Dragon Quest VIII: Journey of the Cursed King
Say hello to the best RPG of 2005.
Published: December 6, 2005
Sure, the hills are pockmarked with random chests and monsters to find and fight, but these are the kinds of things you’re encouraged to find while you battle the monsters. In fact, it’s essential that you level up your characters in classic fashion, allowing them to automatically grow in terms of attack and defense, magic and agily, but also in the way the developers allow you to tweak weapons usage.
Each character wields four different types of weapons and a basic personality upgrade, so as you level up, you can pour points into swords or sex appeal, and as you graduate through the ranks of these individual disciplines, you’re rewarded with special abilities. Most of them are relatively weak and useless until you really start pouring points into one area, but they do allow you to inflict various status effects on enemies or attack whole groups in addition to just normally clobbering them.
Tucked around these upgrades is a voluntary system for mixing different items found throughout the world. What would normally be a throwaway introductory item found 20 hours after you upgraded past it can now be combined with various materials to make new, more powerful types or armor or far more lucrative trade-ins at vendors. This increasingly becomes an alternative to just grinding the enemies in the area until you’ve amassed enough coin to purchase the usual new weapons and armor to keep your characters from getting killed.
Should that happen (and it will), the game preserves the old standby of priests that mete curses, raise the dead and tell you how much experience you’ll need to reach the next level. Inns heal you or allow you to sleep until the evening, at which point some monsters change and certain special monsters can be hunted in the open. The day/night cycle is actually used quite a bit in the game, revealing some entrances to areas and moving the plot along, though it’s always handily sped up for you.
In fact, for a game that’s so charmingly old-school, there’s still a nice bit of hand-holding all the way through the end of the game. Since it is a massive adventure, and one prone to getting a little tiring at times with all the necessary leveling and monster squashing, it’s not unusual to put the game down for a while. You can always press start to talk to characters and find out exactly where you’re supposed to be going with a clever hint that never, ever feels like an obvious “go here next.” Early on, you’ll learn a spell that allows you to revisit any area you’ve already been to, cutting down dramatically on backtracking or needless travel.
It’s this merging of the old series standbys with very minor but important tweaks to the formula that keeps the game so fresh. A lot of the redundancy has been stripped out, and the game never fails to move things along, staying careful to dole out bits of the storyline (smallish as they may be at times) to keep things going. It’s a clever way of keeping you enthralled, and you won’t want to leave for any long stretches.
For all the poo-pooing I did of Toriyama’s character designs, I have to say that the cel-shaded world that was constructed around them is quite honestly the most fitting and well-rounded I’ve ever seen for the medium. The stark outlines around characters work, but it’s more than just a particular look, it’s the density of foliage while wandering around or the way classic characters are brought to live in full, vibrant 3D.
