Myself, of course. After posting on Saturday about how I felt relatively ahead of the curve on Dragon Quest VIII, I went and got my party killed in the dark ruins yesterday.
Dying in DQ8 isn't a big deal, other than if it happens it's usually because you deserved it. There's several ways to get out of any particular fight, and for a mere pittance you can buy an item that'll jet you back to a place where you can safely heal up. Yesterday, I noticed that my party was running kinda low on health and magic points but thought, "Ehhh, I'll make my way to the stairs at the end of the screen and then transport back." Sure enough, exactly twenty seconds later, a group of dog riding skeletons, orchid-headed priests, and a blood mummy or two arrived to slaughter me wholesale.
When you do die, you're resurrected in the last temple you visited, and stripped of half your gold: like I said, no big deal, particularly since the game has several banks where you can store your cash and avoid such a penalty if you get taken down. What stings is knowing that if I'd listened to myself, I wouldn't have lost any anything, except the time it would've taken me to retrace my steps. Of course, with video games the only true currency is time.
Which is the source of my ongoing ambivalence about video games in the first place--why do I continue to fritter away a currency which I have in such short supply? Answers like "fun" certainly come to mind, but sometimes I worry it's because while a triumph in a video game is almost as gratifying as a triumph in real life, failure in a video game is hardly as crushing as its real life counterpart. Maybe someday in the future, when people do something stupid and get themselves killed, they'll be able to wake up in a hospital with half their money gone, but that's still not the case today.
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