Game Debate #128: Dragon Quest VIII

[Reed Rothchild | 9,510]

[Gloves | 11,761]

I've owned it on a number of separate occasions, but never played it.

[DefaultGen | 5,400]

[Kguillemette | 1,543]

I've only heard good things. It's respected as one if the best jrpgs on the ps2, and that's no small compliment. I'll get around to giving it a proper playthrough eventually.

[RH | 4,895]

This was the game that opened me up to the DQ series.  I was 100% team Final Fantasy to that point.  When Squaresoft merged with Enix and they released this game, I figured I'd give it a try.

Man, I missed a lot of good RPGs.  I never snubbed the series, but for some reason DQ just wasn't on my radar.  It's a great story while keeping with most RPG traditions.

IMHO, since the kick off of the 3D gaming era, DQ is as "JRPG" as you can get and this game as the first such 3D games in the series did a remarkable job.

[Hammerfestus | 3,820]

It’s really good. Play it now.  9

[Bearcat-Doug | 5,104]

Never played it. I've only finished the very first game and just couldn't get into the series after that.

[Aguy | 771]

Love it, beat it on PS2 then years later on 3DS. One of my favorite gaming memories playing it back in 2006 on a giant CRT in the living room with surround sound.

Edited November 17, 2022 by Aguy

[RH | 4,895]

2 hours ago, Aguy said:

Love it, beat it on PS2 then years later on 3DS. One of my favorite gaming memories playing it back in 2006 on a giant CRT in the living room with surround sound.

Oh, yeah, it has a killer OST too.  This one I return to regularly to listen to while I work.

[MagusSmurf | 577]

Cool game. I've played the first 9 Dragon Quests and the GBC remakes of 1-3 and this is my favorite. Looks fantastic, good soundtrack, might have the best dub of any PS2 JRPG, has the usual Dragon Quest charm and polish, puts forth more effort than the franchise usually does with its cast and characters, and the scale of the world and exploration thereof was a huge step up for JRPGs at the time. Top 100 JRPG? Yeah, probably.

I think it falls a bit short of the JRPG all-timers though.

On PS2 the game's well over 60 hours long just to roll credits and as neat as it is, the big exploration-heavy large-scale world is a big contributor to that. And while I don't play modern games much, the scale of the world seems like something that could be done better by applying modern AAA budgets plus not being stuck on PS2; as far as I know Dragon Quest XI, Final Fantasy XII and XV, and the Xenoblade games all went for something at least sort of similar. For all that it offers though, I'm not sure an approach that bloats up a game's length so much was necessarily a good change for the genre. At games around Dragon Quest VIII's length, the novelty of a game wears off a bit and having unique or really well done gameplay or a cool story becomes more important to me. And Dragon Quest VIII doesn't do quite enough there for me to really love the game.

The battle system is...pretty much standard Dragon Quest stuff, with the new Tension mechanic seldom mattering that much. I mean, it's good JRPG combat. And it looks great, way better than Dragon Quest ever did before! But yeah. I've never thought Dragon Quest combat was top tier.

Skill points (the game's character building system) aren't particularly good. The game doesn't offer sufficient information for the player to make informed decisions about how they're distributing skill points. If you don't look it up on gamefaqs, you basically just pick a weapon type, put points into that and/or your character-specific attribute, and hope the game gives you good skills in a timely manner and provides good weapons for whatever weapon you picked. I just never feel like Dragon Quest does all that great at these systems. However, in the 3DS version you apparently don't have to distribute Skill Points right at level up, which is a good change that would let you stockpile points for a bit and them test out what putting large chunks at a time into various attributes gets you and resetting if you don't like the results.

And the story. It has a slow start but has some decent build-up, then there's a big scene a dozen or so hours in where it seems like things are maybe picking up...and then kinda doesn't follow up at all quickly and while there are some neat scenes here and there the game just doesn't maintain a good pace of cool stuff going on. The game sets up some neat characters and at least has party chat, but doesn't really give them proper focus. Nice beats occasionally but other than Yangus being fun they don't really amount to that much. In other words: Steps in the right direction were taken but the game is ultimately still too much a Dragon Quest game to really deliver.

So yeah, great game with a big beautiful world that sounds great and delivers solid Dragon Quest combat and has charm for days; but the story and cast aren't all that, the game gets a little long in the tooth, and past maybe the exploration and world that are presumably less standout now than in the 2000's I don't think the gameplay ever feels fantastic.

According to HLTB the 3DS version is like 20 hours shorter despite adding new content. If true then that would certainly be big for it.

Edited November 18, 2022 by MagusSmurf

[srbossman79 | 25]

This was the first Dragon Quest game I actually played through.  I bought it new when it came out back when I was in high school.  I was a big Dragon Ball Z fan when that was first aired on Toonami.  A game with graphics and artwork by Akira Toriyama was right up my alley at the time.  The music and art are great in this game. 

I had a lot of fun with it, but it's one I've never gone back to.  Even with the quirky and colorful characters, there is something about Dragon Quest VIII that just seems sort of sanitized, if that's the right word.  Maybe its the fact that the main character never has any personality in any of the Dragon Quest games?  Maybe something is lost in the translation from one language to another?  They are fun to play at the time, but don't stick with me.  I'd recommend it to anyone that is a JRPG fan though.  It's a good one. 

[Estil | 1,261]

Would you guys think I'm crazy if at the part (like in Dragon Quest 5) where you get to choose who you want to marry, I'd go with the one who has that quiet graceful elegance about her...as opposed to the one I bet puff-puffs like a tiger?