Dragon Quest 8

[LunarWeaver]

I thought it was a pretty good game. A culmination of the tried-and-true. Its battle system wasn't anything new, but it was refined to a point that I had a lot of fun with it.

The world is enormous and gorgeous. I liked running about the terrain to that sweeping music. This was the first game in a long time that made me "feel" the adventure thing going on.

But this game falls under its own traps. It does quite a few things typical of a J-RPG that annoy me and I have to overlook: grinding needs to go; that church save point system needs to be burned; random encounters aren't funny anymore; I do not like searching through every nook, cranny, pot, cabinet, box, dimensional portal to Kermit's house, and so forth looking for things like "Herb" -- a tedious process you must repeat every time you go to a new town; and constantly cross-checking multiple guides to figure out Alchemy Pot bull isn't very exhilarating.

And it really was too long, much of that being filler as exampled. The story was, er, "charming", but riveting it's not. There needs to be certain rewards to motivate picking phrases out of a menu. This game had the strategy aspect down, but... You need to feel your characters' progression is worth the battling and look forward to the next plot point, and this game just didn't have that for me.

But it held my interest for all bazillion hours, and that must mean somethin'!