Started Dragon Quest VIII the other day. I think this is at least the fourth time I've tried to get through it? Across both PS2 and 3DS. Despite its popularity, this one has just never been able to grab me. I've made it all the way through VII and XI, which I'm pretty sure are vastly longer, but this one? Most of my attempts didn't even get Angelo. Currently I've just gotten the boat, and I don't think I've ever gone much further than this.
Trying to analyze why that is, and the main things I've noticed are how small and forgettable most of the early towns are, and how the effort to start faster and streamline the game from VII really didn't do it any favors.
The vignettes start to pick up in the mourning town, but all of the best ones so far still feel like they would have been lost in the shuffle in VII. That town is a real Wind Waker of a story, almost all of the work is done in the last few minutes. Still, I loved the fairytale mysticism of the moonshadow window, and the ending scene made my eyes burn with tears a little, which for me is basically sobbing. Also, damn it took me forever to find the way to get to that mountain. Not a big fan of the overworld in this one.
Something I'm surprised isn't landing is the smaller scale of the story. I miss being on a journey to save the world. I know it eventually ends up in you fighting a god of evil or something like always, and maybe it's because DQ never has interesting antagonists, but chasing Dhoulmagus is surprisingly boring. A lot of this is probably down to the decision to begin in media res, so we have zero personal investment in going after him despite being told about what he did. Dragon Quest should be great at this more personal stuff, and I remember Chapters of the Chosen doing it just fine.
On the one hand, I appreciate its commitment to getting going as fast as possible. 3DS bonus characters aside, you get the full party very early in this one. You fight your first Slimes after just one brief intro cutscene. It sets you loose fast. On the other hand, I think it's just overcorrecting for DQVII's infamously long introduction by throwing you right into it with the bare minimum of context, and the story suffers a bit for it. It takes a while before the game stops operating in flashbacks, and giving you scenarios where the most important events have already happened before you even show up.
The gameplay also isn't really a benefactor of the speedy introduction, for some reason. I feel like my options are decidedly worse here than in other DQ games for at least the first 15-20 hours, despite the speedrun to a full party. It took forever to build up a decent selection of spells, I'm at around level 30 and magic attacks are only now actually becoming good. My party is a mess that's only very slowly coming together under careful guidance. I've barely played III, but I feel like the instantly created party members in that one can do their job better from level 1 than this lot could at level 20.
It's just odd. Jessica's offensive spells are nearly useless when you get her, and it takes like 20 levels for her to get some that start outclassing the whip in damage (the whip doesn't do very good damage to begin with). I wonder if the reason they did skill trees in the first place was to give you more diverse options with such a small cast and no job system, but their do-everything design mostly just ends up making them feel muddled in their purpose. I think Jessica is supposed to be the mage and Angelo the priest, but their skill trees give a lot of weight to completely unrelated things too. It's weird that every single character has an entire skill tree dedicated to fighting barehanded.
I've never been a fan of the tension mechanic either. It's supposedly more efficient than just attacking repeatedly (though apparently not even until you hit high tension), but doing nothing for several turns in a row doesn't feel great. Dragon Quest combat is all about being reactive to the situation, long term planning like this is a poor fit and you're just asking to be smacked down when you get too reliant on it. Apparently it also results in most later bosses spamming Disruptive Wave, so it becomes mostly useless anyway. I'm approaching that point and I've almost never found use for it despite trying, and there have barely been any bosses so far anyway. I also noticed Intimidate was even a thing for the first time? No one ever talks about it, seemingly because it has very few uses.
I generally think of each Dragon Quest as sharing the same basic foundation yet having its own distinct goals, but I feel like I'm being confronted with so many things in this that are just outright worse than XI specifically. Alchemy became a whole lot more involved, Pep works so much better with DQ's combat than Tension, skill trees got much better, the party is twice as big...
So yeah, it's been alright once it got going a little, hopefully I'll see it through this time, but I have a very hard time seeing myself ever relating to why this one is so loved. What's it supposed to be excelling at compared to the others?
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