Dragon Quest VIII: Journey of the Cursed King (2004)

This is an RPG for the PS2. I got it for $6.67 at Gamestop (a $10 game but part of a "Buy 2 Get 1 Free" deal and the other two games were also $10...so $20/3). Looking at the play clock as I wrap up the alternate ending, I see upwards of 110 hours. Even allowing for about 10 hours of occasions where I left the system on if I had to walk away in the middle of a dungeon and couldn't save, I'm still faced with the fact that I spent 100 hours playing this game.

There are two ways to process that number:

1) OMGWTFBBQ I am a nerd. I grew up on NES and SNES RPGs (Final Fantasy/Dragon Warrior and countless derivatives thereof), but the highest play clock I can remember was Final Fantasy VI (or III as it was called at the time), which was somewhere near 50 and was only not 35-40 because I had to grind at the end to get through the final boss Kefka, that cackling punk. I remember that leveling up process as mind-numbingly boring, though I didn't have years of mind-numbing "real" work in an office as a frame of reference then like I do now.

Still, that's just half the amount of time I put into Dragon Quest VIII. I must be regressing into my childhood, right? Who has that kind of time to play video games? Aren't they for kids?

2) Using a metric, say, dollar per hour of entertainment, and comparing to another form of leisure activity. $6.67/100 = $.07/hour of entertainment. By contrast, $10 for a 2-hour night at the movies is $5/hour of entertainment. That's over 70 times as expensive.

Undoubtedly there are also negative repercussions to consider in terms of sheer timesuck and social negligence when I choose to disappear into the world of a videogame. The purely financial/"quant" argument doesn't take into account the spread of those 100 hours, which were concentrated entirely in the space of a month rather than dispersed over a much longer period, as watching 50 movies would be. And I can't deny that by the end I had turned into an addict, flipping on the PS2 almost before I had even got my jacket off at the end of the day, staying up odd hours to find out where the story went next or scouring FAQs and forums filled with unpunctuated tween jibber-jabber about where this or that extremely rare item was.

But any amount of solipsism, psychoanalyzing, or guilt I feel about my time investment won't take away from how awesome this game is. The story is stock Dragon Quest, swords-and-sorcery-and-fair-maidens fantasy stuff, and if you've never been a fan of the old-school JRPG game engine, it strictly adheres to the formula - no Active Time Battle or anything like that to try and force some time-critical "excitement" into battles. (Some of the aforementioned 10 extra play-clock hours where I walked away were in the middle of a battle, and it was amusing to come back and see the enemies just as I left them, still breathing heavily and doing their little dances waiting for me to attack.) But I think originality is overrated, and it's all in the presentation, as they say, and holy crap the presentation!



It's like taking the reins of your favorite 2D animated movie, but in 3D. I think that's the most succinct way to put it - playing a movie. The character/map/dungeon designs are classic: where many games strain so hard to ape reality in their graphics that they take on a creepy quality and magnify the distance between the game and real life, DQ8 embraces its cartoon fantasy roots. The soundtrack was recorded by a REAL symphonic orchestra and the voice acting is across-the-board TREMENDOUS good. As I'm typing this a playthrough of Final Fantasy X is on in the background via YouTube, and it's insane how much bad voice acting destroys my enthusiasm and exposes all the cliches and flaws behind the game right away - by which I really mean, I will never finish Metal Gear Solid 3 because David Hayter's growling as Solid Snake is atrocious. Okay, I might finish it, but I'll have my hands to my ears all the way.

(From what I gather DQ purists are not fans of much of what I mentioned above. The original Japanese version of DQ8 has (of course) Japanese voices, but also MIDI music, and I actually read some comment (I know, first mistake) saying that dudeman preferred the MIDI to the symphonic because the mix was "clearer." Yeah, clearer, and lifeless. Many of the NPCs in towns will say different things to you depending on whether it's day or night, but the night music was MIDI and I was so turned off by it that I didn't bother talking to people at night unless I had to.)

The depth of the characters is astounding, and I envision hundreds of man-hours being put into the script. You can talk to your three companions at any moment on the map, and depending on where you are and what you're doing, they almost always have something different to say, and it's very often right along the lines of what you're thinking. The game really comes alive and gives you the feeling of an actual adventure with companions and not fountains of exposition and motivation.

I haven't even begun to touch on the mini-games (a monster team and arena, a casino) and sidequests that are actually fun, and besides which were excuses to prolong the experience, but I'm running out of enthusiasm gas. I found a random clip that doesn't give much away and shows what the "everyday" experience of the game is like, so if this looks appealing, imagine what it would be like with REALLY GOOD characters and writing, and I will have successfully conveyed how great it is.