Just how big is Dragon Quest in Japan? It's very big indeed - in fact it's something approaching a phenomenon. It's sales figures point to this; in it's battles with Final Fantasy, it has regularly trounced its RPG rival. Dragon Quest VII was the highest-selling PSOne game ever, which is especially impressive as the game was never even released in Europe. Most brilliantly though, there is a law against releasing a new DQ title in Japan on a weekday, for fear that a substantial number of people would skip work or school to play it.

In a word, yes. DQVIII is the best game I've played in a very, very long time and unquestionably the best RPG of its generation. Whilst PS2 versions of Final Fantasy, Star Ocean and Xenosaga all wowed with their technical proficiency, they failed to deliver that sense of magic or great storytelling that was once in abundance in the genre, complicating elements of the gameplay unnecessarily just to give the illusion that they were being 'next-gen', when in reality the genre felt like it had taken a step-backwards. Not so with Dragon Quest - it was five years in the making and it really shows. It proves an excellent expansion to its ageing predecessors; what was fine before has remained wisely untouched, whilst areas where PS2 technology allowed improvements have been lavishly upgraded. It is in many ways set out like a traditional RPG despite the high-production values, combining a host of great new touches with many of the ingredients that made the RPG's of old so great.

The core gameplay works as you would expect from a role-playing game - you explore towns, talk to people, buy things, raid dungeons for priceless artefacts and so on. However, delve a little deeper and you'll discover a veritable trove of excellent touches.

Exploring towns and dungeons is made a far more enjoyable experience thanks to the intelligent controls. Moving the central character with the left analogue, you can swing the camera 360 degrees around the hero with the right stick. Not only does it show off the games amazing beauty, unerring smoothness and ease of use, but it works even in really tight-spots with an almost faultless degree of efficiency - it's the best manually-operated camera I've ever come across in a game, even beating that seen Grandia.

Elsewhere, you can now combine items and weapons in an alchemy pot to create new ones - recipes can be discovered all over the world via bookshelves. And as if all this wasn't enough, you can recruit monsters from around the world, creating teams and fighting against others in a number of leagues in the Monster Arena. There's certainly no shortage of side-quests to tackle, that's for sure.

DQVIII adopts an excellent new feature to neatly side-step a great frustration of role-playing games - getting stuck and not knowing what to do next. By pressing 'start', you can chat with the other members of your party at more or less any point in the game, and they can recap what you have been doing, where you want to go next, or just deliver some funny anecdotes - it's a fantastic idea and I'll be amazed if it isn't used again in the near future.

DQVIII's downsides are few and far between, though there is the odd inconvenience along the way. Inexperienced gamers may find things a little tricky in the early stages and as you can only save game in churches, there are no checkpoints within dungeons. The 'Flee' feature can also prove a pain, as on occasions you will want to avoid confrontation and the game won't let you escape immediately, usually resulting in the enemies causing a fair bit of unnecessary damage. Another irritation is how amazingly tight-fisted the game can be with giving you currency. Even when you reach the latter stages of the game, defeating monsters rewards you with hardly any gold to spend on items, armour and weaponry, and as a consequence, you often find yourself having to sell things you would have preferred to have kept. Still, in the scheme of things, these are not overly significant problems.

Another area where it is noticeably better than your average RPG is in the voice-acting. Whilst a lot of titles are given shoddy, done-in-a-weekend translations with ridiculously high-pitched American accents and a complete lack of emotional connection with the story (don't really need to give any examples - almost every other PS2 role-player is guilty), DQ well and truly breaks the mould. It is unusual in the respect that most of the voicing is British - but there's a remarkably diverse mixture that includes dialects such as Welsh, cockney, Scottish, mock-Italian/Spanish/Russian and last but not least, the good-old Queen's English. It's another sign of the work that has gone into the game, and stands head and shoulders above its peers in this department.