I came to Chrono Cross ready to be in love, having seen its art direction and heard its wonderful music for years. Unfortunately, what I found was that every facet of Chrono Cross's story and gameplay feels like it was failed by an editor. The writers needed someone to trim the fat and point out that maybe multiple big reveals at the end of the game would be more impactful if any time was spent with the player to offer them emotional weight. The game designers needed someone to look at the concept of changing out elemental spells to fight specific bosses and suggest "will this not be extremely tedious when there are 30 spell slots and 60 characters you may be switching in and out of your party?" Instead, we were left with a mess of a game memorable only because of its art and character design & it's incredible soundtrack. In other words, I enjoyed Chrono Cross most before I'd played it.

Painful. While I will never subscribe to the notion that a sequel to something needs to be wholly like the original, the direction this game went in terms of narrative of gameplay is such an obvious and clear downgrade over the original that I find truly baffling. Instead of a tight cast of characters who get a lot of development and intrigue, you get maybe three characters with SOME development and about 30 who clog up the party doing nothing besides using bad accents. Instead of fluid engaging ATB-based gameplay it's now very slow turn based with the constant need to shuffle vague 'elements' depending on the situation. Instead of a plot that is thrilling to discover and learn more about, you get infodumped about 15 twists right before the game ends.

The game has excellent audio and visuals (Zoah eyes emoji) in service to a plot that is completely beneath it. Chrono Trigger never needed a 'bigger and better' sequel like this, it needed something much more concise, which ironically Radical Dreamers fills the role of much better. One of the all time most disappointing sequels.

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.