|
Right from the start, Dragon Quest VIII grabs hold of your senses and reels you in with a colorful, vibrant world with wide-open landscapes and varying terrains that indulge the eyes to a point of childish giddiness. The wonderfully orchestrated music brings an added sense of epic adventure, the beautiful sound of an actual orchestra playing out an original score as you traverse the world map fills you with a strong desire to keep plowing forward through the cel-shaded world of Dragon Quest. Also it helps that the character designs were done by Dragonball-creator Akira Toriyama. His artistic style lends the adventure another bit of originality that makes the game all the more enjoyable as you watch the characters being able to express emotions and simple scenes of plot advancement are not at all graphically poor.
The gameplay, in the beginning, is fairly simple to understand -- a simple standard RPG Attack, Magic, Run away system -- but also employs a character's ability to "Psyche" up, which charges up that characters attack power so they can do more damage in one turn than they would normally do. Sometimes charging up is a useful strategic move that allows you to dole out damage with your heavy hitters while using magic with another character to occupy the enemy. The battles in themselves are visually entertaining, as characters have a variety of different movements for attacks and such, giving the fights variance. Also the characters' weapons and shields are dynamic: they have models for all the different weapons that your characters can wield. Another vital and interesting part of the fighting system is the awarding of skill points, which can be put towards different skills such as swords, axes, the unarmed skill of fisticuffs, and the a skill unique to each character such as sex appeal for your female character.
The story keeps you enthralled as you slowly uncover what happened in the recent past to your character and his traveling party. Many other side stories open up as you go from town to town tracking your quarry the vile jester Dhoulmagus. All the stories through the game are thoroughly engrossing and lend a lot of depth to the game itself. The voice-acting, unlike in a lot of games, is actually superb, in my opinion. The voices fit the characters, and the dialogue is well developed as well.
Dragon Quest VIII really satisfied my craving for a good RPG adventure. If you're looking for a game that brings out the inner adventurer/hero in you then go ahead and pick up Dragon Quest VIII and get ready to immerse yourself in an epic world that needs saving, where you're the only one you can save it.
Dan Work is Whim's new man . . . haha, what a fool!
|
