A Gaming Diary
Posts tagged dragon quest
Dragon Quest VIII
Feb 7th
Forty hours in. Still so no sign of it coming to an end. Nowhere close.
Didn’t help myself by getting stuck in one spot for well over an hour earlier. I thought I was missing an obvious solution to a puzzle and when I found it I assumed I’d kick myself. Instead, I felt like kicking the game because it turned out I’d tried to do the right thing but rubbish controls had meant that it seemed to be impossible.
(Basically as soon as a moving platform stopped moving I’d step off it, even though I wanted to continue walking across it. I assumed the game was making me step off it in a kind of mini cut scene way, but no. If I left the controller for a while and waited for the camera to stop rotating round and then tried to move I walked across the platform without a single problem.)
Still, it got me more XP so it wasn’t a complete waste of time.
Anyway, after that sticking point everything went smoothly and progressed nicely until now, which is bed time. Tomorrow I know exactly what I need to do when I switch on, which is nice.
The translation is great in this game and there are some ace voices but, oh my, some of the accents are utterly awful. In a kind of brilliant way. One in particular today was just so, so terrible. It was ace.
Dragon Quest VIII
Feb 6th
So I made my way back to the boss. Luckily, the dungeon before him hadn’t reset, so it was pretty easy to get back to him. A tough fight, but I defeated him. And then, as is the way of these things, he transformed into a different form and splatted back to church. So I decided to try one more time to kill him. As luck would have it, he doesn’t reset back to his earlier form so I only had the second form to deal with.
I checked the boss tips on GameFAQs, which scared me. I hadn’t set myself up properly, didn’t have any of the recommended attacks or weapons and thought I was going to die. I nearly did, too.
We were twenty or thirty turns in. My main healer was on the floor dead and my secondary healer was near death and running out of magic, fast. He could have died that turn but the boss chose another target. And after the boss’s turn it was my turn. A fireball in his face and then a huge scythe chop and… down he went! I couldn’t believe it.
Far easier than GameFAQs had led me to believe… though I could have died had things been slightly different. I guess I was a bit lucky.
Anyway, after he was defeated the game got back to normal… more or less. Harder now, for reasons I won’t go into, and darker than it’s been previously. Things are getting serious.
Thirty-seven hours in and still a lot to do.
Dragon Quest VIII
Feb 5th
Not played it again but I did go to GameFAQs to see if it was possible for me to do this fight.
Apparently, I’m at the exact recommended level to do it. Hmm. One problem seems to be that my main character is a boomerang user, which means damage is spread across multiple enemies. Great out in the field. But not so good against a boss.
Anyway, I’ll try again. If I was way too low level I’d probably have binned Dragon Quest VIII now. I’ve still got loads to do, too. I didn’t check to see what it was, but this boss fight is part 41 of the FAQ and there are 67 parts in total. So I’ve probably still got fifteen hours or more after this boss.
Maybe I should just give up and accept the fact that lengthy RPGs aren’t for me any more. I’m too much of a magpie gamer.
Dragon Quest VIII
Feb 5th
Oh hooray.
A lengthy dungeon followed by a boss battle far harder than anything else ever seen. And when you die you start off from a church in the nearest town, so I’m going to have go through the dungeon every time I want to try to kill the boss again.
I have no idea if I’ll even be able to at this level, or whether my tactics are at fault or whether I just need better equipment.
Suffice to say, I did hundreds of hit points in damage to the boss without it blinking while it used its three goes per turn to stamp me into the ground.
Dragon Quest VIII
Feb 5th
I’ve just met the most intentionally annoying character in RPG history.
No, make that gaming history.
No, make that plain, simple history.
Luckily, I doubt I’ve got to put up with him for too long.
Dragon Quest VIII
Feb 4th
Thirty hours in now without any sign of the game coming to an end. It’s just huge. Good thing it’s such great fun.
There’s nothing I can really say about it that’s not full of spoilers, though. Even if I said I’d just got access to a… no, better not. Or that there’s a… yeah, better keep quiet about that.
Dragon Quest VIII
Feb 1st
Well, after an hour or so picking fruit and arranging furniture in Venture I decided to play some Dragon Quest VIII. I played it rather longer than I’d meant to, because it took me about an hour to get to a save point after I decided I wanted one. Partly my fault – going to where I thought there’d be one, not where I knew there was one – but still.
Phew. I’m exhausted. By the time I finally found a church and inn I was on my last legs. My health wasn’t too bad, but my magic points were pretty much exhausted, which was making fights much more tense. Under normal circumstances I’d have used to Zoom spell to get straight to a save point – I wasn’t in a dungeon – but I’ve just got a new mode of transport and I’m not sure how that reacts to the use of Zoom spells. I guess I’ve got to find out some time, why not tonight? I don’t know. Maybe I subconsciously wanted to play for as long as possible.
Anyway, I’m safe for now, but I’ve got a long journey into the unknown next time I play.
Dragon Quest VIII
Jan 25th
Another couple of hours.
It’s a really great game and tonight the time between saves was pretty much perfect. I wouldn’t turn it on if I had less than two hours to play, though.
Anyway, I got past the sticky bit and went through a ‘dungeon’ and – because of my wrongness last night – I think I know exactly what to do when I restart tomorrow. So everything’s worked out okay.
Dragon Quest VIII
Jan 24th
Well, Boling Point and Ridge Racer 6 arrived today. I was trying to decide which to play first when I remembered how many unfinished games I have. And not games that are unfinished because they’re too rubbish or too hard, but games I love but have stopped playing.
So I leapt back into Dragon Quest VIII, which was dangerously close to being left forever for no reason. Played it for another hour and a half, but now I’m stuck. I’ve got to go somewhere, but I’ve no idea how to get there. I don’t think I got any clues when I last played a few weeks ago that I’ve forgotten, but it’s a possibility.
I think I may have missed an entrance to a passage somewhere I was a while back. I’ll go back and check, but the game’s stupid save system means I haven’t got time to investigate properly tonight. I wish there was just a quicksave option you could use at any time.
Dragon Quest VIII
Jan 1st
I’ve just played for four hours or so without doing any story stuff at all, just exploring.
I’ve actually got ahead of myself, I think, and visited places I’m going to have to return to when the story requires it.
I’ve just got to where I should be, story-wise, though, and I’ve saved. I’ll dig in a bit later, after my eyes have had time to recover from extended screen-staring.
And I hate being really proud of a reciepe I’ve made up only to find it written down somewhere five minutes later.
