long. Like rooms that are specifically designed so that you end up having to back-track to find your way through and proceed. Or a puzzle in one of the last few dungeons where you have to run around in a big circle four or five times for no discernable reason to proceed.
4. Constant Need for Powerleveling. This one didn't go away either. If you don't spend some time powerleveling in DQ8, you're going to have problems. This unfortunately creates a new problem, in that whoops, it turns out that power-leveling isn't all that fun. Luckily, late in the game you gain access to areas where you can spend all night hunting King Metal Slimes and reaping their glorious bounty of ~30,000 xp a pop.

All in all, these issues really aren't that big of a deal. But they still bother me. And even the first list still holds for the time it was written. For a game this long, it's got to be expected that problems and complaints will change and evolve, which brings me to my next point. .

One thing that absolutely can't go unmentioned in this review is that Dragon Quest 8 is long. Really long. 80+ hours long. I didn't spend a whole lot of time powerleveling, and didn't spend an overwhelmingly long time doing time-consuming side quests like alchemy and gambling, and I beat the game's first ending at ~78 hours. After that, i logged another couple hours doing post-game content [which is really quite good, I recommend it] and got the second ending at ~85 hours. That's a lot of gaming for $50. However, if you're not big on epic-length RPGs, this might be one to pass on.

And now for some completely subjective gushing. The game is good. Really really good. One of the best RPGs I've played in years, possibly the best RPG I've played for the PS2 period. It's proof that a classic turn-based RPG formula can still work perfectly fine after all these years, and that you don't have to have an X-TREEM ULTRA-ANGST-RIDDEN EMO PLOTLINE OF DOOM or a ridiculous real-time action-oriented combat system to have a good game. It shows that it's ok to make games that are hard, and that you don't have to resort to cheap bastard cheating AI to do it. It shows that even though it's the latest in a long long long series of games, it can still be accessible and enjoyable to both fans and newcomers alike. It shows that games don't have to constantly completely reinvent themselves over and over and still feel current and fresh, and it shows that games can be long and full without getting mind-numbingly repetitive.

2005 has been good to the PS2. In just the past few months I've scored two games that fit genre-wide catchalls for "if you like [genre x], you NEED this game". First it was "if you like [action adventure/puzzle games], you NEED Shadow of the Colossus", and now I've got "if you like [Japanese RPGs], you NEED Dragon Quest 8". And please trust me when I tell you that you don't need experience with the Dragon Quest series. I was scared initially, because it seemed daunting to be starting a game that has nearly 20 years of history behind it that I had casually skipped. I was worried that I was too late to returning to the Dragon Quest scene to appreciate it, but I was luckily completely wrong. So please, go get this game. It doesn't disappoint whatsoever.

Dragon Quest 8 - PS2

Presentation

The visuals and sound in DQ8 are really nice. Even though I'm kinda burnt-out on Toriyama's art style, it was nice to see familiar character and monster designs, and the style transitioned to 3d quite nicely. Docking a few points though because the menus can at times feel clunky and sluggish, which can be really detrimental to the feel of the game.

Gameplay

DQ8 is a traditional console RPG. Such things are rare these days, and there's so little I can think to change to make it any better.

Replayability

Once you beat DQ8 the first time, there's still Post-game content that results in an alternative ending, PLUS after that you can still start the game all over again to try new skill allocation combos, new weapon choices, new . . everything. There's so much customization and variety in the character system and the game is so focused on combat that by mixing things up in your skill choices you could have what amounts to an entirely new experience. That is, if you have an extra 200+ hours to kill.

Value

It's not every day that you come across a game with this much content in it. 80+ hours on one playthrough for $50 is a deal to me, and over the past three months the game's been out, I've seen it on sale for ~$29-35. Though, due to the play time the game provides, it's a steal at any price.

Overall

DQ8 is a classic console RPG formula, modernized and perfected. It's an absolute must-have for fans of the series or fans of the genre, and definitely one to scout the trade-in racks for if you're just interested in something Different.