Dragon Quest 8

[Noobta]

Is this any good? I got it...2 years? ago for the FF12 demo. I played the game for about 10mins and never turned it back on >_>

[Xavier]

Its ok. The production values are fairly high, but the story is cookie cutter, and the gameplay is standard Dragon Quest fare (read: straight out of 1987). I was in a similar position where I had boughten the game and largely ignored it, and went back over the summer and finally played through and beat it.

I guess people liked it, and I kinda enjoyed playing it, but its really hard for me to recommend investing so much time (its a long game) in a Japanese RPG without some sort of engaging story.

[orinthia]

Main character is typical silent hero fare but at least the other characters have a bit of life in them (even the horse-princess after a certain point). The voice acting throughout is really quite nice and music is wonderfully orchestrated. You do get spells and items to lower your random battle encounter rate but I never really used them until the bonus dungeon (bunch of mobs in there have instant death abilities). Expect to get at least 80-90 hours of play if you spend some time doing the monster arena and going around recruiting the NMs on the map along with getting certain other items. The story is somewhat lighthearted (especially at the end...) though a lot of storyline characters die along the way .

I'll admit though, you can only watch a king slime wiggle and jiggle so many times but all the monster animations are well done. Here's a tip though: don't take fisticuffs for , it has a very powerful whole-field attack called "thin air" that hero, yangus, and jessica can learn. It takes most random encounters down to one or two rounds and stacks with psych up (which btw is a great way to deal with certain bosses or certain random encounters, namely those bastard demon-face-back frogs). Hero learns it 42 points in, yangus at 42 also, and jessica at 68. Once jessica learns it you can have her spam it for everything since her mp pool is huge. Just be sure to get yangus to 16 humanity and 6 axes somewhere in there to help with some curing and a nice defense down axe skill (can swap weapons in battle).


I loved the game but then I loved the other 7 of them so it may or may not be for you.

[Exoduso]

I played 3 hours and stopped caring. I only got it for the ff12 demo lol.

[Schiavona]

I thought it was pretty good. The job/skill system was a massive change from its immediate predecessors, but I still enjoyed it quite a bit.

[Vinen]

I played 3 hours and stopped caring. I only got it for the ff12 demo lol.

I got to the emoking portion of them game and said fuck this. I have to enjoy the story but Dragon Quest 8 felt like I was playing a bunch of shitty mini stories for the first part of the game that don't have anything to do with each other.

[Bweigelt]

I got it for the FF12 demo as well but was going to go back and start playing it again. Just out of curiosity how many points do you end up getting to allocate to the different weapon skills? As in how many can you actually fill up, I could never decide where to put them and always thought I was making a bad choice unless I just stuck with one. Oh and I only got just past the part where you fight the octopus guy on the ship, so not very far at all.

[Mugmug]

DQ8 was very awesome.

One of the best RPGs on the PS2 hands down.

[Rigor]

Meh... I would not recommend this game. The story was pretty boring. The gameplay didn't really help, and you did the same thing the entire game: Find new town, search town, go to dungeon, go back to town, yay. The hunting monsters was fun for its pokemon quality, but don't buy it, especially not new.

[orinthia]

By lv99 you'll have 350 skillpoints for all characters, but you can beat the game by around lv40-50 so you'll have around 200-250 points to burn. You'd have to hunt king metal slimes (30K exp/kill) and metal babbles (10K exp/kill) to lvl up with any speed but it's entirely luck killing them since they usually run away.

I know it's gamefags but this link is actually a real good one to help you plan out your skill points for your characters. I had my hero main in spears along with fisticuffs and courage, yangus with axe, fisticuffs, and humanity, jessica with fisticuffs, whips, and sex appeal (corny but it does occasionally stop mobs from attacking just from having it to a certain amount, which is damn nice when there's a dozen mobs on screen), and angelo with bow and charisma (sleep shots and mp recovery shots are really nice). I'm just glad it's not lvling several dozen jobs like in dq7 but then you can't use sword abilities if you have a spear in your hand for example. You also really have to make use of the alchemy pot for better items, especially stronger healing herbs early on, special armor/weapons later on, and for some money making.


Like I said the game isn't for everyone since your main purpose gets sidetracked for quite a while as main story characters get killed and certain events have to occur, but it's pretty similar with the other dq games so you either really like it or just won't stand it after a while.

[Xavier]

The entire time I was playing the game, I kept thinking how, I don't know, how well put together the game was. I believe it was Level 5(?) that developed the game, and graphically it was pretty gorgeous. Dungeons were fine, the environments were fine, etc. I didn't particularly mind the gameplay even though its archaic, but the story is just so by the books that the game felt boring. The characters were fine and the voice acting was actually quite good, but without a superb story to back them up, end up being rather irrelevant.

[Vinen]

The entire time I was playing the game, I kept thinking how, I don't know, how well put together the game was. I believe it was Level 5(?) that developed the game, and graphically it was pretty gorgeous. Dungeons were fine, the environments were fine, etc. I didn't particularly mind the gameplay even though its archaic, but the story is just so by the books that the game felt boring. The characters were fine and the voice acting was actually quite good, but without a superb story to back them up, end up being rather irrelevant.

This is more or less how I felt about the game exactly.

[Alina]

Loved it, but the final boss (both his forms) looked really retarded, especially since the entire game was building up his status at the Lord of Darkness. The possessed dog was more fearsome looking...

[orinthia]

Loved it, but the final boss (both his forms) looked really retarded, especially since the entire game was building up his status at the Lord of Darkness. The possessed dog was more fearsome looking...

Yeah... I still liked how you fought him, how sometimes when it was your turn you'd get the camera angle zoomed out and you'd fly around him with his head and eyes following and staring at your team. Brother watched me beat him and commented: "Sure likes playing with his balls..." Was just a bit too lighthearted . I was half expecting him to slap you out of the sky every so often, forcing you to re-engage him as you peck away at a million hp but alas...


My second monster team was named "The Banana Benders" :rocl: So damn funny hearing it said in that incredibly thick Italian accent! Just keep saying no whenever the guy thinks of a team title, there's some damn funny ones in there.

[Ryushii]

I enjoyed the game. No, the story was not note-worthy, but if you enjoy a game for its gameplay I would say this game is definately worth it. The environments and everything are probably the best part. I don't know if I would suggest buying it, but if you have it already, then play it.

[sb]

Great music, good graphics, weak but bearable story. The voice acting on the other characters is solid and one of the best part's of the game. It's battle system can get repetitive but it's not too bad. Worth it to play through, but it's not in the elite RPG's of our era.

The one thing I really couldn't stand was the synth system (alchemy pot). Until you are endgame, anytime you need to synth, you basically need to wait a while (based on how many steps you take), or wrap your controller wire around the stick and run in circles for a few minutes until the synth is ready.

In the end, I view the game as a good time killer and a decent break from MMO style rpgs (sometimes it's nice to not play with others). I started this game, stopped when I got bored and picked it up again (twice), and eventually beat it, though I never got through the endgame content, or maxed my characters.

IIRC gamefaqs, had a few good walkthroughs. I would definitely check for the alchemy pot recipies, as you should never ever sell anything to npc's in this game if they can be used as synth ingredients.

[Rai]

As other people have stated, the story wasn't all that awesome but compared to other games it also didn't make you go "wtf is this shit!?".

Graphic was good, character monster design was awesome, music was quite good but somewhat repetitive, especially the fact that there's only on battle music for normal encounters and you spend more time in random battles than other stuff.

The battle system itself was basically ok albeit too slow ... spending one minute in a random battle even with weak monsters then walking 5 steps just to get into another random battle annoyed he heck out of me to the point where I didn't want to finish the post-game dungeon since it would have taken forever just because of the random battles.

The skill system annoyed me, mostly since I made the mistake of not focusing on one skill per character but rather spread out points. I went Scythe with Angus which made him rather useless (stuff like Stainless Steal Scythe, albeit an awesome pun, didn't work at all). Another annoying thing was that you can't effectively certain mobs unless you have a char with sword skill (at least I think it was sword). So yeah, the possibility to reset spent skill points at some point in the game would have helped.

The translation of the game is pretty much the best I've seen so far. Awesome voice acting and puns that made me laugh quite a lot. Some people from the US had a gripe with it though since they used British slang and accents.

tl;dr: play it if you like traditional RPGs and don't mind spending a lot of time in random battles, but make sure you read up on what skills to get first

[Quicklet]

Played it about a year ago and never finished, replayed it recently and beat the game. If you play through the game without using any guides, you will probably have a high difficulty curve as the game progresses. It's very enjoyable though and I would rate it as a very polished game. Gameplay is very true to the series, so leveling becomes fairly slow and killing metal slimes becomes helpful for speeding up the second half of the game. I think the cel shaded graphics are a nice visual change as well.

Storyline is decent, nothing spectacular but nothing entirely offputting either. My only complaint is that you can't skip cutscenes beyond forcing dialogue along a little faster, but overall if you don't mind putting the time into the game (first playthrough it took me 80+ hours to get up to the final dungeon, but I spent a lot of that time exploring and figuring out where things were; second playthrough was something like 60-70 hours to beat the game) it's worth picking up.

[Laelani]

There's tons of reviews out there saying this is the "Best game ever!!" stuff. I think the average rating by some major media outlets (gamespy, gamespot, OPM, EGM, Eurogamer etc etc) was 89.6% positive. So maybe you'll like it. Personally, i thought it was a great game, better than a lot of other RPGs i've tried. Definitely a play-through for any die-hard RPG fans.

Few things:
-Story was ok, didn't wow me
-Good gameplay
-Long game (nothing new to RPG fans =P)
-Slightly higher encounter rate compared to some rpgs.
-Pretty easy to go through without a guide. (Which is what i like to do.) Though you could potentially miss a few things if you're not EXTREMELY thorough. (miss a few collector coins, sell a recipe item for synthesis.)
-If you're new to DQ, you might find the enemies a little weird (if not silly.. you'll see what i mean) Didn't bother me but i have a sense of humor.
-I think it had a ton of optional stuff at end.. (getting the ultimate gear etc) But the game was so long i was ready to do something else.

Overall: Good game! ^^ But not much replay value for me. I'd have given it a 6/10. That's just my opinion. (but then, i'm not one that will give above 7 too often anyway hehe)

Sorry been a while since i played, i'm probably forgetting stuff.

*Edit* and yeah, i too started this game and stopped for some reason. Picked it up again later and finished it. It might have coincided with another game coming out i wanted to play more, can't remember XD

[Kaludneisucks]

Fun way to kill time while camping NM's or LFG on ffxi.
Jessica's Outfit changing was good fun, but all in all the game left a lil' to be desired.