Dragon Quest 8 - A Legend Continues

[Dracos]

First off, before I voice anything else, I'd like to get out of the way that if this was a numbered review, Dragon Quest 8 would be a strictly 9/10 type affair.  Those reviews that have been put out previously haven't been lying.  Beyond my own fan driven love of the series, the folks behind the came have produced a magnificent combination of Akira Toriyama's art, Level 5's art and coding, Sugiyama's music, and Yuji Horii's knack for the bringing characters to life.  Really, altogether a great show and for those who worry about that kind of crap, a definite candidate for best RPG of 2005.

   One might wonder though why I referred to it as strictly 9/10 type affair instead of 10/10 type as would be expected for that type of thing.  Well, there's no doubt that it is polished and boasts a superb production value throughout.  There's no doubt that it is fun and has many traits which I will espouse upon in a bit.  To consider it less than top tier would be the height of ignorance.

   At the same time, the sheer quality of the overall product makes minor faults come more sharply into focus.  The voice acting, while generally superb, felt slightly awkward at times with the lack of redoing some of the gestures to match the British tone they put over the deal.  Many, if not all, of the Japanese mannerisms that were in the original game were kept intact alongside this British localization, which resulted in folks seeming slightly off in the general presentation.  This didn't come up too often, but particularly with apologies, it felt weird.

   The menus, while beautiful and quite readable, were stuff that didn't belong in a top of class type game.  They were slow and not built for effective management and navigation of a lot of items.  Sure they were pretty and you could navigate them pretty well, but as someone who works a lot with interface, I think they could've done better and that the game was weakened a degree by them.  Some may note that they were 'at least better than the old DQ interfaces'.  In a way, they were, even if I preferred them to this.  What they weren't though is as good as they should've been and they became quite awkward for locating stuff once you got more than 40 items in your inventory.  The lack of sort and search features for stuff mixed with a non-text based menu system made it a hunt for graphical icons pretty much.  Specifically, doing common actions such as whistle, got a bit tedious with having to wait the load time for the menu to appear every time.  Minor things, really, but something they could've done better.

   The control scheme should've been alterable.  Yes, I know, not a mainstay of the Dragon Quest series, but still by now it should be something simple and something S-E USA should've been able to add.  Particularly due to the fact we got an awkward blend of the Japanese standard RPG structure and the US standard RPG structure, which felt weird.  Again, I'd like to reiterate that this is a minor issue, but one of those things that weakened it a bit in my eyes.  This, along with more options in general for customizing the experience, would've gone a long way towards making this the definitive instead of simply the awesome.

   Load times were an issue.  I know some folks didn't notice them but I've got a sharp eye and I could tell that I wasted probably 5 hours out of 100 in load times.  Some of this was due to the score we got, which was the orchestral and, while super neat, increased the load times of the game to handle music.  Some of it was simply choosing a bit too fancy animations for moves.  I get the sense that if the PS2 had twice the cache it did, these whole things would vanish.  Unfortunately, they are a present issue with the game.  You can expect a lot of 1-5 second pauses throughout the game, sometimes right prior to combat animations, often when leaving or entering combat, and definitely with the menu.

   There was the drop rate, an issue that didn't actually come into being a problem until the very end of the game.  The game generally does not give easy drops ever.  In the past DQs, this mattered pretty little because the only thing to do with drops was to equip or use them as consumables, and with rare exceptions, all the good stuff was available in other fashions, via gambling or questing or exploring.  Here, the game provides an alchemy system that is the source of a lot of the better items and pretty much all of the best, which coincidentally raises the importance of such things.  I suspect if the alchemy pot makes a return, this'll be fixed, but as it stands, there's no really good way to improve your luck in getting something other than spending tons of time camping enemies in the right area.  Steal and intimidate, both intended to improve drop rates, tend to have little improvement in practice, reducing the odds of a drop to something around 1/20 or so.  Not something that hurts much during the main game, but it can be a pain at the end where twinking out is the difference between having the tactical options to outmaneuver the post-game bosses or being limited to just leveling up a ton.

   Finally, Sugiyama is getting old.  Those who say this is his best work to date haven't listened to any of his previous orchestral pieces.  He's still very talented, but the game simply doesn't demonstrate the range and skill that placed him as one of the absolute best in the industry.  It's a pity and almost unnoticeable because of the high quality orchestral recordings of the music used, but those listening for another "Wagon's Wheels" or "Unknown World" won't find it here.

   That said, despite these flaws, there's a lot to praise about the game, both on the superficial and deep levels.  

   Superficially, the graphics are beautiful and bring a measure of life to the game that could not otherwise be achieved.  Level 5 is king in this area, bringing a sense that you are playing a living cartoon, managing a very strong naturalness of motion in most things and capturing the beautiful scenary in mind excellently.  Going in depth, it has been tossed around that this is Yuji's statement of saying "What we did before was simulation because we had to.  This is the way of the future."  I could imagine him saying that easily with this game.  The world is vast.  It is similar to the MMO worlds meant for millions of people, but focused around just you.  It is easy to lose yourself in the hills and valleys and forests that make up the world, traveling day and night between the various towns.  This could've become very tedious easily, but they designed it well, the roads almost inevitably tracing the shortest paths between towns and having reduced encounter rates, with plenty of rewards around the map, infamous monsters, and little huts to find for exploring.  It would not be an exaggeration to say that they successfully created a gigantic world that was enjoyable to explore without being tedious to travel through.

   The game mechanics, on a simple level, is Dragon Quest.  Those who've been playing the game series for twenty years now should be ready for how it is.  To say it is simply Dragon Quest though is to do it a disservice.  It is an oversimplification of how polished they are and the generally excellent decisions made throughout.  On the battle side, we have the normal Dragon Quest face to face, turn by turn battles, augmented with fast paced 3d playouts of the actual fighting.  They've added in a new, technically broken, system of tension that feels a lot like something pulled from DBZ, where you can sacrifice a turn (or multiple turns) to boost your power.  I didn't feel this was broken as the game gave both players and enemies the ability to use it and indeed the enemies often did do some neat stuff with it, having some special enemy advantages in the area to quickly raise and drop tension levels.  While it is particularly good, a gamer that relied on it as the centerpiece of their strategy would get torn apart by many a boss.  Beyond that, the core Dragon Quest battle gameplay that has existed for ages lives on.

   On the character mechanics, this game did something very rare in Dragon Quest games: They got rid of something.  They tossed out the entire Dharma Shrine centered class change system that they'd used for the past two games.  Good riddens really, as that system was overheavy and both opened the possibility of every character becoming the same and several less than fun game practices to take full advantage of it.  In its place is a very simplified skill system.  Each character gets five skills, four weapon and a personal skill.  Each of these act like the classes of old, complete with titles, but are not uniform across the party and do not depend on fight count.  When you level, you get a certain number of skill points to distribute between them.  On the wise side, almost every convenience skill or spell you will ever want in the game is placed handily in the first 20 points of the personal skill for the characters, particularly the hero.  It's reasonable to have whistle (Draw enemies to you), holy (ignore battles from weak enemies), evac (escape dungeons), zoom (teleport to towns) and a few heal spells all within the first five levels of play.  Choosing to specialize down a route lets you get bonuses with that weapon and new skills particular to it.  This might be annoying in terms of 'hey, what if I switch weapons', but I found it easy enough to keep two weapons in the personal inventory of a character and it is free to switch up your equipment every round of combat if you so choose.  Additionally, the game gives enough skill points to become competent at all skills or master two and some skills within a normal 40-45 level progression that most will complete over the game.  In effect, this allows each of the characters to both have flexibility based on player choice, while at the same time having their own personality and style in combat that isn't just quickly replacable.  No matter what you do, Yangus the Mighty will not magically be able to just flip classes and replace Jessica as the magic specialist, but at the same time, he could be a backup healer and support or a brutal front line fighter or a cunning thief, or some of both.

   The towns are large, but not truly massive.  A quick footed player could explore most towns in under ten minutes and count on getting to any given place they want to go afterwards in around a minute from entrance.  Yes, a little annoying sometimes when you must save this second and not sixty seconds away, but balanced against that is that the towns generally feel quite alive, if not to the degree of games like planescape, far beyond the degree you generally see in a Final Fantasy title for example.  You've got plenty of folks to talk to in most towns, usually having two positions to be found and a variety of dialogue each.  In general, this made it pretty easy to track anyone down, with almost no cases of tracking a moving target around the town (Pickham has one, but it is an event and everyone points you to where the guy is going during it).  Each town generally has a sort of theme running through it, whether it be port town, church, holy site, or such.  The casinos, a mainstay of the Dragon Quest series for a while now, do return though not in one of their better incarnations.  The gambling is generally in your favor, but limited to bingo, slots, and roulette over the course of the game.  Slight disappointment there, but plenty functional when you want to pick up some rewards from the casino store.

   The characters, notably, are pretty neat.  And when I say the characters, I mean Yangus.  I know there's a rest of the party there, but anyone who has played it will note that Yangus has a real tendency to steal the show and is pretty awesome in doing so.  A general ne'er do well, acts smarter than he is, fat pickin' his nose thief, Yangus provides the powerhouse of the party and a fair bit of comic relief.  I'm sort of teasing here though because despite Yangus being so awesome, the game does have some pretty good characters throughout, as should be expected from an Akira work.  You get a small party of four player characters and two hanger-ons: Hero, Yangus, Jessica, and Angelo for the first, King Trode and Medea for the second.  Due to the small party size, you never have to worry about swapping characters in or out and each character gets a pretty meaty chunk of development to them, often spanning several towns and adventures.  Trode is a pretty likable ol' king, and, though he doesn't look it, is a badass warrior in his own right, which makes for a pretty cool guard captain to king relationship that gets played on with the hero and Trode.  What about the rest of the place?  Well, as is standard for a Toriyama work, we've got a bunch of over the top characters.  From self-serving church dignitaries (Who are neither evil nor goody two-shoes, in a twist off a very heavily played formula) to overdramtic drunk seers to Morrie and his MONSTEROUS PIT, ragazzo.  Morrie deserves particularly note as a personal favorite NPC.  He's an over the top Italian caricature, complete with rants about passion, gusto, and effort and randomly inserted words from Italian.  He refers to you as Ragazzo.  Always.  He also gets a fiery background, sentai poses, and a squad of bunny girls.  He's pretty damn awesome, and on top of that is the focus of one of the more fun minigames/sidequests in the game: The Monster Arena.

   The Monster Arena deserves its own little coverage because it does change up the game a bit.  See, you've got these infamous monsters all over the world.  More powerful named versions of the normal goons you might find around, visible on the screen as you travel around the world (in fact, if you're close, they'll go after you).  These guys take many forms from the slime knight relaxing under a shady tree, to the giant demon guarding a bridge like a troll of old.  At any time in the game, you can fight these for cash and xp and, on the first win, a monster coin that can be sold for a fair amount.  They do level up with you, but this doesn't have too much of an effect most the time in battles with them.  Once you go through an event with Morrie and finish a little quest for him, you get the ability to recruit monster teams (First three, up to a grand total of 12 monsters), putting together your own little army of infamous monsters that can go to battle in the arena or be summoned onto the field of battle anywhere for a few rounds of pain.  I tended to like to use them in boss fights, since they gave an awesome damaging opener while giving you the chance to see how the boss thinks.  That alone was pretty darn awesome.  It makes the game a bit easier, but generally they won't bring a boss to its knees for you.

   The main plot is, in my mind, simple.  It's got its few twists, but this is no Shakespearean play.  That said, it was enjoyable, gave enough ground to feel like I wasn't simply battling idiots, and generally kept me very entertained the whole main game through.

Dracos