Chained to the Alchemy Pot: Dragon Quest VIII

I put maybe twenty hours or so hours into Bully, maybe a bit longer, over the course of a month and a half. By contrast, I've clocked just shy of nineteen hours on Dragon Quest VIII and I've only had it a week and a half.

It's kind of an odd story how I ended up playing DQ8--someone had started a thread on a messageboard I follow about recommendations for an RPG to play and I hopped in and asked for advice. I'd actually gotten a kick of the RPG-lite touches on Marvel: Ultimate Alliance (an experience I've really passed over about on this blog, I suddenly realize) and have always felt a little bit guilty for not being a bigger fan of RPGs on the console: in theory, it's a style of game I want to support (they're heavy on the writing and the storytelling) but never actually take to. I tried a few minutes of Final Fantasy X-2 and loathed it, hated the hour or two of the first Xenogears that I played, and then there was the savagely dull time spent with Kingdom Hearts II....

But I've enjoyed the faux RPG-ness of Champions of Norrath, Marvel: Ultimate Alliance, and certain demos like Front Mission 4, to say nothing of Neverwinter Nights and Baldur's Gate (only my fear of having a time-suck RPG has kept me from installing Baldur's Gate 2 on my laptop). Considering how often I synch up with the average twelve year old video game console player in Japan, I couldn't figure out whether I just kept picking bad RPGs or I just hated them..

With this in mind, I ordered DQ8 from Amazon. It would be my way to finally find out how I feel about RPGs (at least on a console) since everyone who played RPGs praised it to the skies. (According to Wikipedia, the readers of Japanese video game magazine Famitsu voted it the no. 4 RPG of all time.)

Sadly for me, I love it.

Dragon Quest VIII is a huge sprawl of an RPG, in which you are a guardsman of a ruined king and a transformed princess hunt down the evil mage who destroyed your kingdom. At first, you're aided by a single henchman but as time goes on you add two more characters to your party. Pretty standard RPG stuff.

In fact, that's part of the appeal of Dragon Quest VIII--it's the epitome of standard Japanese style RPG, but with absurdly high production values and some of the best localization I've ever played. To catch the levels of stratification within your party, the game's adapters went with an all-Brit voice cast--your first henchman, Yangus, speaks in a delightfully thick Cockney accent, and the ruined king, despite looking like Yoda, sounds like a high-bred fop. (In fact, although the voicde acting is top-notch all the way around, Ricky Grover's voicing of the fat, faithful big-hearted tough guy Yangus puts the character in a lot of top five NPC lists. He's just a joy to listen to.)

That, and a dash of other incredibly high production values--the characters and monsters were designed by Akira Toriyama, the creator of Dr. Slump and Dragonball Z--make the game not just the RPG video game equivalent of comfort food, but the equivalent of super-quality comfort food feast: less a peanut butter sandwich, than a towering Dagwood Bumstead style sandwich made with pricey delicacies from Whole Foods.

Additionally, even though the game can be hard, it's almost always whimsical. You fight dancing devils in short pants, hooded shirtless muscle men who can distract you with their flexing, sentient bouncing bags with leering mouths and bouncing candies--Toriyama's designs so far are more Dr. Slump and less Dragonball Z, and that, combined with the cel-shaded animation, and a large number of silly side-quests and possiblities for character optimization, makes one feel like they're playing an ongoing anime series. It's closer to Harvest Moon than Final Fantasy, making it a nice continuation of the child-like time-wasting I indulged in Bully.

It has its drawbacks, of course. The game's action stems from its random encounters, and there are times when you just want to get back to the village, save your game and quit, but half to fight your way through teams of six monsters, over and over and over.... Also, playing the game for more than three hours at a time makes me feel headachey and over-stimulated, like I'd eaten a bag full of jellybeans. And although it's a huge open world with treasure chests, secret monsters, and hidden subquests, the lack of a detailed world map (I got one about seven hours in and it's ridiculously sparse) and the high number of encounters make that world too much of a chore to explore. (So far.)

But, overall, it's a stunning game, the kind of candy-colored time waster I'm tempted to send along to my ex roommates back on Paris Sreet, and I'm both delighted that I bought it and more than a little terrified. I have projects to take care of in the next few months--some big ones for other people, and a decent-sized one for myself, and it's already caused me to sabotage one gym visit.

I might well have been better off if I hadn't liked Dragon Quest VIII, to be honest. But I take some comfort in knowing that chances are good that no matter how long I play it, there aren't going to be a lot of other RPGs as good as it. My best hope now is that the game will be so good it'll spoil me for others of its ilk.

And if not? Well, at least I'll once again be in line with my twelve year old Japanese brethren.