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The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time. I think that was the last time I got "really excited" about a new videogame before I bought it. It was also the last time a game felt "really exciting" while playing it. I wonder why that was? I think it was the horse. After playing Dragon Quest VIII, the horse-mechanics of Ocarina of Time look pretty dull. That's not to say Ocarina of Time is a bad game, by any means. It's just that its scope was rather small. "Hyrule Field," the stretch of meadow and hill and rock that stood as a hub between each of the game's towns and wild areas, really wasn't that big at all. It was, as Shigeru Miyamoto has explained, a "playground." On our horse, we can run, jump over fences, and shoot ghosts with a bow and arrow. If we have a Rumble Pak, we can feel the controller vibrate as our horse's hooves hit the ground. It makes us feel connected to our world.
Dragon Quest VIII has no vibration features whatsoever. Nor does it have any voices. I think they'll put voices into the next one, even though they clearly don't have to. One could say, though, that they're just pandering to the old-schoolers with the decision to not put voices into VIII. Maybe they are. Though the fact stands that the game has no voices.
It does, however, feature a world that makes Ocarina of Time look utterly sick. I'm sure Miyamoto would approve of this statement; Dragon Quest VIII, as a "significant work," gives us a clearer idea of what Miyamoto means when he describes himself as a "human resources engineer." The horse in Ocarina was an experiment for transportation through large game worlds. That's not to say that the world in Ocarina had to be "large." In Dragon Quest, the dream Miyamoto had when he made Ocarina of Time's "Hyrule Field" is made available to consumers in advanced beta build. Only now, it's applied to a turn-based RPG. The application works wonders.
Dragon Quest VIII's world map is a hero. It is large, and wide, and persistent. It does not let you go. There are paths to take from each town to the next, and there are countless things that catch your eye and pull you off the path and into a little grove where you're then killed by gorillas with clubs. Sometimes you find a river emptying into the ocean from a continent you can't access; you sail up the river between a few fjords, and there, carved into the side of the rock, are the letters "C-A-S-I-N-O." Inside is, well, a casino. Sometimes you might be an hour into a foot-voyage from one town to its neighboring castle, only to encounter a special monster that can be killed for bounty-hunting purposes. You fight him, are significantly weakened in the process, and then continue on, only to find that you can get up the mountainside the way you'd though you could. Eventually, you find an alternate route up, only to be told at the gates that you look suspicious and aren't welcome. Nearly out of magic points with which to heal yourself, you're stuck in the middle of nowhere. It's at these helpless moments that the game feels like a brilliant piece of work.
The instruction manual warns you, on page one, "Try not to get lost." It is not chiding you about your poor sense of direction. It is sincerely warning you that this game is staggering in its scope.
Even if you die, you can rage again against the dragons and magicians of evil. You are reborn at the church where you last saved the game, with all your experience points intact. You lose half your money, however. This is the way Dragon Quest goes. You'll gladly trade half your money, sometimes, for all those experience points, items, and the comfort of a friendly town. VIII is a little easier on the player than earlier Dragon Quests, though -- in VIII, when you die, all four party members are revived at the last church. In other Dragon Quests, only the hero is revived, meaning that you might have to go so far as to sell your armor and weapons to revive your friends. Once you reach a point where you can start putting money in the bank in 1,000-gold increments, you'll be slightly better off. The games generally get easier the farther along they progress. Dragon Quest VIII is the same way.
I would award highest honors to Dragon Quest VIII in the "flow" category. Standing still and looking out at the world has never been better. One segment, in which you depart a country inn in the morning to stand on the edge of a cliff with a traveling merchant and look down at a ship in the middle of the deserted wasteland at the bottom of the valley, is especially awe-inspiring. Also awe-inspiring is the idea that the beach you look down upon from a mountain ridge early in the game is not at all necessary. Yet, if you go down there, there's a treasure chest with a life seed -- that's three more hit points, permanently.
Dungeons are another thing altogether. Those essentially standard Dragon Quest dungeons laced with intricate little puzzles and clever riddles, the full-3D graphics engine realizes them as some of the historically finest level design in games. I'd never been able to appreciate Dragon Quest dungeons as I do now, because I perhaps lacked the imagination to know that the little bright bubble around my hero as he walks down red-brick-like passageways is to represent a flaming torch. From Dragon Quest VIII's first dungeon on, we know who we are, and we know what we're doing: we are a hero, and we are carrying a torch as we descend deep into a natural cavern. Right from the entrance, we can see a treasure chest on a ledge way down below us and to the left. There's a sword inside, if we can how to retrieve it. A later dungeon involves the catacombs beneath an old monastery. This dungeon is precious to me. It feels something like the ruined Dwarf mines in the first Lord of the Rings movie; the ceilings are low, the staircases are carved out of the rock, the plazas are big and well-lit, the backrooms full of poisonous marshes that look like they might house all manner of foul creatures. As detailed and stunning as the graphics are, they only add to the imagination's power to imagine. It's magnificent.
If Dragon Quest VIII goes wrong anywhere, it's that it's too forgiving. It loves the player so much it doesn't want the player to get angry. I mention above how being helplessly lost is a feeling unique to this game, in that you can be helplessly lost, physically tired, and dead broke when it comes to items. The game, soon, doesn't want you to feel this way, so it gives you the "Ruura" spell, which transports you back to any town you've previously visited. If you're going from Town A to Town B and you've never been to Town B before, going back to Town A is only going to net you a night's rest and another shot at the long and winding road to Town B. Still, in later stages, it feels something like a cop-out to use "Ruura" -- when so much of the first part of the game revolves around securing a boat ride to the other side of the ocean, to be able to just pop back to that first continent with a magic spell when you're sent on an errand feels bogus. I have started a second quest, which is now a luxurious one-tenth of the way through the game and shows thirty hours on the clock, in which I refuse to use "Ruura." It makes the game feel like a hell of an adventure. It takes on a quality damn near the original Legend of Zelda, which was, the first time you played it, a game full of screen after screen of places you'd never been and things you'd never seen; playing Dragon Quest VIII this way shows me that the Dragon Quest series owes as much -- if not more -- to Zelda as it owes to "Dungeons and Dragons" and Ultima, as Final Fantasy owes to Dragon Quest, as Final Fantasy VI owes to Dragon Quest V. Though I'd rather not impose arbitrary limitations on myself, was it not Shigeru Miyamoto, a non-gamer, who challenged gamers to play Super Mario Bros. without picking up a single coin?
**
Dragon Quest VIII was programmed by Level-5, a group of talented young men who made Dark Cloud 2, a game so full of ideas that it was, in the end, nothing. Yet it was pretty, and compelling. A quirk of that game's design lies in switching from your plucky young hero to his literally barrel-chested robot suit: rather than show the hero board the robot, a subtitle pops up on the screen, telling us we're getting in the robot. The PlayStation2 spins the disc hard. Pop, we're in the robot. I asked a friend -- isn't that kind of dumb? Why not show a little animation? The friend replied, "Well, an animation would take time." I took this, at the time, to mean that my friend -- and the designers of the game -- didn't realize that an animation in a game with even the smallest cinematic aspirations could be short and punchy; it needn't all be like summoning Bahamut to lift enemies and a chunk of earth into the sky and then breathe lasers at the earth, sending the enemies crashing to the ground while the player runs out to get some Chinese food. Now, I take it, my friend was simply so zoned-into the game's power-levelling, random-dungeon-generating dynamic that he wanted to play as efficiently as possible. Dragon Quest VIII, though programmed by the people who made a game that pushes players to be efficiency experts, economic spenders, and gadget-whores (the vast amount of gadgets, cameras, weapon-repair items, tutorial videos that demonstate item usage, city-building interfaces, et cetera is staggering), was clearly not designed by them. Some mourn the hiatusization of Level-5's True Fantasy Live Online for Xbox. I, for one, upon completing Dragon Quest VIII, come to think that it's good Level-5 served under the guidance of Yuji Horii and his men for a project. They learned how to apply their flow-creating graphical prowess and dungeon design into something more self-restrained. It's courageous, and it has balls; playing this after Dark Cloud 2 makes me puzzle about why Dragon Quest VIII doesn't have a corner map display like Dark Cloud 2. The puzzling lasts only a few moments: because it doesn't need it.
***
Battles, as I've said, are simple. The only thing that distinguishes them from earlier Dragon Quest battles is, well, everything visual. The enemies animate like cartoons. So do the heroes. Yes, for the first time, you can see the heroes during a Dragon Quest battle. And you can see their weapons, too. Every weapon has its own distinct look and attack animation. Different suits of armor can make Jessica look like a dancer or a bunny girl. Et cetera et cetera.
Though the details are clearly quite entertaining, elaborate, and wonderful, it's in the big things that Dragon Quest VIII shines. Simply put, the towns are magnificent. I don't think I've ever seen better towns in a Japanese RPG. This is coming from a man who used to swear by Climax's Landstalker's Mercator City as the "greatest RPG town of all-time." Dragon Quest VIII trumps it. As though fed up of games with cities that are there simply because RPGs need cities, Dragon Quest VIII fills its towns with the most ingenious architecture seen in a videogame. Call this a new feather in Akira Toriyama's cap, if you will -- many Japanese have respected him for some time as a fashion designer; from now on, they may well call him architect. The mere positioning of bedrooms in inns, the spiraling staircases in lighthouses, the boxes stored under staircases in a weapon shop, the underground sprawl of a tenement building, the flow of castles with red carpets, the grand cathedrals, the purple lighting and banners of a smoky fortune-teller's shop: every building you walk in has an instant, undeniable feng-shui that suits its purpose. My favorite building, I reckon, is the four-story all-purpose stone wall that overlooks a market at a port just ten hours into the game. It's the second port you arrive at, following your first boat ride. There are mechants spread out all over the gray stone landing area; from the fortified wall of the all-purpose building -- which, yes, includes a bar and the most lived-in-looking inn I've ever seen, maybe even in real life -- you can see the boats docked at the harbor to your right (the sight reminds me of Skies of Arcadia, though that game took place in the sky) and the sprawl of the hilly landscape to your left. You can see the tower of a castle about two days' journey on foot from the port. In that castle's town, you're told how to find a certain hill by a certain riverside. From atop that hexagonal castle tower with its flying black banners (the king is mourning his dead wife), you can trace the complicated, hour-long walking route with your eyes.
I was really amazed when I found out I could do that.
[next: . . . and he lived happily ever after.]
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