I was looking for something big to sink my teeth in and have always heard people rave about Dragon Quest VIII as one of the all time great JRPGs so I decided to check it out. JRPGs arne't a genre I play a lot, most of my experience with them is via the Pokemon, Paper Mario(well the first 2) & Mario & Luigi games with a few others at various points in time. Dragon Quest VIII is set in some sort of fake medieval type Europe, there's a King I'm hanging out with but he's been turned into a frog guy and we're off to fix that and there's a gruff English bloke with me. It's fine, there's some general goal but it wasn't really grabbing me at any point but it was just enough to keep me going.

The game starts out in a small town and I was given a number of quick quests to complete before being pointed to go find a crystal ball in a nearby cave by a waterfall. I was playing the PS2 version and the game uses random encounters for battles so once out of a town every few seconds you get into a battle with random enemies. Not my favourite type of system but I would soon come to understand why it's in place. My first time through the dungeon I got to the second encounter before getting destroyed, it was clear I was very under-leveled for this dungeon even though it's the first one! So that's where the random encounters come in, the game wants you exploring the World and getting into battles to level up, but it feels like you have to go out of your way to do this. The 3DS re-release changes this so you can see the enemies on the map but from what I've read doesn't change XP requirements so you still have to do it anyway. 🤷‍♂️

I got through that dungeon and boss after a bit of grinding and then things let up a bit. I visited a couple more towns, completed the next couple of dungeons on my first or second attempts and it seemed like I was over that initial hurdle... until I hit another one. I looked up a guide online to see how under-levelled I was and it was 3 levels at least, maybe 4, so it was going to be another 40-60 minutes of wandering around getting into battles to level up some more. I might have kept going if I enjoyed the combat in the game but I found that aspect to be frustratingly unpredictable due to the amount of randomisation it uses. From one battle to the next you will get a group of enemies that are a push over or a group that leaves you down to a few HP and possibly with a dead party member. Even the turn order has randomisation to it for every turn meaning you can't even get a grip on it once you're into a battle. This makes planning difficult but especially healing because you don't know if you will go first or last so you're constantly making sure you have enough HP to withstand as many attacks as there are enemies for each party member because that does happen, I've had someone go from full health to dead in one turn because of this. And that's just in some random battle on the map that I got some bad luck on. I think all of this made the combat not very interesting. There are mechanics to defend or power up but they feel pointless when there's no way to have a battle plan so you just end up wandering about using your best attack most of the time, it's rare that you need to employ any other tactics. It's all about the numbers in the end and success mostly comes down to grinding battles to have bigger numbers than the dungeon boss.

If the combat was more interesting I'd have stuck with this longer but put it down after about 7 hours. The game world looks great with vibrant colours and it has a real Breath of the Wild vibe to it, very peaceful and chill. I have to call out the really nice transitions between the times of day presented with a camera pan to the sky. Unfortunately not a game for me, I am still looking for something big to sink my teeth into though. I might have a look at something from the Persona series...