Dragon Quest VIII
RNGesus has provided unto us… Dragon Quest VIII: Journey of the Cursed King!
Stephanie: My copy of Dragon Quest VIII for 3DS arrived right as we started playing FFTA, so it’s not inaccurate to say the game’s kind of been on my mind all last week anyway. I just didn’t think we’d get to it so quickly.
Rich: I’m pretty sure that I bought my original copy for PlayStation 2 on your recommendation back in the day.
Stephanie: It was a sure thing to recommend because, even if you weren’t into Dragon Quest, it came with the Final Fantasy XII demo. And really, how can you not love DQ8? The voice acting alone is enough to warrant a buy.
Rich: I put more than 30 hours into this game back then. I don’t remember why I stopped, but I’ve always been meaning to get back to it, and was really excited a couple years ago when it came out for iOS. But that version had really bad controls, and no voice acting, which killed it for me. The 3DS version that just released a couple weeks ago solves both those problems, so big win.
Apparently, the voice acting was exclusive to the North American release, and the Japanese version had no voices as was standard for a DQ game.
Stephanie: That makes sense; I’ll never quite understand how popular the series is, given how conservative Enix is with the franchise; their games always seem to lag way behind technologically. But Level 5 really did great work.
I put 10 hours into the PS2 release myself, which is pretty good for me. In fact, the only reason I stopped playing was that my wife was playing Radiata Stories at the time, and took over the PS2 to finish the final stretch of her 100% run of the game.
I guess this game is a bit of a ringer, given how much fondness we know we still have for it, but it’s good to get a game like this early to set the bar for other JRPGs we’ll be playing.
Rich: It’s funny that the first two games that random.org has selected for us are representing the two biggest JRPG franchises. Although FFTA is a spinoff game…
Stephanie: Between the two, there have to be 15+ games represented. Odds were in their favor.
Rich: It’ll be interesting to see how the franchises stack up against each other. The main DQ series games stay true to formula for the most part, only changing slightly, while the main FF series games are constantly re-inventing themselves.
Well, let’s get started!
Fun Facts!
This was the first game in the main Dragon Quest series to be released after the Square/Enix merger.
This was the first game in the main series to see a PAL release.
This was the first game in the series to be released in North America as Dragon Quest and not Dragon Warrior.
This was the first game in the series to have a subtitle: “Journey of the Cursed King”. The earlier games in the series were given subtitles when they were remade on the DS.
