If you want to buy yourself a copy,

click.

Final stats
Okay, I just beat the game and here is what it is telling me:
Time played: 71 hours, 14 minutes
“Distance travelled:” 300 miles
Battles: 1066
Monsters defeated: 3452
Times wiped out [party totally iced]: 4
Total gold obtained: 112,334
Types of items collected: 252.

71 hours, 14 minutes
That’s insane. Over five solid 14 hour days. I read somewhere that it was a fifty hour game; never did I think that would be the speed if you were playing through with a walkthrough at hand and not going on side quests. I feel faintly sick that I spent this much time on a video game, and I’m the dude who’s always talking about how video games are the potential literature of our age.

71 hours is a long time
Video games aren’t books, and Dragon Quest VIII certainly isn’t Joyce. I bring this up because Ulysses is the only novel I’d give a hundred hours ±30. Maybe Lolita. I think you understand what I’m saying.

Was it worth it?
No, but it came close. Before I go into it, let me explain

what the game is about.
This is not how it happened, but: imagine The Lord of the Rings movies were made in 1984. Now imagine that due to budgetary constraints, they were shown in Japan without dubbing or subtitles - but with the sound effects intact. Now imagine that three basically uncreative executives of a nascent video game company meet up a year later and distill their memories of those movies into a copyright-free paragraph-long summary. That paragraph is given to a young manga artist, who expands it into a serial for Shonen Jump. That serial is taken and used as the basis for a new video game, which is maybe/maybe not influenced by Ultima for the PC but in any case DESIGNED, WRITTEN, and PROGRAMMED BY ONE MAN. Now imagine that video game goes on to be tremendously popular in-country, and seven sequels are produced over the span of twenty years, each repeating the plot of the first. By the eighth iteration, the plot is the blandest fantasy pabulum evar. The name of the series is Dragon Quest, and you’re going to quest, and you’re going to fight motherfucking dragons, motherfucker.

This is not bad, for two reasons
With video games, where a player controls things, blandness allows for projection of self. This is why the main character never speaks: he’s you, and you’re the one talking, mumbling out loud at the screen at three in the morning. Also, Dragon Quest I and VIII are not the same games, but they share common mechanics: running around on a map, random encounters, and turn-based combat via menus. As Tim Rogers points out in his gorgeous review, VIII is the 3D, fully rendered, self-actualized sister of Dragon Quest I, which was just a bunch of unexceptional 2D pixels pushed around by the Nintendo Entertainment System’s 6502. I have high hopes for the look and feel of Dragon Quest IX, because I trust it’s going to be even closer to its Platonic ideal, and that’s not something you can say about many sequels.

Or to put it another way
maybe there’s something to be said for starting out mediocre and trying really really hard until you get it right. In that way things get better with time; the problem with the act of genius, for the market, is that it doesn’t repeat itself.

Visuality
In 2D, you see everything: nothing is hidden - or, if it’s hidden, the way to make it appear is visible. In 3D, what you see is generated on the fly. If you’re in a dungeon, you can miss a treasure chest that’s hidden around a corner if you don’t look around the corner. This isn’t such a big deal, because Dragon Quest VIII is clever about addressing this problem - but I prefer 2D. Regardless of which side you’re on, 2D RPGs and 3D RPGs are chickens and hippos, even if they’re in the same series, even if they share the same mechanics.

(In truth this 2D/3D distinction is false. What I’m calling “2D” can be easily done by a 3D system with a locked camera set fifteen feet off the ground. I’m way into the locked camera, the god’s-eye-view. Am I wrong?)

The more you play, the easier the game gets
This is actually how it should be. The longer you do something repetitive, the less patience you have for it. Ideally, and I want to underline how this is personal belief and not an accepted commonplace - ideally, the aim of a video game should be to give and show every part of itself to the player. How - pleasureable? interesting? that experience is determines how good the game itself is. A game that gets too hard is put aside in frustration, not finished, and fails.

I think Yuji Horii (the director of the Dragon Quest franchise) and I are on the same page about this - he likes to talk about being kind to the player. Anyone can finish Dragon Quest VIII. The thing that’s hard about it is that it’s a marathon. If you’re into sprints, you won’t finish. That isn’t the game’s fault - after all, you’re not going to get stuck. You can hit the start button to talk to your party, and they’ll give you advice on what to do next. The priest reminds you of this every time you start the game. If that fails, you can go back to the first town in the game and talk to your friend, the fortune-teller, and he’ll give you another salient hint. You’re really, really not going to get stuck. If a boss kills you, you’ll come back armed with knowledge of their attacks and beat them. For sure. Nothing in the game is discouraging, because of

Intelligent design
It’s amusing to think that this Dragon Quest thing, as much as it feels real in a lot of ways once you get into it (the topography, architecture, the passing of time, not Jessica’s breasts) is A SIMULATION THAT WAS CAREFULLY HANDCRAFTED BY A HUNDRED PEOPLE OVER THE COURSE OF DECADES OF MAN-YEARS. This is why, for the most part, your logical intuition about the world is correct, because it was put together that way by a bunch of logical dudes, for your pleasure. This is also why, at any given point in the game, you can defeat the monsters you encounter with just the right amount of effort and force, and the shops in the towns sell weapons and armor that cost just slightly more than you can afford.

Jessica’s breasts
I have been with, by my estimation, 45,000 women, and none of them have had breasts like Jessica. In a time before awful plastic surgery, in order to get her chest to look like that poor Jess would have to wear miles of underwire and round band-aids over her nipples. And let’s not overlook her costume changes (sexxy spoilers.) The bunny girl fetish thing has been a staple in anime and video games for decades now; the root source is Playboy clubs. Half of the women in this game dress in bunny suits and a quarter are nuns. But I don’t think it’s misogynistic - in fact, there’s a hidden strip club with a joke about seduction and male gullibility. Besides, girls in video games are like transsexuals: created of men, for men. Real women are left almost entirely out of that circuit, except for the precious few who play RPGs.

Dragon Quest VIII Gaiden
I’d play a game centered around Bangerz and Mash, the two little kids who are, for reasons beyond their present understanding, totally enamoured with Jessica.

Rebarbatives
The main thing I wish is that there were no loading times. And a “repeat battle commands” option; too much unnecessary menu keying. And I don’t know why they decoupled heal and save, or why you have to go to a church to learn experience points needed to level up. I do know (it makes you run around towns), but it’s irritating.

I would have liked more NPC character models too, but whatever.

RPGs that are better than Dragon Quest VIII
Earthbound (which is a Dragon Quest game, sort of)
My memories of Final Fantasy VII
The Legend of Zelda: Majora’s Mask.

This is the reason I’m giving Dragon Quest VIII four stars out of five when I was planning to give it three and a half:
My save file has become dear to me. I borrowed my little sister’s Playstation to play this game. After I finished, I BOUGHT MY OWN MEMORY CARD AND COPIED MY SAVE FILE ONTO IT. I am keeping a memory card for a system I don’t own with a file I can’t play, with a handwritten label that says “DQVIII” on it, in a box of keepsakes. Thus

.

And by the end of the 70 hours, you really do feel like you’ve lifted a fucking curse.

Epilogue: the great thing about DQ8 is that it made me think about form.

Games should be kind
I’d like to see even more information provided to the player in-game. DQ8 takes lots of half-steps - Yangus’ “Nose for Treasure” spell that tells you how many treasures are left undiscovered in a dungeon, Trode’s monster and item lists. But if you’re going to have a monster list, why not have a radar feature that guides a player to the location of an unencountered monster? etc. Also, you’d expect RPGs now to be like the GRE - if you get something wrong, the difficulty adjusts. Such is not the case.

Games should be unkind
If you do something wrong, let it not be fixable and have consequences. I’d like to see an RPG that’s more like life - unfair. You have to run away from every monster; they’re all too strong and there’s no way to beat them. Pac-Man and Bezerk are structured around running away, and they’re fun. Let everything cost a fortune - whatever.

Anyway, unkindness is honest.

Games should be rad
There are 3D models for everything in the game; why not sell little copies of the monsters online or something? Better yet, far in the future, let the game connect to the player’s personal fab and print physical copies of things as prizes.

Better AI for NPCs. Let’s see NPCs carry out their lives in more detail: lighting the fire, buying food, eating, sleeping, etc. And why doesn’t anyone get mad when I take stuff from their cabinets?

I’d like a role-playing game that gives you challenges to do in the real world and then judges your performance. Like maybe you’d have to make something out of wood or paint a painting and hold it up to a camera for the game to evaluate in order to continue, and then it would show up in the game. Or a game that learned about you - maybe you could feed it your credit card statements and photos of your house or something.

RPGs point to the future, with their resource management and ease of play, because someday our lives are going to feel as effortless and under control as these games. I promise.