Well, things are finally coming to a close in Dragon Quest VIII. One last dungeon and what may or may not be a bullcrap fetch quest is about all that remains.
It's been a fun ride, though it have some serious pacing issues going. The story itself and going from point A to point B is just fine, but there is one glaring problem that really slows things down and turns this game from a nice RPG romp to a numbing exercise in grinding and cash farming. That problem is the Alchemy Pot. It really isn't a bad concept; you toss two or three items in the pot, go about your business until it cooks, and ding! out comes a new goodie for you to enjoy. The problem stems from the fact that the 'cooking' time can be very long (it seems to be longer the more powerful/valuable the end result), you can't access the pot if you're in a dungeon so if it finishes you have to evac if you want the item and/or keep making things, and the pot's cooking pace is accelerated while running around outside of towns and dungeons. The end result is that you wind up wandering around some place or other for protracted periods farming mooks and waiting for the pot to ding. I'm grateful that they eliminated the cooking time in the remake.
On the flipside, every cloud has a silver lining and in this case, the silver lining is Metal Slimes, lots and lots of Metal Slimes. To wit: Metal Slimes are Dragon's Quest's traditional experience piñatas. They're extremely tough, extremely evasive, are immune to straight magic spells, and flee combat at the drop of a hat. But if you can manage to kill one of these boogers, you get loads of EXP, moreso if you kill the Liquid Metal Slime and the elusive Metal King Slime. Fortunately, an endgame area is just crawling with Smiles, including all three Metal variants. So while the Alchemy Pot is taking its sweet time giving me endgame equipment, I've been tearing through King Slimes and their gooey vassals on a cartoony regicide rampage. It's awesome, rewarding, and oddly cathartic.
The storyline is wrapping up fairly well, I just through beating the crap out of a possessed bigass demon dog with wings. That was the most tragic and hardcore game of fetch the stick ever. Then my party winds up in the local Pit of Despair while the one competent not-quite-evil guy turns into a megalomaniac Pope. Seriously, its like Caesar Borgia by way of Sephiroth here. You give him what for, but then the local Evil Deity of Evil manages to break out anyway, and doom is upon us all. You know, the usual. The Harvest Never Rests!
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