Stilt Village
GBA
So I continued Dragon Quest VIII after a break of a few days. Or is it more like a week? I think I'm nearly done now.
Much to my surprise, I've been met with a string of puzzle bosses. I don't recall these ever being a thing in other entries, but I could easily be forgetting. Cap'n Crow does one thing, and it's pretty damn effective, but figure out how to play around it and that's it. I wouldn't want every fight to be like this, the unpredictability of DQ combat is kind of the point, but it was an interesting concept to explore. Then I got to Empyrea. That fight was a complete mess. My first attempt I was destroyed by confusion, my second played so cautiously around this that my party fell apart trying to survive, and I only barely pulled off a win by calling in my monster team with only the hero left standing. I could definitely have refined my strategy more and theoretically done better on a third attempt, but I was just glad to see the back of her. I honestly got insanely lucky the second time around, I was only hit with confusion twice and it was on one person each time.
I was worried going into the dungeon immediately after since I didn't stop to heal or anything, but that boss was a huge breather. He could hit hard, but that was about it. He never even dispelled my buffs! I did the Dragon Graveyard sidequest after this, and that boss was even more of a breeze, since at this point I think I was pretty overleveled for it. Now that I have access to Metal King Slimes, the rest of the game is not going to pose much issue.
There were some cool sequences in here, like the prison (though I find the idea that they could actually capture and contain a party with powerful magic and a key that can open any door by putting them in a hole with one buff guy guarding them really stretches belief). The floating castle was another big similarity with DQXI, but this too was pretty interesting to go through, and I was so overleveled that it was a leisurely exploration with Holy Protection.
Now I'm on a hunt for some heretofore unmentioned plot devices to destroy a barrier. As much as I'm glad they didn't make me explore the laziest dark world of all time in its entirety for a second act to the game, I'm not sure whether or not I want it to just be over at this point. On the one hand, they're really drawing out the conclusion. On the other hand, I don't know if we've actually built to a satisfying conclusion. The game suffered throughout from the sheer predictability of its overarching narrative. It's usually minimal in Dragon Quest, but there's more focus put on it here than usual, and as soon as you know what's going on you can see exactly how it's gonna play out. Chasing the villain around the world utterly failing to ever actually stop him from doing anything. The one disruption comes from actually beating Dhoulmagus, but then as soon as Leopold gets the staff it's unfortunately right back to the status quo. So I just get this sense like there's something still missing, but maybe that's just DQVIII.
Having been to all of them, I have to reiterate that the towns of all things really suffered here for some reason. There were a few cool ones, like Pickham or the snow one, but the vast majority are so tiny and forgettable. I wonder what happened there, it's not like the dungeons are smaller and less complex than the older games too or something.
Also, I have to bring up how this is surprisingly clunky to play for such a recent port of a relatively modern game. Why do I need to move with the circle pad and use the D-pad for menus? And the camera is pretty bad for similar reasons, plus how it coming into physical contact with the world can knock it out of whack. I keep forgetting the Equip menu is super fucked for some reason too and accidentally try to use it only to immediately regret selecting it.
Much to my surprise, I've been met with a string of puzzle bosses. I don't recall these ever being a thing in other entries, but I could easily be forgetting. Cap'n Crow does one thing, and it's pretty damn effective, but figure out how to play around it and that's it. I wouldn't want every fight to be like this, the unpredictability of DQ combat is kind of the point, but it was an interesting concept to explore. Then I got to Empyrea. That fight was a complete mess. My first attempt I was destroyed by confusion, my second played so cautiously around this that my party fell apart trying to survive, and I only barely pulled off a win by calling in my monster team with only the hero left standing. I could definitely have refined my strategy more and theoretically done better on a third attempt, but I was just glad to see the back of her. I honestly got insanely lucky the second time around, I was only hit with confusion twice and it was on one person each time.
I was worried going into the dungeon immediately after since I didn't stop to heal or anything, but that boss was a huge breather. He could hit hard, but that was about it. He never even dispelled my buffs! I did the Dragon Graveyard sidequest after this, and that boss was even more of a breeze, since at this point I think I was pretty overleveled for it. Now that I have access to Metal King Slimes, the rest of the game is not going to pose much issue.
There were some cool sequences in here, like the prison (though I find the idea that they could actually capture and contain a party with powerful magic and a key that can open any door by putting them in a hole with one buff guy guarding them really stretches belief). The floating castle was another big similarity with DQXI, but this too was pretty interesting to go through, and I was so overleveled that it was a leisurely exploration with Holy Protection.
Now I'm on a hunt for some heretofore unmentioned plot devices to destroy a barrier. As much as I'm glad they didn't make me explore the laziest dark world of all time in its entirety for a second act to the game, I'm not sure whether or not I want it to just be over at this point. On the one hand, they're really drawing out the conclusion. On the other hand, I don't know if we've actually built to a satisfying conclusion. The game suffered throughout from the sheer predictability of its overarching narrative. It's usually minimal in Dragon Quest, but there's more focus put on it here than usual, and as soon as you know what's going on you can see exactly how it's gonna play out. Chasing the villain around the world utterly failing to ever actually stop him from doing anything. The one disruption comes from actually beating Dhoulmagus, but then as soon as Leopold gets the staff it's unfortunately right back to the status quo. So I just get this sense like there's something still missing, but maybe that's just DQVIII.
Having been to all of them, I have to reiterate that the towns of all things really suffered here for some reason. There were a few cool ones, like Pickham or the snow one, but the vast majority are so tiny and forgettable. I wonder what happened there, it's not like the dungeons are smaller and less complex than the older games too or something.
Also, I have to bring up how this is surprisingly clunky to play for such a recent port of a relatively modern game. Why do I need to move with the circle pad and use the D-pad for menus? And the camera is pretty bad for similar reasons, plus how it coming into physical contact with the world can knock it out of whack. I keep forgetting the Equip menu is super fucked for some reason too and accidentally try to use it only to immediately regret selecting it.
I try to access the party chat decently often, but there's only so far that will go in this game. I fucking love party chat, but VIII and XI nerf it from its former glory to mostly being the characters talking about what just happened in the plot and reminding you where to go, like a bunch of Navis with personality. Tatls, then.
None of the party members besides Yangus have really grown on me over time. There's a reason he got the spinoff. Even the devs seemed biased towards him. I feel like he gets way more dialogue than the others, and he's always the one who has a back and forth with Trode. Trode hardly ever interacts with the other two.
Oh, right, four technically. I wrote this whole thing and forgot to even mention the 3DS exclusive characters. From a writing perspective, they really aren't worth mentioning. They're pretty one dimensional, especially Morrie, whose entire personality can be summed up in the words "PASSIONATE" and "Italian". I swapped Yangus out for Morrie after I got him because Yangus basically carries for the first half of the game with high stats and then immediately craters once the other characters can actually do something while he doesn't get any good abilities to keep up. Ironically, using Morrie has made me much more reliant on Tension in these later fights against bosses who can instantly dispel it whenever they want. By the way, it's a little weird how Red becomes playable right after the game points out that she isn't good at fighting compared to your party. Really selling us on using her there! I don't think she's actually even bad either...
So, Angelo is a fuckboy, and not an especially charming one like Olivier in Trails in the Sky. I kind of like that he's actually horribly messed up by his upbringing and his persona is transparently a two-faced coping mechanism to give him an outlet for his bad home life. Despite everything he's trying to do the right thing anyway, but that doesn't necessarily make him likeable. If you came out and your parents disowned you, Angelo would help, but he'd casually call you slurs when you weren't in the room. His highlight is definitely his emotionally complicated relationship with Marcello, but he mostly talks about poker or smelling the pheromones of women.
Jessica has a party chat line in the Dragon Graveyard where she tells Carrie to make up with her brother after this is over, and Carrie is just annoyed and tells her to butt out and where does she get off treating her like she's her mother? This is the kind of subtle, thoughtful, "show don't tell" character writing that makes Dragon Quest so great in a genre full of characters who all stop to emptily react to every event, talk in circles constantly rehashing the same points, and repeat the same unfunny gags ad nauseum (which were already unfunny when some anime first used them 30 years ago).
Of course, I say that, but an indirect expression of how her brother's death impacted her is probably the most nuance Jessica has been given the whole game. Jessica as a character talks about the subject of revenge a lot, and I'm not exactly sure if she has anything else going on? She seems frequently pessimistic? But man, I think this is the low point for the series' treatment of female characters. I hope it is. Because Jessica as a sex object is what she really seems to be about.
Jessica gets it so much worse than Jade did, and Jade didn't have it great. Her design alone is pretty bad in-game. I mean, I knew she had cleavage, but it's like, really out there, and she jiggles whenever she moves. There's this weird, uh, gameplay and story segregation surrounding her sexiness, which is a sentence. In addition to three weapon trees and fisticuffs, each character has an exclusive skill tree which basically represents their main trait. Jessica's is Sex Appeal, which is generally about realizing her sexiness and weaponizing it. And she wouldn't be the first whip-wielding over-the-top horny-sink dominatrix character in a JRPG or anything. Trails in the Sky had one of those too! Except that wasn't where they took it at all. She's actually fairly serious and no-nonsense, nothing about her behavior is provocative and she's just wearing a dress that doesn't fit her right. A character who uses sex like that is probably the number one thing I actually don't trust Dragon Quest to write based on its track record, but Jessica is just an exploitative mess without internal consistency.
I thought XI was for sure the worst in the series about sex, but it was mostly just unfunny, this one actually veers into being kind of gross about it. There's a ton of boy's club stuff in the middle part of the game, including that one area in Baccarat that's one step removed from being a strip club. There's some leering, this one guy keeps calling her a bimbo... Just really ramping up the amount of passive moderate sexism.
Lastly and not really least, there's Trode. I think this is the first time the series did a non-combatant party member like this, and he's got more going for him than most of the combatant party members. I mean, he'd better; as impotent as he is he's really the one driving the plot, and the subtitle is Journey of the Cursed King and everything.
There's a weird sort of dissonance to kings (and specifically kings, though I suppose it applies to the occasional queen as well) in Dragon Quest, maybe it's just a me thing, but normally they don't get a lot of screentime anyway so I've never given it a lot of thought until now. It's got to do with how, in Dragon Quest, the king is always Just Some Guy. There's usually at least a little decorum, it's rarely the case that they're actively trying to make him a ridiculous character, but they just lack the kind of formality and seriousness the king has in Zelda or something. The king in Dragon Quest is very literally approachable. You can just go up and talk to him, he's just hanging out in his chair, even if he's swamped with responsibilities or facing a crisis he's usually still weirdly down to earth and reasonable for a guy coming from a bloodline wielding absolute authority.
Anyway, this makes it all the stranger when the two seemingly mutually exclusive concepts of the king being a funny little goblin man you're traveling with and the whole weird-ass arranged marriage situation subplot collide. That's such a strange fairytale justification for a political situation that we get to see a relatively grounded perspective on. "Our parents couldn't be together, so wouldn't it be romantic if our children married in their stead?" I guess it's the sort of thing these silly Dragon Quest kings would come up with, but reality sure isn't lining up with their romanticism. I feel like Dragon Quest often does run on that kind of logic though, so I'm not sure if this is intentional subversion or...
Thing is, Trode is so protective of Medea, but I don't think he ever actually voiced any discontent with the idea of her having to marry Charmles, even after seeing firsthand how awful he was. It's hard to believe he'd be happy about the arranged marriage in the first place, giving his beloved daughter away to some man she's never met. He's self-important, but he's not the type of royal who seems to value status as everything and would actually think this is what's best for her. And it's weird that a character like this is dealing with this kind of Weird Monarchy Shit to begin with. He's just a little guy, you're telling me he's beholden to the promises of his dynasty? Dragon Quest kings are weird.
Oh, right, Medea. Suddenly, she becomes an actual character, and starts talking. I don't know if they've convinced me yet. What I mean is, I'm not sure she isn't just a means of jerking off the player. Actually, I'm pretty sure that's exactly what she is. IIRC the original ending of the game involves the hero marrying her, and so far I feel like this whole affair is mostly just in service of making her Waifu Material. She just told me that she used to think of him as an older brother, but now sees him as a man, which is uh...
I guess she serves as a means of learning a little bit about the hero's past. He's been a complete non-entity otherwise. It's the endgame and all we really know about him so far is that he has a weird mouse and he's immune to Dhoulmagus's cursed thorns somehow. Could go off on a rant about silent protagonists and why they're so frequently a waste of space in games like this or XI (as opposed to DQV, which I consider the most masterful use of a silent protagonist I've ever seen), but this is long enough already.
None of the party members besides Yangus have really grown on me over time. There's a reason he got the spinoff. Even the devs seemed biased towards him. I feel like he gets way more dialogue than the others, and he's always the one who has a back and forth with Trode. Trode hardly ever interacts with the other two.
Oh, right, four technically. I wrote this whole thing and forgot to even mention the 3DS exclusive characters. From a writing perspective, they really aren't worth mentioning. They're pretty one dimensional, especially Morrie, whose entire personality can be summed up in the words "PASSIONATE" and "Italian". I swapped Yangus out for Morrie after I got him because Yangus basically carries for the first half of the game with high stats and then immediately craters once the other characters can actually do something while he doesn't get any good abilities to keep up. Ironically, using Morrie has made me much more reliant on Tension in these later fights against bosses who can instantly dispel it whenever they want. By the way, it's a little weird how Red becomes playable right after the game points out that she isn't good at fighting compared to your party. Really selling us on using her there! I don't think she's actually even bad either...
So, Angelo is a fuckboy, and not an especially charming one like Olivier in Trails in the Sky. I kind of like that he's actually horribly messed up by his upbringing and his persona is transparently a two-faced coping mechanism to give him an outlet for his bad home life. Despite everything he's trying to do the right thing anyway, but that doesn't necessarily make him likeable. If you came out and your parents disowned you, Angelo would help, but he'd casually call you slurs when you weren't in the room. His highlight is definitely his emotionally complicated relationship with Marcello, but he mostly talks about poker or smelling the pheromones of women.
Jessica has a party chat line in the Dragon Graveyard where she tells Carrie to make up with her brother after this is over, and Carrie is just annoyed and tells her to butt out and where does she get off treating her like she's her mother? This is the kind of subtle, thoughtful, "show don't tell" character writing that makes Dragon Quest so great in a genre full of characters who all stop to emptily react to every event, talk in circles constantly rehashing the same points, and repeat the same unfunny gags ad nauseum (which were already unfunny when some anime first used them 30 years ago).
Of course, I say that, but an indirect expression of how her brother's death impacted her is probably the most nuance Jessica has been given the whole game. Jessica as a character talks about the subject of revenge a lot, and I'm not exactly sure if she has anything else going on? She seems frequently pessimistic? But man, I think this is the low point for the series' treatment of female characters. I hope it is. Because Jessica as a sex object is what she really seems to be about.
Jessica gets it so much worse than Jade did, and Jade didn't have it great. Her design alone is pretty bad in-game. I mean, I knew she had cleavage, but it's like, really out there, and she jiggles whenever she moves. There's this weird, uh, gameplay and story segregation surrounding her sexiness, which is a sentence. In addition to three weapon trees and fisticuffs, each character has an exclusive skill tree which basically represents their main trait. Jessica's is Sex Appeal, which is generally about realizing her sexiness and weaponizing it. And she wouldn't be the first whip-wielding over-the-top horny-sink dominatrix character in a JRPG or anything. Trails in the Sky had one of those too! Except that wasn't where they took it at all. She's actually fairly serious and no-nonsense, nothing about her behavior is provocative and she's just wearing a dress that doesn't fit her right. A character who uses sex like that is probably the number one thing I actually don't trust Dragon Quest to write based on its track record, but Jessica is just an exploitative mess without internal consistency.
I thought XI was for sure the worst in the series about sex, but it was mostly just unfunny, this one actually veers into being kind of gross about it. There's a ton of boy's club stuff in the middle part of the game, including that one area in Baccarat that's one step removed from being a strip club. There's some leering, this one guy keeps calling her a bimbo... Just really ramping up the amount of passive moderate sexism.
Lastly and not really least, there's Trode. I think this is the first time the series did a non-combatant party member like this, and he's got more going for him than most of the combatant party members. I mean, he'd better; as impotent as he is he's really the one driving the plot, and the subtitle is Journey of the Cursed King and everything.
There's a weird sort of dissonance to kings (and specifically kings, though I suppose it applies to the occasional queen as well) in Dragon Quest, maybe it's just a me thing, but normally they don't get a lot of screentime anyway so I've never given it a lot of thought until now. It's got to do with how, in Dragon Quest, the king is always Just Some Guy. There's usually at least a little decorum, it's rarely the case that they're actively trying to make him a ridiculous character, but they just lack the kind of formality and seriousness the king has in Zelda or something. The king in Dragon Quest is very literally approachable. You can just go up and talk to him, he's just hanging out in his chair, even if he's swamped with responsibilities or facing a crisis he's usually still weirdly down to earth and reasonable for a guy coming from a bloodline wielding absolute authority.
Anyway, this makes it all the stranger when the two seemingly mutually exclusive concepts of the king being a funny little goblin man you're traveling with and the whole weird-ass arranged marriage situation subplot collide. That's such a strange fairytale justification for a political situation that we get to see a relatively grounded perspective on. "Our parents couldn't be together, so wouldn't it be romantic if our children married in their stead?" I guess it's the sort of thing these silly Dragon Quest kings would come up with, but reality sure isn't lining up with their romanticism. I feel like Dragon Quest often does run on that kind of logic though, so I'm not sure if this is intentional subversion or...
Thing is, Trode is so protective of Medea, but I don't think he ever actually voiced any discontent with the idea of her having to marry Charmles, even after seeing firsthand how awful he was. It's hard to believe he'd be happy about the arranged marriage in the first place, giving his beloved daughter away to some man she's never met. He's self-important, but he's not the type of royal who seems to value status as everything and would actually think this is what's best for her. And it's weird that a character like this is dealing with this kind of Weird Monarchy Shit to begin with. He's just a little guy, you're telling me he's beholden to the promises of his dynasty? Dragon Quest kings are weird.
Oh, right, Medea. Suddenly, she becomes an actual character, and starts talking. I don't know if they've convinced me yet. What I mean is, I'm not sure she isn't just a means of jerking off the player. Actually, I'm pretty sure that's exactly what she is. IIRC the original ending of the game involves the hero marrying her, and so far I feel like this whole affair is mostly just in service of making her Waifu Material. She just told me that she used to think of him as an older brother, but now sees him as a man, which is uh...
I guess she serves as a means of learning a little bit about the hero's past. He's been a complete non-entity otherwise. It's the endgame and all we really know about him so far is that he has a weird mouse and he's immune to Dhoulmagus's cursed thorns somehow. Could go off on a rant about silent protagonists and why they're so frequently a waste of space in games like this or XI (as opposed to DQV, which I consider the most masterful use of a silent protagonist I've ever seen), but this is long enough already.
