Since times long forgotten, a forbidden scepter had lain sealed away
in Trodain Castle. Until one day a mysterious jester called Dhoulmagus
disturbed its rest and freed the scepter from its ancient bonds.
Using the scepter's power, Dhoulmagus placed a spiteful curse upon
the whole kingdom. In the space of a moment, the people were transformed
into thorns and the land was frozen in time. To add insult to injury,
the king and the princess were turned into hideous beasts!
However, the curse left one person untouched...a young guardsman ...You!
Now you must embark on an epic journey to save your king and country and
lift the shadow of the evil jester's curse.
.........
This IS the RPG of 2005. 2006 will bring us Final Fantasy 12, until then..
I got about 10 hours into Magna Carta: lame story but pretty gfx, 5-6
hours into Shining Force NEO: nice story but lame combat. So many RPGs,
but nothing to grab me... Whats an RPG gamer to do?! Thank god the
grandaddy of all RPGs is here with a new instalment!
You dont know what Dragon Quest is?! Time to use the Echelon time machine
... flux capacitors engaged ... here we go!
The year is 1986. Final Travesty errr Fantasy doesnt exist yet. There is
no console RPG world. A young Yuji Horii (familiar? he also produced
Chrono Trigger) would turn the game world upside down. Dragon Quest was
released for the Famicom to huge success. It was released in North America
in 1989 as Dragon Warrior due to copyrights owned by the D&D folks.
Skip forward to 1988, Dragon Quest III is released, one of the best
selling, and frankly a fantastic, RPG of all time. So much so that the
Japanese equivalent of congress had to pass a law forbidding a Dragon
Quest title from retailing on any day other than a weekend (aka Sunday
since back then Jap kids still went to school 6 days a week) or a
national holiday. Yes, Dragon Quest III cost so much money in folks
skipping work (and school ofcourse) that action had to be taken. Crazy eh.
Now 1991, Dragon Warrior III is released in the US of A. This is where I
joined the series. In a world of bland simplistic and short games, here
was a NES cart that packed like 100 hours of gameplay. Even the young
SNES which I obtained for Christmas that year couldn't really compare.
Defeat the Demon Lord, save the world, its no problem. Well actually it
is, this was a friggen hard game! The difficulty was over anything I had
played really, and well worth it.
Flash forward to 2001 now. There had been 2 SNES Dragon Quest titles,
great games I must add, that never were released stateside. Probably due
to the lackluster success of Dragon Quest 4 on the NES, which hell, I
never even played back then. After many delays, the epic Dragon Quest 7
was arriving stateside. After a really uhh bizzare Final Fantasy 8 and what
I have grown to love but hated at the time: Final Fantasy 9, I was psyched
for a real meaty RPG. (Yeah okay PSX gave us no lack of RPGs, but lets
keep it simple oke.) We errr Kalisto released it on November 2nd 2001 as
Dragon_Warrior_VII_USA_PS1-KALISTO. This was a day that changed my life
probably for the worse. Dragon Quest 7 was an incredible game. Every
time I saw a 7/10 rating from a US gaming site I died a little bit inside.
Lets face it, it was the best selling game on the PSX in Japan, something
has to be fishy here.
Well lets take a look at Dragon Quest 7. It features really bad 3D
environments, but it allowed you to spin the world around freely, which
is something people came to love on the PSX. The SNES quality sprites
and resampled NES sounds really turned alot of graphics whores off.
But lets face it, I cleared the game just shy of 100 hours on the game
clock, with tons of hours off the clock used in replaying shit. Final
Fantasy 8 took what, 25 hours on a first run? Oohh pretty FMVs, vs
ohHH gameplay. Lame fanboys, I think I saw Squall getting gangbanged
by some truckers while you had the game paused. Err I digress. I spent
so many allnighters playing this game, just to get another story thread
unlocked, just to visit another world, just to make another 100k gold
in the Casino. Yeah I didn't make it out of my house too awake for the
next 3 months. One of the longest times I've spent playing an RPG
on a single run. But there was a hell of alot to do!
Dragon Quest 7 really had lackluster sales too stateside. I was quite
sure we'd never see Dragon Quest 8 state side.... until it came out
in Japan! Wow! At first I was worried. A fully 3D (cellshaded) game
might ruin the timetested genre at the cost of commercial success.
Absolutely not. The game is Dragon Quest through and through. Akira
Toriyama's char and monster designs are better than ever. Hell the
game even has lunatic breast bounce. I haven't played the US one
enough to know if they toned it down or not, maybe we'll release a
breast bounce trainer to unlock it if they did
However, life isnt as easy as it was back in 2001, so I only spent
about 10-15 hours playing the Jap installment, saying I'll wait for
the english version... and here it is! To celebrate I have even
shaved my head for the first time in a bazillion years, to uhh look
more like a slime? Christ I dunno, but its comfortable. One of those
IRC eggings on that turned out well atleast.
Ok so heres the game, since ive already typed alot, I'll spout some
usual rantings. Real sceners never die, friendship above all else,
never forget the original console legends, fuck p2p/fserve/nointro/pub
maggots who bring us down, ignore them! Everyone needs to work together
to keep the oldschool scene spirit alive. The days of amiga bbs may be
(mostly) gone, but that doesn't mean the scene should slip into a mess.
Console groups with PC nfos might be nitpicking, but every time I see
a group with web generated ascii logo. I wonder why we even bother after
all these years. Stop using those absurd file names like
blah-gamename.part01.rar, how hard is it to use an 8.3 name really-g.uys
Maybe not everyone wants to burn RARs onto joilet filesystems, but aside
from that, its just tradition. Once apon a time, you'd be nuked for
these kinds of offenses, and just because the scenes become much more
public, ie shitforce, hs-news err dnl-news err console-news, doesnt mean
it has to keep on this downward spiral. Much love to all the people and
groups keeping the tradition alive.
Dragons Quest 8
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