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It starts in medias res, like all the good epics. A rat is scrounging through the woods. He skips between fronds of grass and arrives at the foot of an old man. He looks up. The old man wears a curious expression. His face also happens to be fish-like, green, and scaly. He's oddly kind of cute. The rat is a little cuter. The rat runs away, finally jumping into the pocket of a yellow jacket. The jacket belongs to a man with no name, who we'll call "Billy" just because that's what I chose to name him. He's roasting sausages with a fat, chest-hairy man in a stone helmet named "Yangus." The two aren't talking, though later dialogues will reveal that Yangus calls Billy "big brother" near habitually. This is because of an oath Yangus swore some six months before the story begins. The situations surrounding the oath resemble something that happens to a Chinese folk hero on his journey from one non-existent country to another. In a momnet, Ynagus jumps up. "I detect something, my brother," he says. Billy stands up and unsheathes his sword. The woods rustle. Something jumps out, zooming toward the camera.
The "something" happens to be a pack of three blue, round, shiny, smiley-faced Slimes. This is the first battle of Dragon Quest VIII, which is the sequel to Dragon Quest VII, which was kind of the sequel to Dragon Quest VI, which did a rather poor job of being the sequel to Dragon Quest V, which was a revelatory sequel to Dragon Quest IV, which was a nice change of pace from Dragon Quest III, which aced Dragon Quest II, which seemed confused about what, exactly, Dragon Quest had put in place when it arrived, in 1986, as the first "Japanese" console-based video role-playing game of all-time.
The battle with the slimes lasts all of fifteen seconds. When it's over, the old man with the green fish face tells us it's time to continue our journey, only he can't find the princess. She might have run off into the woods, scared by the Slimes. Just as the three are standing around wondering, the princess wanders back in to the campsite. She's a princess like we've never seen -- essentially, a white horse with a braided and ribboned black mane. The next stop on our journey is a small town where an old friend and advisor of the old green fish-faced man has lived for many years. It's been a long journey to get here. We enter the town, and find that just two nights before, one of the citizens' houses burned down. Yes, it's the house of the person we've arrived to visit. While Yangus and Billy are relaxing at the tavern, there's commotion about monsters having entered the town. They rush out with their weapons alongside some taller, more-brutal-looking townspeople in horned leather masks, only to find the green fish-man, whose name is Torode, standing on his covered wagon, cowering behind his white horse, Meetia, screaming at the people to leave him alone. Dejected, the three heroes and the one horse leave town, only to be stopped by a girl -- the daughter of a fortune-teller -- who believes she saw their arrival in a dream.
Soon, we're going to learn a scrap of the backstory, before being pushed off on the first sidequest, a rather uningenious romp through an ingeniously structured cave behind a waterfall. The backstory goes like this: once upon a time, there was a castle called Toroden, and it was the most beautiful castle in the world. It was home of the wise King Torode and his beautiful daughter, the Princess Meetia. They held grand balls in the castle, and musicians and scholars from all around the world came to take in the wonders of this cultural metropolis. Yet Toroden also had a secret -- a magic wand from a long-gone era was enshrined in the topmost part of the castle, supplying the country with knowledge and harmony. One day, an evil wizard named Dolmageth came to the castle and stole the wand under cover of night, planning to use it to usurp countries and steal princesses. The wise king tried to stop the evil wizard; a struggle ensued. The princess awoke and came to the shrine. Just as the evil wizard was about to curse the wise king, the beautiful princess, ever filial, stood before her father's body, absorbing the shock of the spell. When the smoke cleared, the wise king was transformed into a stubby, green, scaly, toady, fishy-faced man. The princess was transformed into a beautiful white horse. The wizard found this amusing. He walked away, confident that the pair would never be able to reclaim the wand from him. He went up to a battlement, looked down at the castle, and waved the wand, thinking of roses. Soon, the castle was overrun with rosevines, thorns, and gorgeous flowers; all citizens were turned into green, thorny statues. The princess, now a horse, helped her now-defenseless and ugly father escape with haste. They stood outside the castle after Dolmageth had gone, wondering what they should do. Shortly, a young man employed as a guard in the castle awoke from a bad dream, rubbing his head. This was Billy. For some reason -- the story continually teases us by saying "He's just a lucky kind of guy" -- he had been the only human being in the castle not transformed by the wicked, all-consuming spell. He soon finds his king, and they shortly equip a covered wagon and set off in search of clues that will help them defeat Dolmageth and restore Toroden Castle. This journey will take average players around sixty hours and series experts around four hundred. The story is called "Dragon Quest VIII: The Sky, The Sea, The Continent, and The Cursed Princess."
From the beginning of the game, from the moment Torode refers to the gorgeous white horse as "Princess," a grown Japanese man is hooked the way a young American elementary school student is hooked on his mother's bedtime stories. This is the first significant work of storytelling by Akira Toriyama and Yuji Horii since Dragon Quest V, which was about the bond between a man and his murdered father; like that game, it is a tale told with many, many words, through many long, gratuitous dungeons and boss battles, and few heroes or villains that would seem out of place in a bedtime story. In Dragon Quest V, the hero and his father are making a journey that has apparently be going on for some time. They are on a boat. The story opens with the hero's dream. A baby is being born in a castle. The queen says she wants to name it Billy -- the name of the hero! -- and the king says that's a fine name. The queen then falls ill. She might be dead. We don't know. Billy wakes up, soon, the son of an adventuring rouge named Pappas, who looks a lot like the king in his dream. From the moment we land at our destination, it's evident that we're in a place where everyone knows and remembers Pappas. They are quite happy about his arrival. They clear up rooms for him to stay wherever he goes. Old men whisper to Billy about how "your father is a great man." Billy hasn't seen this countryside for ten years. He's eleven years old. It's evident from the start, as Billy pokes aroud in caves, befriends a little girl, and gets in some trouble involving a Killer Panther kitten which later joins his adventuring party, that Pappas is researching something. Billy, through a few short adventures, grows up just a tiny bit, reflecting the player's state of already-grown-upness. We realize: dad is doing something. Dad is a man who has worked hard for my whole life to find something. Unfortunately, soon, when the prince of a neighboring kingdom is kidnapped and the ever-rough Pappas is sent to investigate, things heat up. Billy goes with his father, helping out just enough to see the arrival of a malicious wizard with some scary-huge friends. Pappas is murdered; his last words to Billy are "Your mother is still alive." Billy and Prince Harry are shackled and taken off to work on the evil cult's tower to heaven. Billy spends ten years as a slave. Eventually, he breaks free, finds himself in the town his father had taken him back to ten years ago, and sets about continuing the quest his father had started. By the end of the game, he'll be married, with two children. And his giant pet Killer Panther is still by his side.
Is Dragon Quest VIII a better story than Dragon Quest V? Well, yes. And no. No because Dragon Quest V is a thing of the past; released in 1992, I first played it to completion in 1994, and I loved it above most other videogames. I think I might like it more than Final Fantasy VI, even though that's probably a better game. Dragon Quest V, which introduced the capture/collect/train monsters dynamic into role-playing games, was a long (though not too long), twisting, sweet little piece of videogame, which endeared itself to the player, forcing him to think of it ten years later with as much fondness as the revenge with which Billy thinks of his father's murder. We get emotionally attached to Dragon Quest stories partly because they're simple and partly because they are about things we already understand, told in the context of worlds our parents told us about when we were kids.
Yet Dragon Quest games are not children's stories. Children's stories would take themes like love for one's parents or (as in VIII) duty-bound honor and sharpen them into a point that comes in the form of a final moral. Dragon Quest takes these themes, designs appealing characters to embody them, and then lets the world's most famous (and talented, in my opinion) comic artist/writer run with them on a hell of a budget.
That the games are simple in design is indicative of many things. Battles with enemies are random, popping up as the player tries to walk from one town to the next. As the player walks into woods, the enemy encounter rate might increase. The enemies you fight on one side of a bridge might be stronger than the enemies you fight on the other. The backgrounds for the battle screens differ when you're in a cave or in the hills or in the forest or on the beach or down by the river. In combat, you first choose to fight or run. Normally, you're going to choose to fight. You then select which enemies to fight. Normally, there are a lot of enemies -- anywhere from three to nine -- in random formations. The hero can equip swords or boomerangs. The sword slashes one enemy. The boomerang hits all enemies on screen; yet the damage it does decreases as the boomerang flies from left to right. The hero's sworn-brother uses axes or clubs and does massive damage. The token girl character can use magic wands or whips -- the whip attacks all enemies in a group. The other guy is -- well, the other guy. He's normally a mixed bag of magic and attack. The enemies range from cute Slimes to giant fire-breathing dragons. Sometimes you get killed. Sometimes you don't. Usually, you win the battle. Strategy can be used. Magic can be used as well.
You arrive at a new town with a lot of money you earned by fighting monsters on the way. You're almost dead. You enter the town and sleep at the inn. In the morning, you walk down to the shop, and buy new armor and weapons. Normally, the money you earned by fighting -- or getting beat up and running -- is enough to buy maybe a helmet for everyone or a new sword for one person. Seasoned veterans go for the new sword. Now you can kill enemies more quickly. This means you make money more quickly. As battles end more quickly, experience points roll in at a greater rate. Your characters become innately stronger. Soon, you question the townspeople and find that there's a dungeon nearby in which some item you need to progress is located. This information normally comes amidst humorous incidents involving a woman worried about her ne'er-do-well husband's behavior at the local bar, or else horse thievery. You enter the dungeon, get hurt a lot, exit in a hurry, and then save up more money. Dragon Quest games are about, essentially and repeatedly, telling you that practice makes perfect and nothing in this world cannot be taken down without preparation. As a moral, it works slyly. As a gameplay device, it allows us plent of time to see and feel our characters getting stronger while we take pride in each new weapon or attack.
New to Dragon Quest VIII's fields of battle are the ability to target individual enemies in a group (the older titles only let you chose which type of enemy you wanted to attack, resulting in something like a two-dimensional recreation of the chaos of war) and sweet, honest little Dungeons-and-Dragons-like choices at level-up, wherein you appropriate points to various skill-sets, resulting in earning of new techniques or permanent alterations of statistics, with every four points added. The only skill everyone shares is "Martial arts," which allows you to fight without weapons, and requires much training by sweaty, mouth-breathing DQ geeks to build up. Normal humans will want to use weapons. The hero's "Sword," "Spear," and "Boomerang" can be powered up, as well as "Bravery." The girl, Jessica, can learn "Whip," "Rod," and "Knife" techniques, as well as "Color", which powers her new magic spells. Suave Kukule excels in "Sword," "Bow," and "Wand," as well as "Chivalry." Yangus can study "Axe," "Club," and "Personality." Painstakingly slot enough points into that last attribute and you'll get the level-up message "Yangus became somewhat like your uncle who likes telling stories -- and learned the 'Cure' spell!" This is amazing -- and not just because your big, dumb, barbarian party member has just learned a cure spell.
So yes. In case you haven't noticed yet, I'm calling this Game of the Year 2004. I call it this not because I'm ashamed I didn't call Dragon Quest VII "Game of the Year 2001" -- rather, I call it this because it is the most honestly original thing done with the genre of role-playing in ten years. You might be thinking, right now, that no game with random battles and the simplistic -- if personable -- character-development system described above can be called "original," much less "the most honestly original thing done in the genre of role-playing in ten years." I can understand your doubt. However, there is yet a secret I have not disclosed about Dragon Quest VIII. I will disclose it now, if you will read just a little further.
[next: once upon a time . . .]
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