Dragon quest viii map Pc#Nostalgic and fun, yes, but the PlayStation 2 didn’t exactly stand up well against the superior HD powers of an Xbox 360 or PC from that time. History becomes a little complicated here, but by this time, Western RPGs began to catch on with World of Warcraft and Oblivion, and the grandness that Dragon Quest VIII brought to the genre wasn’t as impressive anymore. Persona 3 rolled up in 2006, but it actually shifted the emphasis of JRPGs back to drama and mechanics once again, bringing the Final Fantasy X formula back to prominence. It was Atlus that found the breakthrough hit a few years later. I don’t have great memories of JRPGs from the middle of the PlayStation 2’s life because we localized some genuinely bad ones back then. In North America, we got a lot of these games because JRPGs were still in Gold Rush mode at that point, and everyone wanted to find that breakthrough hit. The upsurge in hollow, lifeless JRPGs on the PlayStation 2 no doubt came from smaller, less talented studios trying to copy its success. Armor Project, Square Enix, and Level-5 are all top of the line figures in the industry and somehow made this emphasis on being an empty world work. The problem is that not every studio has the talent behind it like Dragon Quest VIII did. Its success defined the first few years of the JRPG on the PlayStation 2, leading to games like Suikoden III and Xenosaga that focused more on drama and storytelling and less on conventional adventuring.įinal Fantasy X is also one of my all-time favorite video games, so you can see where I land on this spectrum circa 2001.Ī bit deeper into the PlayStation 2’s lifespan, Dragon Quest VIII exploded in Japan and became one of the best-selling titles of all time. Its success popularized a return to simple adventures in grand mystical worlds. It was, and still is, a beautiful game with smart mechanics, but it also had a linear world that emphasized the destination over the journey. The PlayStation 2 started off with a bang in Final Fantasy X, the ultimate example of the former. Well, a developer can take one of two routes: make a gorgeous game that has a lot of detail and a deep system that requires a lot of computing to pull off or make a very simple game that emphasizes grandiose size over complexity. These games need to be enormous! Can we really do it? Rather, it was a problem that many PlayStation JRPG developers were finding at the time, unsure of what to do with all of the excess storage capabilities of a DVD. Not just a problem with Dragon Quest VIII, but it is kind of its faultīut then again, Dragon Quest VIII isn’t the only title from its era that suffered from this problem. The “Zoom” spell, the game’s fast-travel option, is also a lifesaver, but you need to actually enter a town before you can use it. The ability to dodge combat is one of this port’s saving graces. From there, it was still quite a hike, and all I could think was “Thank God Square Enix took out the random battles.” I would have had the patience to deal with them in 2005, but not nowadays. In a classic 16-bit JRPG, this wouldn’t be a problem since its a trot that will take a minute at most, but here, I honestly took a whole fifteen minutes trying to get to another town after finding myself on the wrong side of a mountain range and having to backtrack to the road. The whole thing just feels empty, beautiful but empty, and every time I’m running between villages, I find myself just wanting to get to the next place as fast as I can. It’s infuriating when these don’t have a treasure waiting for you, and they feel like they don’t serve any real purpose other than to be a distraction. The overworld map is gorgeous, but there’s not really much to do there besides fight monsters and explore clearings on the map. In an age when every video game series, even flippin’ Super Mario, has its “open world” entry, Dragon Quest VIII’s feels really sparse by comparison. Which is fine for some, but that’s exactly what I’ve been trying to steer away from as of late. Dragon quest viii map full#This is a full blown epic quest that can take up to half-an-hour to travel between villages if you want to search the surrounding areas and uncover treasure. These aren’t squat 16-bit sprites that take under a minute to travel between towns and dungeons. Houses are all the right size, mountains look like genuine mountains, castles loom over our heroes, and the endless oceans extend far beyond the horizon. You know, being able to travel to any point, climb every mountain, search every peninsula, and do all this with the scale of a properly sized world. For 2005, the game was stunning in its size, delivering on all the promises that Mass Effect would make three years later. Critics and fans alike praised Dragon Quest VIII for essentially taking a classic 16-bit overworld map and recreating it fully in 3D.
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