Level Warp.

Wow. My last post was five days ago? Really??

I guess I shouldn't be that surprised--I haven't had a ton of time to play Dragon Quest VIII, much less write about it. As I recall, I had two sessions of maybe 90 minutes each.

The first session was a deliberate goof-off thing: I had captured a new creature that seemed pretty powerful and thought I'd have a run at the Level C Monster Arena championship.

And now it occurs to me I haven't told you anything about the Monster Arena yet, which is probably for the best, but alas unavoidable now. The Monster Arena mini-game is this area you stumble across after you've been playing for a while; when you do, a surprisingly hairy-chested man gives you bounties on three monsters, one of which you've probably already encountered, one of which you're about to encounter and the final one you run across about four or five hours down the road. If you capture all three, you open up the Monster Arena miniquest where you pit a team of those three monsters against three teams of three monsters in rapid succession. If your team beats those three teams, you get a price and you're allowed to compete at the next highest, more difficult, level. Because the three creatures you're given bounties for are pretty wimpy, you're encouraged to go find other monsters wandering the countryside. If you can beat them, you'll recruit them to your team.

This, plus the assorted treasure chests, provides more incentive for you to wander the countryside, and, timed where it is in the game, retrack your steps looking for monsters you'd encountered in the landscape. (In DQ8, the majority of your monster fights are randomly generated, but there are a number of monsters wandering around by themselves that you can avoid or attack, and it's these that you can recruit for your team.)

Me being me, I completely misunderstood the location of one of those three monsters so I didn't unlock the Monster Arena minigame until much later in the game than I'm sure the designers had calculated. This was good thing because by the time I'd opened it, I knew the location of two or three strong recruitable monsters and had a pretty powerful team right out of the gate. My group battled their way up from G to E without any trouble, and barely squeaked through D which hairy chested Mario assured me was the hardest group to beat. Actually, C went on to kick my ass and so I put the monster quest aside until I encountered a wandering dragon early in my Wednesday session... It was good enough to soundly beat Round C, but Round B, the penultimate set, was a bunch of mean bastards, and I barely made it to the second team in Round B before savagely beaten.

This set up the situation for the rest of that Wednesday session--wandering around the landscape on a sabrecat, fighting random monsters, finding treasure chests, and looking for recruitable monsters. It was only another thirty minutes of play or so, but it was pretty breezy and I finally turned it off as much out of annoyance at my own laziness as anything.

The second session on Thursday was, alas, more serious as I decided to go back into the Dark Ruins where my characters got killed. To my surprise, I battled to the bottom of the dungeon without too much trouble, mainly because I was willing to have all my characters throw out their top spells and bring the beatdown. I was hoping the bottom of the dungeon, which promised a showdown with the Big Bad, would just be a coattail of a level--the kind of thing that had happened twice in the past where my party confronts the villain, he mocks them and then teleports away laughing, and some new area of the map is opened up.

Nope. It's probably not the end of the game (I'm right at fifty hours, which is how long it takes people on the Internet to finish Dragong Quest VIII, but if there's one thing I've learned about my ultra-tard playing abilities is however long it takes people on the Internet--I call them "liars" for short--to finish, that's about two-thirds of the time it takes me to finish. If DQ8 is really fifty hours on a relatively quick play, I'll finish the game at about the 75 hour mark) but goddamned if I wasn't stuck fighting a laughing, annoying uber-boss who could split into three and fuck my party up big time. Remarkably enough, right as I was running out of everything, I beat his first incarnation, and the next two within five minutes later. I wanted to breathe a sigh of relief, but I knew better: I don't recall encountering this in American games--I'm sure it happens--but Japanese game developers love the two-stage end boss. Sure enough, the dude rises up, says more stuff, laughs some more (I gotta give it up to the designers of Dragon Quest VIII; you have to push a button to move past each box of dialogue, which is handy if you have to run for a pee or a sandwich or something. In this scene the villain laughs at you for a solid minute at which point you have to push a button, then he continues to laugh some more, and then you push a button, and then he laughs even longer and heartier and more annoyingly. It was so in-your-face I had to laugh.) and then, as is the Japanese end-boss want, turned into a giant winged demon and proceeded to beat me stupid. Because he got two insanely powerful attacks per round, one of which would shock half my party, and the other of which would brutalize any given party member, I was mincemeat in about eight minutes.

And then, thanks to the generous nature of DQ8, I was reborn in a church having lost no more than half my gold and having gained several thousand experience points. Unfortunately, I was out of time for the day, to say nothing of all the rare one-use only magic items I broke out in my attempt to beat his ass.

So that's where things stand. I haven't played since Thursday; I doubt I'll play until Wednesday; and once I do, I'll have to decide what I'm going to do. Currently, I'm leaning toward hitting GameFaqs and really looking in-depth at the stuff I can create with my alchemy pot. I've done a pretty good job avoiding it, and creating various items based on the hints I've found around the game, but there just aren't enough of them and I'm not getting any younger.

I don't like the idea of wandering around having random fights just to level up, but I don't see any other choice since I'm not strong enough to beat that boss in my current state. The main problem is my heroes are leveled up enough that while the fights are quick, the payoff is low, and it's gonna take forever for me to level up. Ideally, there'll be a section of the map I've missed where the monsters are just tough enough that I'll get good XP (yes, that stands for Experience Points) and can have my group bump up a level or two. That, plus manufacturing a rare item or two might make enough of a difference.

I certainly hope so; not only do I still want to play Yakuza, but those copies of Front Mission 4 came in and Mr. No-Willpower ordered GTA: Vice City Stories from Amazon today. This puts my to-play list at NINETEEN games. If I can get three or four of those games before God of War II goes on sale (hell, before it becomes a Greatest Hits title), that'll be a remarkable triumph of willlpower on my part.