Games / Game Reviews

Dragon Quest VIII Review

By Jonathan Mills
January 28, 2006 - 14:56

The Dragon Quest series is insanely popular in Japan, so popular in fact, their was a law made many years ago that state's that no Dragon Quest game can be released on a week day (so as kids don't skip school to go buy it) That law still stands today. While Dragon Quest has enjoyed great success in Japan, the series has not fared extremely well overseas. Over the many years, very few games in the Dragon Quest series (usualy re-titled as Dragon Warrior for the American audience) have even come stateside, the last of note being Dragon Warrior VII for the original Playstation. Seeing as how DQVIII is such a great game, hopefully, this will change now.

Dragon Quest VIII has a very classic RPG style to it, like many games in the genre, you travel from town to town, talk to people, gather items, buy weapons and maybe take on a side quest here or their. Unlike more recent RPG's (This entire generation really, with a few exceptions) their is a huge overworld by which to explore. Battles are turn based, with the Boss fights offering some very intense moments. As you engage in random battles, you gain experience points, when enough is obtained your character's level up. When you level up, along with your base stats increasing, you will obtain a few skill points which you can freely distribute to a skill list. When a skill reaches a high enough number you'll obtain new skills to use in battle.

The star of this game and the reason you'll play through 80+ hours of it are the characters and the story, simply put, their wonderful. The story starts with you helping a cursed king and his daughter, who have been turned into a monster and a horse, try to reverse the curse by finding a man named Daulmagus, of who which they were cursed by, from here the story evolves to a much grander scale that i'll let you fully discover for yourself. The characters are wonderful, all full of personality. You have your hero which you can freely name (mine was named Jon) he's sort of your typical hero guy, he represents you, so he never talks. Next you have Yangus (my personal favorite) who is a former theif turned good. Then you have Trode, the poor king who has been cursed. I won't speak of the other characters as you don't start with them, and I don't want to spoil any suprise for you.

Hero

Dragon Quest VIII uses cell shaded graphics, the art of which was done by Akira Toriyama of Dragon Ball fame. This is the best the PS2 is going to do, the graphics are fantastic, with the fame rate almost never dropping. Music is catchy and usualy upbeat, and while I wouldn't say their are many stand out tracks, the overall music score is still pretty awesome. The voice acting is also top notch, I never felt at one moment that someone was out of place, and I give special praise to the actors/actresses who played the main cast of characters.

King Trode

But now, among all this praise, I must point out the few downfalls that the game has. The first thing may or may not be an issue for you, but it was for me and that is the games length. When I said it was 80+ hours, I really meant it, and if you decided to do more side quests or forgo into the other aspects of the game, you could easily take that up to 100 hours. For me, the game was just to long, in fact I actually played it in 2 different periods. The first was about 60 hours through, at that point, I was just burned

Exploring the overworld can be painfull at times, with the high encounter rate.

out. After not playing it for at least a month, I came back to it and finished the last 20. I was actually alittle ashamed when I finished it the 2nd go around, because I had so much fun, it was hard to believe I had stopped playing it before. This though thought me a lesson and that is to not burn yourself out playing a long game like this. Anyway, as I said before, the games length may or may not be an issue to you, this is just a personal preference of mine. The other downfall of the game is the encounter rate. This is yet another RPG that has far to many random battles, I couldn't help but think while playing that if the encounter rate were half of what it was, the game would never stop being fun to play. I wish all RPGs would just use the onscreen enemy system (where you see the enemy's onscreen before you go into battle) , rather then the random battle one. If they did, you could freely explore the world without fear of getting into 1000 fights. Their is a spell you acquire in the game that stops the occurrence of weaker enemy's but this does nothing for your current situation, so exploring dungeons and the overworld can sometimes be a pain.

In the end, Dragon Quest VIII succeeds despite a few nagging problems. Everything about the game is top notch, from it's graphics, to music, to story and it's superb voice acting. It's simply one of the best RPG's released in this generation.

Final score is not based on an average

Last Updated: January 17, 2025 - 08:20