Dragon Quest VIII: Journey of the Cursed King

Dragon Quest VIII: Journey of the Cursed King is far from being one of the franchise’s best installments, failing to explore the series’ tradition and the few new things it brings to the table. It’s a simple and tedious JRPG that offers a bland, bad developed story, and boring gameplay.

The plot follows an unnamed hero – who serves as the player’s male avatar – whose mission is to end the curse that plagues a king and his daughter: the king has been turned into a troll and the princess into a mare. To do this, the protagonist needs to destroy the one who has cast the curse, a mysterious court jester named Dhoulmagus – although he eventually discovers that there are more sinister forces behind the event.

Journey of the Cursed King marks the first attempt in the Dragon Quest series to build a fully three-dimensional world. Here, instead of quickly traversing the overworld map to the next town, the protagonist can explore vast fields, forests, and mountains in the way to their objective. Sadly, however, there’s little to find in those places. The environments in the game are large empty fields full of unused spaces: leaving the main road results in few surprises or rewards, as many of the roads and areas do not contain any useful – or even useless – equipment: finding a treasure chest, even one that contains an insignificant amount of money, is already a huge find in the game, as climbing certain mountains or exploring suspicious corners of the map usually reveals absolutely nothing, frustrating the player with the pointless exploration.

In the game’s original version, this exploration was also marred by random encounters with monsters – a problem solved in the 3DS port, which shows the creatures wandering the environments and thus allows the player to try to avoid the confrontation. Something they will probably do often, as ordinary battles become more and more tedious with time, as they remain identical from the beginning to the end of the game, which can easily last more than 40 hours.

Journey of the Cursed King‘s combat system could not be simpler. It’s turn-based and the player controls the actions of four characters, which can attack, use a skill or magic, defend or “Psyche Up”, which increases the power of their action in the next turn. Each character has the option to equip one of three weapon types, which have their own skill tree to be gradually unlocked by leveling up.

Although basic, this combat system still manages to present numerous problems. First of all, since several skills don’t spend magic points when used – or spend just a tiny amount of them – they make the normal attack an irrelevant option, devoid of any benefit. In the same vein, the Psyche Up action takes several turns to actually become useful, and common battles end long before that, making it a viable option only against bosses. This also occurs with the defend command, except that it’s only useful against just a few specific bosses that telegraph the turn of their strongest attacks.

Normal battles, therefore, depend solely on spells and skills, but there’s not much variety in them, which is a serious mistake: maximizing the spear skill tree with the protagonist, for example, unlocks only five skills, one of which is almost identical to one that another character unlocks using an axe. That is, during most of the game, the same attacks will be used repeatedly. As ordinary monsters don’t require any strategy to be beaten – it’s enough to just use the strongest thing at your disposal – the battles don’t take long to get very repetitive – which is especially problematic in a game of this length. Moreover, if certain monsters exhibit particular strengths and weaknesses, they are nothing more than the simple “being vulnerable or immune to a specific element”, which makes them very easy obstacles to overcome, as all spells are always available at any time to the character once unlocked, so the player just needs to select the right one. Since there isn’t much enemy variety in the game’s regions, it’s not difficult to memorize their weaknesses. Battles, then, fail to offer anything new after the first hours.

In narrative terms, Journey of the Cursed King, despite its lack of ambition, also falters a lot. The structure is episodic, with the protagonist’s caravan chasing Dhoulmagus from city to city and repairing the damage the villain does to each one. Around the midway point the premise changes, but the logic of going from place to place to solve their problems remains unchanged.

The question, then, becomes the quality of each of these stories, which unfortunately have trouble in developing their characters and narrative arcs, with the exception of the first ones that introduce the main characters from the protagonist’s party. Jessica’s story, for example, shows her breaking free from her mother’s bonds and fighting the sexism that tries to hold her in her
“right place”: Jessica wants to take revenge for her brother’s murder, but everyone complains about her wish, claiming that, because she’s a woman, her place is at home with her mother, and her only duty is to get married. Angelo’s story, in turn, explores his tumultuous relationship with his brother and indicates how his carefree and arrogant attitude is a rebellious response to his brother’s authority. Actually, his brother, Marcelo, eventually grows to be the most fascinating figure in the overarching story, thanks to the tragedy of his authoritarian nature eclipsing his desire to change the current caste system.

These narrative qualities, however, are rare. Jessica and Angelo’s development occurs in their respective stories at the beginning of the game, and after they join the main group the two are forgotten by the narrative. In the same way, Marcelo’s revolt appears in a single scene, and then his desires are summarily discarded in exchange for an attempt at redemption: his previous plans are not even mentioned anymore and the redemption arc has nothing to do with them. Both Jessica’s and Angelo’s endings also have their own share of problems (spoilers to the end of the paragraph): while she decides to go home and make peace with her mother – which can mean anything, including going back to be servile – Angelo remains the same libertine as always, revealing to be a static, flat character.

Still on the subject of Jessica, Journey of the Cursed King also falls into an unnecessary objectification that goes against the lighthearted tone of the narrative. Each character has a unique skill tree that reflects one of their special traits. While the protagonist’s trait is “Bravery”, his friend Yangus’ is “Humanity”, and Angelo’s is “Charisma”, Jessica’s is… “Sexy Appeal”. It’s not enough for her to be able to fight just in a bikini with one of her special outfits; her special trait – which reflects nothing about her personality – also sexualizes her gratuitously. To make matters worse, the abilities unlocked by this skill tree can be, well, disturbing to say the least, since they make monsters skip a turn because they are staring at Jessica lasciviously. It’s important to point out this not a problem new to the franchise, also appearing – but at least in a less bizarre way – in Dragon Quest V: Hand of the Heavenly Bride, which puts the possible wives of the protagonist lined up as products inside a store, all hoping that he chooses the one he likes the most. Not to mention that one of the traditions in Dragon Quest is to have female NPCs dressed in a bunny outfit, which also sexualizes them.

Anyway, going back to the story, the whole core of the game suffers from narrative problems. There are several plots that fail to bring any semblance of a character arc – like the one that works with the cowardice of a prince – or to build a too obvious one –like a character that despises another and at the end learns to respect them or the case of two brothers who fiercely compete with each other and in the end learn to work together. The game also suffers from sudden shifts in the personality of the characters: there’s a corrupt member of the church, for example, that in the course of a single sequence of scenes, suddenly become incredibly altruistic and a truly noble person, being constructed as a martyr by the narrative. And the game also suffers from plots in which the characters are not confronted by the selfishness of their actions – like the king who neglected his people for years due to the death of his wife – nor by their hypocrisy – like another king who thinks it’s okay to hire a group to “assist” his son to win a challenge, but not with the boy buying the trophy for that challenge.

The main story also has nothing interesting to say and boils down to an attempt by an evil creature to dominate/destroy the world. The relationship between the protagonist and the princess begins to be developed too late and, for some inexplicable reason occurs in optional conversations, which can be easily missed if the player is not diligent enough. The king’s function as a character is just to offer plain exposition, basically repeating or pointing out what should be done, while the fourth obligatory member of the group, Yangus, serves only as a comic relief due to his heavy accent (“Heh heh, long time no see, eh!? I ain’t seen your mug since we polished off that fat geezer“) and his catchphrase (“Cor Blimey!“).

The narrative only gets it right when it doesn’t take itself too seriously, either by putting suggestive names on the characters (the rich Mr. Golding, his daughter Cash, and the ultra-boring Prince Charmles are good examples), or by giving an eccentric personality to some monsters, with an octopus standing out right at the beginning by simulating discussions between its tentacles, Tenta and Tickles, changing its voice to match each one’s personality. If the game had doubled down this tone, it would certainly have avoided the boredom of its more dramatic situations involving flat characters.

Thus, Dragon Quest VIII: Journey of the Cursed King’s failures are threefold: it doesn’t advantage of the 3D presentation it introduces, it relies on a repetitive and dull combat system, and also tells a boring story.

Review originally published in Portuguese on August 23, 2018.

July 01, 2020.