Dragon Quest VIII

System: Playstation 2
Release Date: 2005
Published By: Square Enix
Reviewed by: Darien
Rating:

This game would lose at least one full point if the voice acting couldn't be turned off. It's not just lousy like in a lot of games; it's lousy and seemingly designed explicitly to annoy. Before even getting out of the first town for the first time, you'll have endured cockney, proper british, french, and spanish accents at least. Annoying accents are one thing, but to mix all of them together randomly is beyond comprehension. Fortunately, it can be turned off, and then you'll just have to read the accents and not listen to them.

The music is well-performed, but utterly lacking in subtlety. It would probably work better as an album or a concert than it does as a soundtrack. Sound effects and visuals are about on par with what one would expect from the series, with the familiar assortment of creatures and noises. Level 5's cel-shaded visuals (as seen in Dark Cloud 2) fit in well with Toriyama's character designs, and the world is lively and colourful; the lighting is a bit weak, but that is the only real visual flaw. The load times, on the other hand, are absurdly long. Longer by far than any other PS2 game I've ever played.

After Dragon Warrior VII's relatively engaging world and story, Dragon Quest VIII seems a step in the other direction. The plotting is absolutely standard, and anyone who has ever played a video game before will probably be several steps ahead of it throughout. The world is somewhat large, but seems very empty and linear. For the first time in the series, the world is in full 3D, and the landscapes and foliage are beautiful, and the game treats it like a cave. Roads are bounded and clearings are sectioned off by impassable cliffs, restricting freedom of movement unnaturally and annoyingly. Furthermore, drops are handled inconsistently by the game; at times, falls short enough as to be imperceptible are enough to prevent movement entirely, and at other times, it's possible to fall down several levels of a building.

Mechanically, the game starts out promising and turns rather dull rather quickly. The skill system used here is much more vague and inflexible than Dragon Warrior VII's; each character has five skill paths to spend points in, learning different skills at different levels. But there's no indication which skills are to be learned from which paths, so the whole system is a bit of a crapshoot. There's some business about building "tension" from turn to turn so as to make the final action stronger, but the game rather quickly makes the whole thing pointless.

By this time, we're used to video games that give us a large number of debuffs but make all the monsters worth debuffing immune to the lot of them. Dragon Quest VIII takes the idea a bit farther than most, though; in addition to bosses being immune to all debuffs, starting rather shortly into the game they become capable of clearing all buffs off of the party and resetting all tension. Combining this ability - which cannot be resisted - with multiple actions and obscure development choices creates for an absolute minimisation of strategy. Instead of strategic choices we get grindfest; make sure you're high enough level and have good enough gear and that's about it.

Dragon Quest VIII isn't a bad game, just a lukewarm one. A game that does not live up to its pedigree. It does excel in one respect, however; much like in Dark Cloud 2, the female lead can be stripped pretty close to naked without especially weakening her. But it goes a step beyond with the animations for the skills in the Sex Appeal tree. Eye candy is always a bonus.

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