Imaging making the game not dead easy like DQXI, with not just lovely character, but sexy characters, without modern censorship and without modern bash on sex appeal or fan service. Now add funny moments that are actually funny and finally add the sense of adventure that old JRPGs used to have. That sum what DQVIII do well.

You actually die in this game and dying have consequences, dead character can only be revive on save points (till you get the magic to revive, but that's like 20h into the game and it's a 50/50 magic) and getting wipe out take half of your money. I would not say this is a hard game, it's not, but is not completely easy.

The look is a 10 out of 10 for a PS2 game, the jump from DQ7 is HUGE, the biggest in all the series. Toriyama's character design is beautiful, even for NPCs. Jessica gets a lot of fan service costumes and details, I'm always grateful for that, because is something modern mainstream games are not allow to have anymore. For me the weakest part of the design are the monsters, i can't get used to the goofy monsters of DQ games. Scenarios and overall world looks awesome.

The world is very open and the sense of "going in an adventure" is very strong, there's no waypoint or HUD message saying where to go all the time.

The story is super simple and classic, cliché, i would say.

Alchemy and Monster Arena do a decent job to add some variety to the formula.

My main complain is how painfully SLOW everything is... No skip, nothing have skip here.
Saving takes take like 10 unnecessary question and/or menu movement, same with item movements, menu navigation, everything. Random encounters makes exploration feel slow too, I feel for PS2 era we should already have real monsters on the map.
Also, this game is grindy, unfortunately, the main and almost only way the game knows to add difficulty is raising levels, farming is almost mandatory. There's very little place for skill or tactic in this game, gameplay is super straight foward, plain for RPG standards. Status-effect, buffs/nerfs, elemental rock-paper-scissor... pretty much all is negated in most important battles, they feel useless to be honest.

So if you want a comfy adventure and you have the necessary patience, i recommend this game, its one of those works where you can clearly see it was made with love. In my opinion this is the right game to get into the Dragon Quest series.

As usual, dragon quest is a pure, distilled jrpg experience. It will never surprise or challenge the player with innovative mechanics, but it will provide some of the most meticuloisly refined turn-based mechanics out there.

I particularly loved the aesthetics on this one: the cel-shaded look is enchanting and timeless. The characters also shine, both in design and in personality. Most of the characterisation is conveyed through party banter and bickering that is somewhat sparse, but always charming. Some characterisation ilfor the main character is also conveyed through mechanics, i.e. his immunity to curses and cursed equipment, which cleverly hints at some mystery about him. That is a really good touch.

Combat is nothing surprising, but it is quite well crafted and balanced. The only spark of uniqueness it has is the "psyche up" system, which lends more than a few opportunities for tactical play.

Basically no grinding is required, each character grows into a useful role, and getting them to work together in synergy is quite satisfying. As a side point, only having 4 party members is a design choice that I wholeheartedly support: it makes the game more focus and doesn't force the player to choose what characters will be left to rot on the bench.

Having only played DQXI to its completion before this game, I was left a bit disappointed by VIII in some regards, mainly the town designs, which are a lot more generic than XI. But I guess that's an unfair criticism, as XI came out a decade later.

The main drawback of this game is its length. It took me 60 hours to finish it, and it really didn't need to be this long. I caught up with Dhoulmagus (the big overarching objective of the first half of the game) at about the 35 hour mark, and I feel that this was a great place to end it. Little did I know, I was barely halfway through, and the second half would be just more of the same, repeated as nauseam.

If you'd allow me a (badly crafted) metaphor, DQ to me is like a fine steak. It doesn't need fancy toppings or sides, just some salt and pepper, it lets the flavour of the top-quality meat speak for itself. No fancy mechanics, no experimentation, just finely crafted jrpg-ing. Unfortunately, though, this steak is, like, 2kg of meat. It's way too much for one person, and even the most rich and succulent cut of meat you ever had is going to tire you after eating that much.

A series of bullet points on Dragon Quest 8:

-This game is everything a Dragon Quest fan could want from a PS2 DQ game, with a traditional soul but AAA production values circa 2004--at least, in the US version. It basically is like playing a high-end SNES RPG in full 3D, but with a full-scale overworld. The traditionalist feel of DQ7 was suffocating and boring, but at a time and place where JRPGs were going to vastly different places (such as FF10 jettisoning the overworld map completely), DQ8's old-school JRPG feel is instead refreshing.

-To that end, if you really like JRPGs, this game is sure to be one of your favorites. If you kinda like JRPGs, it's still pretty damn good, but a bit repetitive and overlong. If you don't like JRPGs outside of maybe EarthBound or Final Fantasy 7, this probably won't change your mind, but you'll likely still be charmed to at least some degree.

-DQ8's combat is very polished, but only a little more engaging than previous games. The battles (which still randomly pop up) mostly go swiftly and smoothly, with greatly satisfying animations. But they also tend to linger on things about two seconds too long, and those trivial seconds add up a lot over the course of 60+ hours. In general, the random battles were getting really repetitive by the end. The new tension system is a nice addition, and adds a risk-versus-reward feeling to later boss fights when all those super attacks you're charging up could potentially be rendered worthless in an instant.

-A few other gameplay observations:
--The leveling system is easily the best in the series up to this point, and provides good replay value.
--The Zelda influence I noticed in DQ7 continues to be felt with the dungeons, which even give you a map near the beginning. They were pretty fun to play through, though probably better in the 3DS version where you know when a battle is about to interrupt your puzzle-solving. Like Zelda, the puzzles are easy, but still satisfying. Rydon's Tower was really fun.
--Exploration was generally fun, but I wish the world map had areas' names labelled.

-The game is a delight to look at! The models are fantastic, environments are very colorful, and the world is quite vast and detailed with lots of pleasant scenery. The cutscenes are somewhat limited in animation, but characters' faces can at least be quite expressive. The enemies are very expressive and charming. Jessica's boobs.

-It's mostly very nice to listen to as well. I've heard better soundtracks in this series, but this still has a fair amount of memorable tunes. The orchestral soundtrack is mostly lush and beautiful, but I actually like the MIDI soundtrack a little more in places--the percussion is definitely stronger, and the orchestral recordings are a bit smothered in reverb, meaning the melodies can be a bit muddier. However, the game does not have enough music for its runtime. Final Fantasy 6 (1994) has over 60 songs over the course of ~35 hours. Dragon Quest 8 (2004) has about 40 songs over ~65 hours. Some story sequences really could have used unique music, and there definitely aren't enough town themes. This is DQ traditionalism at its worst--having a single two-minute overworld theme works a lot better on a zoomed out map you don't spend a ton of time on.

-On the topic of audio, I'd like to say the voice acting they graciously gave us for the English release is mostly very very good, or at least entertaining. A few characters have annoying voices, and having almost every character have a different zany accent got excessive late in the game. But generally, the decision to ham it up and play into the game's goofiness was brilliant. The localization is generally super charming and chock full of puns--leveling up your boomerang skill a bit earns you the rank of Baby Boomer, and leveling it up a lot makes you a Boomeranger (presumably with a soft G).

-The voice acting contributes to some stellar storytelling all around, with some really memorable and surprisingly emotional scenarios. The bad guy is a real bastard this time around. As I said before, I do wish the cutscenes were a little more animated and had more unique music, or that some conversations cut out the town music in favor of atmosphere. But the narrative generally strikes a good balance between classic DQ episodic storytelling and a more epic overarching story. It's definitely an odyssey. There are some really cool setpieces in this game, some of which remind me of classic moments from DQ2 and DQ5.

-Later in the game, there's some filler busywork in the vein of "Go here and talk to this guy...oh gee he's not here, better go to the cave dungeon nearby to find him!" After playing for so long, this was tiresome. Maybe the game should've been more like 50 hours instead of 65-ish. There were also a couple harsh difficulty spikes I had to grind at, but generally the difficulty was at a pleasant upper-medium.

-As long as this game was, and as annoyed as I occasionally was with random encounters by the end, I was already missing it a bit as it ended. It was a hell of a ride, and I love all the main party members and King Trode and Princess Medea so much. This game gets an 8, as in Dragon Quest 8.

I only got this game as a kid because they bundled in a copy of the Final Fantasy XII demo with every purchase. My brother and I are big fans of the Final Fantasy series, so we were hyped to try out the next-numbered title. Surprisingly though we never really tried the demo out, and that is because we were both enthralled by the world, characters, gameplay, graphics, and overall feeling of this game.

This game is dense, there is just so much to do and discover and explore in this world. From the different cities and dungeons to find, to the items and equipment to discover and create through alchemy, and the characters you control and customize.

The story is also very well told, it's simple like most Dragon Quest games but extremely effective with its storytelling. I would even say it's one of the best stories in the whole series. This game is also stunning, even after all this time the game looks and plays smoothly, and it is genuinely timeless.

My only gripe with the game is that it is excessively long and has some pretty big difficulty spikes. The team could have cut out a few of the character moments and still had an effective story, but at the same time, it adds so much to the characters you play with. I recommend this game to every JRPG fan out there, this is a true classic and deserves to be experienced.

"To live life is not to walk through a meadow."

DQ8 is one of my favorites in the series. The game is charming in every regard whether it be story, party members, or NPCs. Being a less linear experience than a lot of the other JRPGs of this era makes the world feel sprawling. Exploration is and always will be a big part of the series and the rewards for going off the beaten path are usually worth it here.

The main issue most people will have with this game is how fucking slow it is. This makes getting the bell to speed up to traversal feel impactful. Unfortunately, the combat animations are still way too long so use speed-up in an emulator.

Revisiting this cast was fucking sweet. I love this group of misfits and their party talk is often hilarious. Their stories are pretty short, but they resonated with me. This is also the only game ever that has Yangus as a character. COR BLIMEY!!!!!!!

Overall, it's one of the best in the series I've played and a gold standard for JRPGs back in the early 2000s.

Still not wanting to get off of the Dragon Quest train yet, after DQ3, I hopped right into DQ8~. I’ve technically played a little bit of this before, getting to a bit past the first boss in the English PS2 version over a decade ago, and while I enjoyed what I played, I never went back to it. I was determined to fix that this time, and finally saw DQ8 through to its conclusion. It took me about 70-ish hours to get the normal (non-post-game) in the Japanese version of the game on real hardware.

DQ8’s narrative is about you, the Hero (whose canon name is Eito), traveling with a strange little goblin and a bandit-looking fella in a horse-drawn cart. That bandit-looking fella is Yangus, an ex-bandit who has decided to follow you as part of your adventuring band out of respect, and that little goblin is the titular Cursed King, Torode of the English version’s subtitle, while the horse pulling the cart is the cursed princess of the Japanese versions’ subtitle. Toroden Castle was attacked and cursed by the evil mage Dhoulmagus, and you, as the only surviving member of the royal guard, are on a quest to defeat him and break the curse on your leige and the princess.

Writing-wise, I have very mixed feelings on DQ8. On the more positive side of things, this is easily one of the best presented narratives you’d seen in a game by 2004. The recently born Square Enix was really putting their money where their mouth is, and compared to contemporary Tales of or Atelier games, DQ8’s recreation of Akira Toriyama’s art style is incredibly impressive. While characters don’t have any VA in the original Japanese version, their facial expressions and gestures, when combined with the camera direction in cutscenes, tell a really impressive story nonetheless.

On the more negative side of things, there are the nittier grittier details of the writing and the themes that make me wonder if the game is like this through genuine intent, lack of ability, or just simple lack of time. The game’s first third or so has a lot of really impressive cutscenes and character beats as you pick up the other two members of your party, and it makes for a really strong first impression. However, after you get your fourth party member, what seems like a very character-focused story suddenly pivots back to the more familiar “adventure vignette” style that so many other DQ games (especially 7) use so well. This would be all fine and dandy (albeit a bit disappointing) if not for the game still occasionally wants to have bit character beats.

Near the game’s conclusion, it just suddenly decides to bring up larger political ideas from one of the minor antagonists (who is heavily tied to one of your main characters) that are very quickly discarded and never really addressed. The game then more or less doubles down on the notion that his (good) points don’t matter and are wrong in the post-game content (whose contents I looked up rather than played myself), and the whole game ends up with this weird vibe of being somewhere between glorification/apologia for royalty and the nobility of being status-quo warriors. For most of the game, I figured that the worst things I’d have to say about the writing were the very of-the-time sexism and the unevenness of the character writing/narrative pacing, but instead I was left with something that you need to kind of try and look past its themes to try and enjoy it. Were the character writing more complete and fleshed out beyond the first 20 or so hours (where most of the cutscenes are), perhaps this wouldn’t have been such a big issue, but as it is DQ8 is a very confused product narratively if you peer even a little beyond the surface level.

Dragon Quest as a series is generally pretty good at having stories about adventures that don’t try to say much with their larger themes. While DQ8 is mostly that, it also decidedly isn’t in a way that makes for a very uneven experience. It’s not something that will bother everyone, but it’s something that casts an unfortunate shadow across the whole experience for me. While it at least manages to end on a relatively strong beat, with how confused and messy (or, with a less charitable reading, outright bad) the themes are, it’s well below a lot of other JRPGs of the time for me. If I had to choose in terms of just narrative, I honestly prefer DQ7, if only because it’s such a better realized product than 8 is, and that’s to say nothing of contemporary games with much better realized character beats and themes like Tales of Rebirth or Atelier Iris. I certainly wouldn’t go as far as to say that DQ8’s writing or story are outright bad, but I definitely cannot deny just how disappointed the whole experience left me.

Mechanically, at least, DQ8 manages to be a very significant improvement over DQ7 in just about every way. The basic mechanics are still very DQ (spells, weapon types, items, that sort of thing), but the big change from DQ7 (and by extension 6) is that we are rid of the incredibly grindy job system! In its place is a much better executed skill system, where each of your four characters has five skills that gain levels as you put skill points into them with each level up. Each character has four weapon specializations and one character skill, with each weapon skill giving more power and moves to use when using that weapon, and the character skills giving anything from new spells, to new moves, to even special passives you’ll always have.

This system isn’t perfect, mind you. The total inability to redistribute these skill points is a pretty damn mean choice, as even though you can technically max out all 5 by the time you hit level 100, you’ll also most likely be beating the game around level 42 or so like I did, so if you mess up and try to do a “jack of all trades” build not realizing that that’s terrible, there’s no way other than a LOT of grinding to get yourself out of that hole. DQ8’s difficulty curve is kinda all over the place (it peaks around the time you get the boat, at which point I had to do like 8 or 9 hours of grinding to get to a level where I could survive going forward), and the final boss was definitely one of the easier DQ final bosses I’ve fought, but on the whole I’d say this is certainly one of the harder DQ games I’ve played, so play sub-optimally at your own risk. My main piece of advice is to pick one weapon skill and then your character skill, and then max them out before starting to max another weapon, because it’ll make life a LOT easier.

The presentation, as mentioned earlier, is really stellar. The cell-shaded graphics and camerawork do an incredible job of bringing Toriyama’s art style to life in 3D, and it still looks great even through composite cables on a PS2, as far as I’m concerned (which is more than you can say about a lot of other 3D PS2 games, I’m sure I don’t need to tell you). The music in the Japanese version isn’t the orchestral version, but I still liked it a lot, as it’s that familiar Dragon Quest-y goodness that makes the other games so nice to listen to as well~. The game has some performance issues in some areas and even some boss fights, with the framerate very visibly struggling to keep up with the action, but this being a turn-based JRPG, that doesn’t really affect gameplay at least.

The last thing I’ll mention about the Japanese version being different from the English version is the UI, which is very different. Rather than the very stylized and picture-heavy English UI, it’s a UI much more evocative and familiar to what prior DQ games used. It felt like no change at all going from DQ7 to DQ3 to this, which I didn’t mind. Honestly, I like how simple and streamlined the Japanese UI is, but that’s something more down to taste than one being outright better than the other or anything.

Verdict: Recommended. Wonky difficult balance and sloppy writing aside, I did still quite enjoy my time with DQ8. The grinding goes quickly enough that it makes the weird difficulty curve not so bad, and the strength of the presentation does a lot to make the inadequacies of the writing in the places where the themes aren’t in turmoil. I would never say it’s my favorite DQ game, and it’s far from my favorite JRPG on the PS2, but DQ8 is still a good game that a fan of DQ or JRPGs will likely have quite a good time with. The 3DS port also adds some very nice quality of life features like sped up battles, enemies visible on the map, and making alchemy instant (because good god does it take an unforgivable amount of time in this version), and if you’re thinking of playing DQ8, that’s probably the version to play.