confidentialmisanthropy

Thanksgiving was a blur. What time, I didn't spend mildly intoxicated in Tokyo and Yokohama was spent with the FFXII demo. Oh, and that game they packed in with it: Dragon Quest VIII. Both the demo and VIII remind me of FFXI more than any other game in either series for different reasons.

When I first got my hands on FFXI, I was convinced I'd finally arrived at gaming nirvana. The MMORPG genre was always intriguing to me but most of it was mired in D&D fugliness. Draping it in Final Fantasy was enough to get me interested. The first few days I spent, like everyone, levelling right outside town. I was a bit more adventurous than most, though. After just a little while I'd managed to befriend a group of players that were either as equally intrepid as my thief, or just felt inclined to follow me wherever I'd take them. We'd stray as far away from Bastok as we could get, fighting along the way 'til we got killed. It doesn't seem like a big deal now. But at the time it felt pretty rebellious and a bit exhillirating. We weren't interested in merely grinding levels, but actually having some sort of an adventure.

I remember the first time we ever got to Konschtat Highlands and the world just sprawled out in front of us. It was the first non-dungeon I'd been to with no music. The lack of a score only helped the mood. It was raining. Hard. And we kept getting jumped by goblins, climbing hill after hill heading towards some weird landmark I'd spotted on my map. When the massive crag, finally came into view, the rain stopped and a rainbow appeared stretching across the sky.

I exclaimed, "This is the game I've been waiting for my whole fucking life."

Weeks of time sinks, bad parties, and waning adventure and waxing headaches deflated that notion as my time with FFXI went on. I kept trying to get that feeling back. And, truthfully, it came back a few times, in different forms, but hardly anyone was on my page anymore. No one wanted any adventure. They wanted to level. This, coupled with the realization that as a game FFXI really isn't that great drove me to unoficially quit the game.

Dragon Quest VIII is derivative. Sometimes it's offensively so. And it doesn't matter.

I'm going to go out on a limb, and say that 3D has lended DQ something of a greater identity. It's like it was always meant to be so. Gone are the tiles representing forests. No more disproportionate world map screens where your avatar's as big as a town. It all sounds purely visual, but we are talking about a videogame here. Seeing is neccessary. Why not make it drop dead gorgeous? Toriyama's character designs have never looked this good. 'Specially in the case of VIII's bestiary. Level 5 was so proud it seems, they added a first person view option.

The other night, on my way to Port Prospect I noticed it was getting dark. I ran past the gate to town, into a clearing, to a cliff overlooking the ocean. I switched to first person and watched the sun go down and I thought, "This is the game I've been waiting for my whole fucking life."

/shrug

The mere act of running down a path and seeing the next town come up in the distance is like a manifestation of what I always imagined moving giant sprites on world maps for all these years. DQVIII isn't the game I've been waiting for my whole life. It's the game I've been playing all the time, fully realized. It's an old-school RPG with benefits.