Dragon Quest 8: Journey of The Cursed King

For the most unimportant announcement of the week, I’ve started playing Dragon Quest 8: Journey of The Cursed King again 😉 Been playing for about an hour everyday for the last few days. I can’t give a thorough review of it at the moment and I don’t plan to, but I want to say a few things about the game.

Going to start with the most obvious thing, the graphic. It’s simply gorgeous; the characters, the enemies, the landscapes, etc. I’ve been playing games since I was a kid and thus, I can say the game arguably has the best graphics for RPG on PS 2. Seems like it pushes the console graphical power to the limit.

The game has a few tricks on its sleeve that make it more realistic in terms of character movements and physical appearance. The game takes into account the properties of the different terrains / landscapes the characters are in. For example I can see the remnants of the grass when the character runs on grass and similarly I can see the dust coming off when the character runs on dusty path. I can also see changes in the weapons & armor the characters carry when I equip them with new weapons / armors. It’s quite impressive considering other RPGs don’t show these changes. So what’s next? The ability to see changes in the clothes worn 8)

I bet Chen, Jonessy & their army will be pleased to see the graphical changes in the game 😈

As usual, nothing is perfect. There are a few thing that I hope were done differently:

• The game uses the church to save the game and the inn to rest / heal the characters. The inn does both in other RPGs. I know this is the tradition in DQ series, but I feel this should be let go. Sometimes we have to let go something no matter how fond we are of it.
• The menu could have been better especially when it comes to equipping equipment. Each character has his own personal belonging / storage in addition to the group storage. This is fine and in-line with other games. However, when I want to equip new stuffs I have to store the thing I want to equip in the character’s personal belonging. That means I have to transfer the item from the group storage to the character storage. This is too cumbersome as there’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to equip the items straight from the group storage.

I can only say this much because I’ve only played for less than 10 hours so far. I just hope that some stuffs I find irritating will be fixed in the next installment of the series. The thing is the next game will be released on Nintendo DS. This is odd because RPG is an intensive game and the DS excels not in that type of games. The DS is amazingly suited to play fun, attractive & short-burst games like Mario Cart, Brain Training, etc. I guess they want to take advantage of the dual screen feature of the DS. But, I wonder how the graphic will look like. PSP would probably a better choice graphic wise if they want to port the series to portable platform, But there’s nothing unique in PSP I guess; no offence to you PSP guys 😆

DQ 8 shows the evolution of games up until recently. In my opinion most games are the prettier, sexier version of the previous ones. If I go back from the days of Atari to PS 3 / XBOX 360, all I can see is games that are better looking than the previous generation with nothing truly new being offered. Then the Wii came along and offers something truly unique with its motion sensing controller. It’s aimed for broader audience including those that were alienated to games previously. I’m really glad that Wii came along because it opens up a whole new playing field. No doubt the others will in one way or another offer unique innovations of their own. That can only be good for all of us 😛

It’s midnight of Saturday 21 July; the release date of the latest Harry Potter book. Kudos to you guys that have been queuing up for the book at this moment. I am just too lazy to do that kind of thing 😆 Will get it in the morning / afternoon depending on the weather; a very wet summer over here much to my liking.

It will be a weekend of reading for me and for lots of Harry Potter fans 😉