Dragon Quest 8: I am free! And by that I mean I am done the main game. Never again will I be playing this. Well, okay that's a bit harsh, but the game's final hours were not a good one. I've mentioned this in IRC but it bears repeating: the game really could've been 10 hours shorter and it will still be plenty long.
The greatest strength of the game is the setting. It falls into a category I dub "an Exploratory Game", meaning the game expects you to go about exploring this wide new world, interact with its environments and so on. The towns are huge and the world map is huge - so there are plenty of places to visit and plenty of places to go and find out new things. There are tons of items and world map chests and the towns actually feel like towns with the bustling activity and day/night system. I love how the game made religion relevant by the way. By turning all your save points into Churches, so every town has one. It made it feel that it was relevant, where in other games, it might be mentioned once or twice and you're expected to believe that it is important all the way through. When DQ8 works a concept, it tends to drive it home - for better or for worse.
The exploratory setting would all work very well, if not for one teensy tiny problem: the encounter rate is ridiculously stupid. It's hard to get from place to place quickly and hard to convince yourself (especially later) that its worth looking at that detour because of how many encounters there are. This wouldn't even be so bad if it weren't for the fact that there isn't a good way to null encounters. I compare this to other games of this nature such as Wild ARMS 3 or Xenoblade, where in those games, if you don't want to fight, you could just cancel encounters repeatedly. This made travelling and exploring fun because you're actually getting to explore the area. In DQ8, the downfall is that your methods of doing so are limited to start, and aren't even that effective. Holy Water is truly the only way to guarantee you won't run into anything, but that requires you to massively out level enemies, which is a downright chore since it involves hunting Metal Slimes (again hammering on a point) and those things are jerks. This is a huge blow to what would otherwise be quite enjoyable.
In terms of gameplay, this is a mixed bag. I guess it is very traditional Dragon Quest, where experience is important but you can't get it sans hunting Metal Slimes or something. Truly, to make the game faster (and possibly more enjoyable), you have to hunt these things, and they suck. Worse yet, grinding on anything else is terribly inefficient, so it is like you almost have no choice but to dwell into this realm of insanity. The skill point system is neat but it suffers from the Wild ARMS 2 syndrome in that once you place your points a certain way, there are no backsies. This is very damaging to what would be a neat system because it encourages you to like FAQ your builds from the start, which is a bit silly. It doesn't help that the NPCs that are supposed to help you in this regard are vague as hell, so it's impossible to know where the good passives are and where the best skills are. I followed the speedrun guide so I had a Hero with his 1/2 MP cost thing pretty quick, but if I were playing on my own, I don't think I would've dropped 90 points into Courage that quickly. If you could reassign skill points this wouldn't be a problem. It wouldn't be hard to implement either - just create an item that allowed you to reassign skill points. You already have like 300 items from alchemy, some of which are useless.
Speaking of Alchemy, this is a mixed bag as well. While it is not required to beat the game (thank god), it does run into a slight issue that Tal brought up before about games using an Alchemy system: In order to have a good alchemy system, the materials have to be common. DQ8 follows this enough for *most* cases. But in the case of forging new equipment, it really fails. Experience isn't the only thing that is really short in the game - money is too. It's not exactly FF12 economy, but it's tight enough that you can't afford to buy 3 Plate Mails for example and then try to brute force a combination to make better armor. This ends up being a big "Just FAQ it" moment, which it really shouldn't be. I will give the game credit because in some ways, this does make your decisions on what to buy more important and there are recipes in books scattered around the world. But at the same time, it hurts this alchemy system because it just encourages you to hoard things, which limits your gold so you have to continue to grind more.
Plot / Characters were passable. There is a pretty noticeable lack of development, which is probably what made the game felt like it dragged on for too long. None of the characters really change and none of them really make much of an impression, but at the same time, I don't hate any of them either, so that's a plus. The plot of the entire game is essentially one huge ass fetch quest and it doesn't really change from that. At some point, I also had to gather 7 Dragon balls or something to defeat the final boss. It served well enough as a back drop for the game so I won't say much else here. I got more use out of Yangus then most people it seems like. Jessica was like useless for about a huge chunk of the game until towards the end, so I don't get any sort of hype for her but maybe this was just sucking ass with Alchemy or bad skill builds. I dunno. Guv was probably MVP with his massive healing reserves thanks to MT full heal and 1/2 MP cost.
Overall, game is probably like a low 7/10 for me. Might be a 6.5/10. Final PC levels were 36/37/37/35 for Yangus/Guv/Angelo/Jess respectively. Die less, please Jessica.
