This is not going to be a popular opinion. I became a fan of Dragon Quest fairly recently after having a fantastic time with DQ3. Since then I've played 1, 2, 4, 5, and 8.

This game is often held up as the best of the series, and I couldn't agree less. Before I'm burned alive, let me start from the beginning and try to explain myself.

From the start of the game, I loved the opening premise. Escorting this particular caravan and trying to hunt down the magician responsible for their fates was a great initial hook for me. What I didn't realize at the time was that for the vast majority of the game I would be following this magician around the world from place to place a la Sephiroth in FF7. That's perfectly fine, just as it is in FF7, but that means the burden of sustaining the player's interest falls on different elements. FF7 has a few important ways of keeping things interesting. First, that section of the game is minimized somewhat by the fact that Midgar exists before it. Second, the places the party visits are fantastical, interesting locations all on their own, like the Gold Saucer, Junon, or Cosmo Canyon. Thirdly, FF7 has a large ensemble cast with both backstories and ongoing "front" stories. This means that most locations can be of personal significance to at least someone in the party. Corel prison isn't just a desert prison, it's the site of a whole story arc for Barrett, a character who the player is hopefully invested in.

Dragon Quest 8 does not have these things. DQ8 for the most part features plain fairy tale kingdoms with their own isolated stories that are largely detached from the main overarching plot or the personal affairs of the party. In my personal opinion, those town stories are not interesting enough, and are hugely outclassed by similar stories in other Dragon Quest games.

Each party member has their own One Piece style recruitment arc, except Yangus... kind of. A big part of the problem is that "Each party member except Yangus" includes exactly two other people. All three of these party members are fine. They have likable enough personalities. Unfortunately their development as characters stops dead the second you leave "their town." I know there's a lot of love for these characters but if I measure them against the cast of any similar RPG I can't help but feel that they come up short.

I enjoyed the gameplay until about 2/3rds of the way through, when I discovered that if I want to actually beat this game, I'm going to have use the tension system. More advanced Dragon Quest gameplay tends to involve setting up buffs and having the boss cleanse them off of you. Usually this is fine. However inflicting decent damage in DQ8 requires you to "tense" up for several turns in a row while praying to your god that the boss doesn't do his completely random buff cleanse that he does every few turns. Dragon Quest 8 does this for almost every boss in the latter portions of the game, and I found it absolutely maddening. Not maddening in a challenging and difficult sort of way, just in an incredibly, unnecessarily frustrating and unfun way.

At the end of the day I don't think either the gameplay or the narrative of DQ8 are anything to praise, and that saddens me as a huge fan of DQ3, 4, and 5.

Reviewed on May 20, 2020


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