> 
> This being said, I've become fascinated with the game "Dragon Quest VIII" as a
> mysterious anthropological artifact.  Mysterious? Yes. If it was just plain
> awful, there would be no mystery.  There's plenty on drivel in the world and
> one more piece could be circumnavigated much as one avoids the calling card of
> a poorly supervised dog. Here's the mystery: How could the same people who
> could create art and story components which display virtually indisputable
> evidence of rather advanced aesthetic and intellectual sensibilities produce
> and publish a game in which the player is compelled to spend the great majority
> of playing time in INSANELY frequent and absolutely pointless battles with silly
> monsters?
> 
> Their HAD to be (IMHO) artists and writers saying, "This is really STUPID and
> it's wrecking the story!" and marketing "people" saying, "We need to sell
> gazillions of these to the masses... No continuous monster bashing means no
> gazillions of sales... No gazillions of sales means no project".
> 
> 


In fact, the Dragon Quest series has a long history (DQ8 is obviously 
the eigth :-) ), and DQ8 is the first one to be beautiful (beautiful 
graphics, orchestral music, etc.). All the previous one have been quite 
austere, and yet they were among the biggest hit in Japan, a real 
cultural phenomenon (Japanese politics even have voted a law which 
forbids the game to be released on weekdays, due to large absenteism 
from school and work !, see the 7th paragraph of 
http://www.rpgland.com/specialfeatures/dqhistory/historyofdragonquest.html 
).
This shows that there is 'something' in the system of the game itself, 
including the many battles which may seem pointless at first. You sort 
of need to get into the rythm of it...


Thibaut

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