*A review of Dragon Quest: Journey of the Cursed King for the PlayStation 2.*
An old skool style RPG, where only at churches can you save the game and check how much experience is required to level up. The game's camera can be rotated but you can also see the sights of this immersive world for yourself through first-person view. There are numerous NPCs to talk to, troves of treasure to be discovered, and the cows can be milked too!
With not much emphasis placed on puzzles, the dungeons tend to be simplistic in their design. The turn-based battle system is solid and you can change weapon without taking up a turn, which works well with the customisation to be had in allocating the characters' skill points. However, it would have been helpful to have a confirmation of the choice of commands for completion, or a quick reset feature. Though there might still be a sense of progress as your party is resurrected when they are wiped out, albeit at the cost of half of their gold. Levelling up in this game is on the slow side. Also, money is tight - enough to encourage players to give gambling a go! See if Lady Luck is on your side at the likes of slots, bingo, and roulette!
Whilst the compass is handy and the Battle Records with Trode's opinion is neat, I'm surprised by how restrictive the World Map is. The interface for items could be improved and similarly, for the Alchemy Pot - which can seem slow, what with the trial-and-error involved for making items. Despite experiencing day/night changes in the game, resting unfortunately, does not pass the time it takes to stir up the goods!
Akira Toriyama's character designs are cool, and the game's cel-shaded graphics give a clean and colourful look. The framerate does dip a bit when the screen is busy. The soundtrack is heavy on the strings but musically it's a strong showing. The voice acting is really well done and sees to British, instead of American accents, though a fairly diverse range of dialects is on show. The humour sometimes wasn't so successful, with Yangus' "COR BLIMEY" wearing thin - they did know to stop but I did not find it to be funny in the first place. Some of the story sequences seemed silly.
The game can feel prolonged - some sections could have been skipped. Maybe more could have been made out from Munchie the mouse. It's nice to be able to confer with the party. Some of the bosses took several attempts to beat - that's when not being able to skip the sequences sucks. And just when you thought you could put your feet up and enjoy the ending, you'll still need to get up and push yourself past the finishing line.
Dragon Quest: The Journey of the Cursed King can take around sixty hours to complete - tackling the optional tasks can see this time go into triple figures! Those little load times do add up, but there's more than plenty of play time for the patient.
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Nicely summed up, probably my favourite PS2 RPG. It was cool to confer with your party - in DQ7 they're a bit less useful and tend to tell me I'm "taking my sweet time" lol :) tom
redeyes22 01.01.2009 23:01
great review aggy
tractor-boy 01.01.2009 13:45
Sounds decent enough, although it's not really my type of game
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very helpful by (88%):
helpful by (13%):
