Dragon Quest VIII: Journey of the Cursed King for 3DS is an enhanced port of Square-Enix and Level 5's 2004 PS2 RPG by the same name. The graphics and music are a bit of a downgrade from the PS2 version, but the 3DS version adds a handful of quality of life improvements to modernize the game. The 3DS version removes random encounters on land in favor of visible roaming monsters, it has a fast-forward toggle for battles, and shortcuts and a map on the bottom screen. DQ8 came out on 3DS a little over a month before the Switch launched, so I’ve overlooked it for a while, but I’m glad I’ve gone back and played it because it’s a pretty great game.
The game's subtitle, Journey of the Cursed King, refers to your NPC companion throughout the game, King Trode. Dhoulmagus, the game's villain, has stolen the Scepter of Rhapthorne from Castle Trodain, turned King Trode's daughter into a horse, turned King Trode into a Namekian-looking green monster, and turned everyone else in the castle into a plant, except for the Hero. This Hero was a Royal guard in Castle Trodain, but was not affected by Dhoulmagus' magic for some reason. Now, the Hero, King Trode, and Princess Medea (the horse) must travel around the world in search of Dhoulmagus in order to kill him and break the curse.
Dragon Quest VIII plays a lot like other DQ games. You travel from town to town, look through everyone's closets and break every pot you find, talk to villagers until you find out what's going on, go to a dungeon for some reason, and then come back to town and maybe get a new party member in the end. This is the thing I love the most about DQ games; the individual scenarios you find in each town. Each town is like playing through a story arc in an anime. They work as self-contained stories, but add to the world and overarching plot at the same time. Even though DQ8’s story ends up being about saving the world, as usual, the town stories feel very grounded and personal. Dhoulmagus is running around killing the descendants of the Seven Sages who sealed Rhapthorne in the magical scepter, so of course, this directly affects the villagers, including the characters who join your party. For example, Jessica, the first character to join your party, is the sister of one of these descendants who was killed by Dhoulmagus, so she is out for revenge.
I especially liked the stories that introduce you to your party members, even though I felt like they could have done a little more with each character after they join your party. There is some character development for everyone throughout the game since they are all closely tied to the main story, and there is some closure to their personal arcs, but they kind of felt like an afterthought compared to the main story of Dhoulmagus, King Trode, and Medea.
The battle system in DQ8 is pretty much the same old-school, turn-based system as in the previous DQ games. You choose commands from a menu, take turns attacking, and your agility stat determines the order in which everyone acts. Aside from the "Skills" menu from Dragon Warrior VII being renamed to "Abilities", the menu has pretty much the same commands as always. The only real new battle element is the “Psyche Up” command. The Psyche Up command skips a character's chance to attack in favor of charging up Dragon Ball style for a more powerful attack in the next turn. You can even use this on multiple consecutive turns to power up your attacks even more. Frankly, I ignored this system for most of the game. The extra damage just didn't seem worth skipping a turn, and bosses have a move that removes all buffs in the late game, so you’re probably wasting your time psyching up in those fights.
Another thing I almost completely ignored is the game's crafting system, Alchemy. With Alchemy, you can combine 2 or 3 items to make another item. You can make recovery items, equipment, and weapons. You can find new Alchemy recipes by reading books around the world or by experimenting. My problem with this system is that it encourages item hoarding, and as a result, grinding as well. I usually buy all the upgrades in a new town, so I buy something and sell my old gear for money to buy the next piece. But with Alchemy, you might get a recipe that calls for an item you got rid of 2 towns go, so I'd have to hoard everything and grind to get the money to buy the new gear in town just in case I need it for Alchemy later on. It's just too much work. I never used Alchemy for recovery items either because I never felt the need to use them. I had healing and Zooming covered with my characters’ magic.
The 3DS version has a completely redone UI that looks a lot like the one in the DQ 4-7 DS remakes. It seems poorly thought out, though. It doesn’t take advantage of the touchscreen, and it feels very archaic, like something out of an NES game. You're constantly sent back to the previous menu when buying or selling anything, you can't buy or sell multiples at once, you have to have a character carry an item for them to use it, and characters can't equip things directly from the bag. It’s very frustrating to work with. The way the bottom screen is used outside of the menus is really nice, though. You get a map for most areas on it, so it's much easier to make your way through dungeons and around towns, and there's a little shortcut menu you can use to quickly talk to your party members, Zoom, use Alchemy, or call your Sabrecat mount.
The thing that really made DQ8 stand out from previous DQ games when it came out was its 3rd person perspective and 3D world with a realistic scale. Even though many games around this time were already using 3rd person cameras and 3D worlds, most RPGs still used fixed camera angles and pre-rendered backgrounds. The realistically scaled 3D overworld made the game feel more like a huge epic adventure than ever before. Flat overhead maps could never capture the feeling of traveling through a DQ world like this.
I really love how the environments in this game look, even if the graphics look outdated now. I think this game captures the look of an Akira Toriyama anime and the classic DQ games much better than DQXI. It's the softer more cartoony look to everything that's missing from DQXI that makes DQVIII look more like classic DQ.
DQ8 feels a bit clumsy to control compared to DQXI, though. The camera can be pretty annoying, especially indoors. It runs into walls, won’t back up through walls, and it can’t see through walls behind you, either. The game also has no jump button to deal with all the new levels of verticality introduced by the 3D game world, so there's a lot of running around rocks, small blocks, and fences in the environment. You also can't fall off the side of a hill if it's too high or too steep, so you have to take the long way around in a lot of places while exploring the overworld, which gets annoying.
The graphics are noticeably downgraded from the PS2 version, but the game still looks pretty nice for a 3DS game. The framerate is 30ish now, but it's pretty steady. The lighting effects are almost completely gone, textures don't have as many blended in textures for paths on the ground and stuff, so they're not as varied, and the anisotropic filtering cuts off about 2 feet in front of your character, so textures viewed at an angle look really blurry. There is also a lot of pop-in everywhere, especially in the overworld. The game doesn't look quite as jaggy and low res on a 3DS screen as a PS2 game on an HD TV, at least. And they did add the roaming enemies in the world without tanking the framerate, which is quite a feat for the 3DS.
I'm not a big fan of this soundtrack. The downgrade from the PS2 version’s orchestral soundtrack makes a huge difference. This just sounds like every other DQ game on DS, and also DQXI. The voice acting is pretty good, though. The delivery felt a bit slow at times, but all the voices felt right for each character. I especially enjoyed Yangus’ VO. Cor blimey! I thought the accents were well done, and not unintelligible, like they used to be in text form in some of those older DQ localizations, too.
I really enjoyed this game. This is my favorite DQ after DQXI now. It is a very traditional and old-school DQ game, but I really like the story and characters. And even though the graphics are not as good as in the PS2 game, they really make me feel like I’m playing in huge Akira Toriyama style fantasy world. RPG fans should definitely set aside 70 hours or so and go back to the 3DS to play this gem.
Remember that Castlevania collection from a few months ago? Contra Anniversary Collection is basically the same thing but for Contra. You could replace all instances of Castlevania in my review of Castlevania Anniversary Collection with Contra and have a pretty good idea of what Contra Anniversary Collection is all about. I also played the Switch version of this one, so I'll go into some docked vs undocked differences here, too. This collection comes from the same developers as the Castlevania Anniversary Collection, M2, it has nearly identical UI and features, and a lot of the same problems. It compiles most of the 8-bit and 16-bit Contras; the arcade versions of Contra and Super Contra, Contra and Super C for NES, Operation C for Game Boy, Contra III for SNES, and Contra: Hard Corps for Genesis. That’s 1 less game than Castlevania AC’s 8, but unlike Castlevania AC, this has Japanese versions of all the games plus a few European Probotector versions for a total of 16 games. That’s 1 more than Castlevania AC’s total of 15 with all the Japanese versions.
Here's a full list of all the games included.
Contra - Arcade
Contra - JP Arcade
Super Contra - Arcade
Super Contra JP Arcade
Contra - NES
Contra - Famicom
Super C - NES
Super Contra - Famicom
Operation C - Game Boy
Contra - JP Game Boy
Contra III: The Alien Wars - SNES
Contra Spirits - Super Famicom
Super Probotector: The Alien Rebels - EU SNES
Contra: Hard Corps - Genesis
Contra: The Hard Corps - JP Mega Drive
Probotector - EU Mega Drive
I'd say having the Japanese Contra games is even better than having the Japanese Castlevanias. That's because the Japanese versions have much better cheats! NES Contra 1 has a 30 lives code in both versions, but the rest of the US console/GB games either have less cheats, give you less lives from cheat codes, or had the cheats removed entirely. Super C's code only gives you 10 lives in the US version, but gives you 30 in the Japanese version, for example, and Contra III and Hard Corps removed cheat codes altogether. Hard Corps also removed the Japanese version’s hit points. Trying to beat these games with limited lives is fun in its own way, but it’s way too hard for most gamers. I believe that the 30 lives code is a big reason why the first NES Contra (and Life Force) became so popular in the first place. If you're looking for the kind of experience you had when playing Contra on NES with 30 lives, look up the codes and play the Japanese versions.
If you're wondering what Probotector is, it's the European version of Contra before age ratings were introduced. The European console/GB versions of all these games replaced the humans and/or the aliens, depending on the game, with robots. The player character robots, the Probotectors, looked like human-sized mecha from Macross, and a lot of the aliens looked like tiny knockoff ED-209s from Robocop. Only the Probotector versions of Contra III and Hard Corps are in this collection; though, so you won't see the tiny ED-209s here because those were only in the Probotector versions of Contra and Super C.
The quality of the emulation here is just as good as on the Castlevania collection. I tested out every one of these games, and they run just as well as the games in Castlevania AC. There are no issues present here that weren't present in the originals. In other words, there's still some slowdown and flickering in these games, especially in the NES games. The only games that are enhanced in any way are the Probotector versions of Contra III and Hard Corps, which have a 60Hz mode, in addition to the original 50Hz mode, which makes them play as fast as the Contra versions and gets rid of the weird PAL resolution. That was nice of M2 to include.
The emulator options are still pretty disappointing in this collection. There are no improvements over the options in Castlevania AC. Most disappointing of all is that there's still only 1 save state per game. These games are all pretty short, so it's not as big of a deal as with the Castlevanias, but it would be nice to have a few more to have a save at the end of a game, or a save with a co-op game, or whatever. I'm also disappointed that none of the 3 versions of Contra: Hard Corps allow you to remap the buttons outside of the in-game options, which are made for a 3 button Genesis controller. The rest of the games all have emulator level button remapping. Castlevania Bloodlines was also missing button remapping, so I guess it's an issue with their Genesis emulator. Being able to remap stationary aim/weapon select to R would make Hard Corps much easier to play on a Pro controller. I found it easier to play HC with an arcade stick. Another disappointing thing is that there's still only 2 border images for all the games; the Contra 3 box art and a picture of some flames. Do they not have any other Contra art lying around?
The Save Replay feature is the same here, too. This feature allows you to retroactively record a video of your gameplay starting from when you booted the game up or from the last save you loaded. There's nothing new or different about it, but it's still a cool feature for recording videos, since you can just hit save after you've done whatever it is you wanted to do, instead of recording every attempt from the start.
Another complaint I have about this collection is that it does not scale the games down to 720p while docked. You can set your system to 720p if you want, but it’s not going to change the scale of the games. They're still going to be displayed at a scale meant for 1080p. I prefer 720p for these old games because a 3x scale image fills more of the screen at 720p than a 4x scale image fills at 1080p. The games still scale to 3x at 720p while undocked on Switch, at least.
Similarly to the Arcade Classics Anniversary Collection, this collection has turbo or auto fire for some games. Both the arcade and console versions of Contra and Super Contra let you either toggle turbo on with L, or hold down R to use it. Being able to simply hold down the button to shoot your default gun was either tied to a special weapon or really slow in those games. There was no default gun auto fire in the series until Operation C. My hands thank you for the turbo, M2.
The display options in these games all have the same names, except for in the Game Boy games, even though they sometimes do different things. The Contra and Super Contra arcade games had a vertical CRT monitor inside the cabinet, so these have the most unique display options of the bunch aside from Operation C. Original gives you a 3:4 (not a typo) aspect ratio at a 4x scale with a slightly vertically stretched look, like 4:3 options usually do but vertically. Pixel Perfect gives you an image with the same pixel scale as Original but without the vertical CRT stretch, and 16:9 stretches the image horizontally so that it fills the entire screen. 16:9 looks even worse than usual in these games with such a narrow field of view. 4:3 Scanlines, which is still actually 3:4, gives you a 4.5x scale image with scanlines and the vertical CRT stretch. 4:3 Scanlines is the only option that fills the screen vertically and doesn’t look ridiculous, so it’s the easiest one to play these games on a TV with because it gives you the biggest picture outside of Tate mode. Pixel Perfect Scanlines and 16:9 Scanlines gives you the same image as Pixel Perfect or 16:9 but with scanlines.
The arcade games also allow you to rotate the game image left or right, AKA Tate mode (pronounced tah-teh). Translator's note: tate means vertical in Japanese. You can even combine the rotation with any of the 6 Display Options. But strangely enough, or thankfully, the UI and borders don’t rotate with the game. This mode works really well with an undocked Switch and a controller, but I don’t know about on a TV or monitor without a rotating stand. You could just lay on your side and play on a TV like this, I guess, but I didn’t find it very comfy.
In the NES and SNES games; Original has a 4:3 aspect ratio with a 4x scale and 16:9 fills the whole screen with a horizontally stretched image. Pixel Perfect still has the same issue it did in the Castlevania collection; it’s displayed in a 10:7 aspect ratio while docked, like Pixel Perfect on Genesis, and is displayed correctly in 8:7 while undocked. M2 should know that Pixel Perfect on NES and SNES is supposed to be 8:7, so who knows why this hasn’t been fixed. The 4:3 Scanlines option fills the screen vertically with a 4.5x scale 4:3 aspect ratio image with scanlines, Pixel Perfect Scanlines is the same as Pixel Perfect but with scanlines, and 16:9 is a stretched fullscreen image with scanlines. I also noticed that the 50Hz version of Super Probotector has some messed up stretched aspect ratios in both Original and Pixel Perfect modes while docked and undocked. They look even wider than the 10:7 on the Genesis games in Pixel Perfect. I guess this is because of the PAL SNES’ 288 pixel vertical resolution, but it looks terrible.
The European version of Hard Corps, Probotector, has its own share of 50Hz problems. It looks like the Original and Pixel Perfect display options are reversed, there are big purple overscan bars on the top and bottom of the game image because of the PAL Mega Drive’s 240 pixel vertical resolution, and it looks like it’s being displayed in 3x scale at 1080p instead of 4X, and at 2x in 720p in handheld mode. It’s bad. The options on the 60Hz versions look good, though. No problems there. They’re the same as the NES and SNES games except that Pixel Perfect is displayed correctly in a 10:7 aspect ratio at all times.
Operation C looks like it's running on a Super Game Boy emulator. Sadly, this is the original version and not the colorized version from Konami GB Collection Vol. 1, just like with the GB games in Castlevania AC. The Original display option gives you a black and white image in 7.5x scale, Pixel Perfect gives you a black and white image with a 7x scale, and Dot Matrix gives you a 7x scale image in 4 shades of green and huge pixels. It's supposed to look like the original Game Boy, but the image is so much bigger than it was ever meant to be that it looks more like a GB running on an LED billboard because the pixels have blank space in between them, like lightbulbs on a billboard. The Color Filter option gives you a 7.5x scale with the default Super GB palette; 3 shades of orange and dark blue outlines, Color Filter (Pixel Perfect) gives you a 7x scale image with the SGB colors, and Scanlines gives you a 7.5x image with the SGB colors and scanlines. All of these display options are displayed in a 5x scale and fill the screen vertically while undocked since the GB's vertical resolution of 144 pixels fits evenly 5 times into 720p, so 4 of these display options are exactly the same on a handheld Switch.
Just like in the other collections, there's an ebook full of design documents, a Contra timeline, the instruction pages with the game's story and controls, and some interviews with Nobuya Nakazato and Tom Dubois. Tom Dubois is the artist who painted the cover for Contra III, Castlevania III, and lots of those old Konami games with painted covers. He wasn't too talkative in his interview; though, so I didn't get much out of it. Nakazato is the producer of the upcoming Contra Rogue Corps and a few of the games in the collection, like Contra III. He talks about how he got started at Konami, Contra history, and the development of Contra III and Hard Corps. It's pretty interesting. The design docs are really interesting, too. They have little drawings mapping out levels and explaining what enemies and the player can do, designs for unused weapons, and even details on how they were going to make the games harder for the SNES versions.
This collection is just as barebones as Castlevania AC and still has a lot of the same issues with display options, but the games are awesome and the emulation is good, so I still think it's worth buying. I just wish they would have put a bit more effort into these. I’ve seen what M2 has done for sega. It would have been nice to get more borders, scans of the boxes and manuals, art galleries, soundtracks, all that stuff the Mega Man Legacy Collections did so well. I hope they do another one and put Contra Shattered Soldier, Neo Contra, and Hard Corps: Uprising in it. Those games are awesome and I'd love to have them on new systems where I don't have to use a DS3 to play them. Contra Rebirth also needs to be brought back, because it was a Wiiware exclusive and you can't even buy it anymore.
Gato Roboto is a Metroidvania developed by Doinksoft and published by Devolver Digital. Gato means cat in Spanish, in case you didn’t know. In Gato Roboto, you play as a cat with a robotic suit. But there’s a Blaster Master-ish twist to Gato Roboto, you can step out of the robot suit and take direct control of a cat with a totally different set of abilities. Gato Roboto is a short, bite-sized Metroidvania, but it's also pretty cheap. It's available on Steam and Switch for $7.99.
In Gato Roboto, a man named Gary receives a signal from a nearby planet while on patrol aboard his tiny spaceship. Why he is on patrol or what kind of signal he receives is not explained, so I guess it's a distress signal and he's some kind of space cop. Gary contacts "mission control" about the signal and the mission control guy says it's one of their research facilities, but it's been abandoned for a while. Gary sets a course to investigate the planet when his cat, Kiki, jumps on the controls, hits something she wasn't supposed to, and sends their ship crashing down to the planet. Gary is injured in the crash, so he sends Kiki out to explore. Yes, it's pretty Metroidish. This is pretty much the setup for Super Metroid and Metroid Fusion.
When you first start exploring the small planet, you play as Kiki, just a normal house cat. Well, I guess she's smarter than the average kitty. You can run, jump, climb up and slide down walls, wall jump, and even swim. Kiki controls kind of like Mario in NSMB. You even swim by tapping the jump button. But Kiki's most useful trait is actually her size. Since she's so small, she can go into small tunnels, like Samus would using her Morph Ball ability. Kiki has no attacks; though, so she can't open doors or break rocks. She also dies in one hit. She's weak as a kitten! Thankfully, she finds a very Varia Suit-like robot suit laying around pretty quickly. This suit can jump and shoot an arm cannon in 4 directions, but it can't swim, and it's 2 blocks tall, so it can't go into small tunnels. That's where Kiki's abilities come back into play. You can hop in and out of the suit at pretty much any time, so you can go through the small tunnels or swim across the water and then find a way to get your suit back. Sometimes you have to bring it to you by pressing a switch or something, and other times you just have to make it to the next save station to have the suit teleported to you. It's a cool mechanic that sets this game apart from most other Metroidvanias.
Like other Metroidvanias, you can get a few powerups for your suit. Kiki stays the same throughout the whole game, though. There's missiles, a double jump, a dash move that can phase through some objects and enemies, and some upgrades for your health, arm cannon, and missiles. The missiles are the most useful, since you need them break through a lot of the rocks in the environment and they do a lot of damage. The game is pretty short, so while that's not a lot of upgrades compared to other Metroidvanias, it's fine for this game.
There's also a couple of other machines Kiki can use, but they're not keepers, like the robot suit. Some of the water areas have a little submarine with a gun, which allows you to open doors and kill enemies underwater. You'll also find a few laser turrets you can use to break rocks deep in areas where you can't take the robot suit into. I thought this was a cool idea that worked well with the in and out of suit mechanic.
As you explore this research facility planet, you'll encounter lots of aggressive robots and small animals. You find computers with logs that explain what's going on in detail, but basically, a mad scientist turned everyone into rats and frogs and has a bunch of robots that will try to kill you. You'll often be locked inside a room with these enemies as a sort of miniboss and you'll have to clear the room to progress. You'll also have to fight the mad scientist throughout the game. He's a rat riding a variety of weaponized vehicles. These rat bosses aren't super hard, but they are much harder than the exploration part of the game. It felt a bit imbalanced to me. I was never stuck on them for too long, but the sudden difficulty spike was jarring. I tried to see if the story matched the Styx song, "Mr. Roboto", but I can't really tell.
This weird little planet is very reminiscent of the original NES Metroid and Metroid II on GB, but its structure reminds me more of Metroid Fusion. Even though there's a lot of exploring to do, everything feels fairly straightforward. It was always obvious where I should be going and backtracking to previous areas is mostly optional because you can't progress if you've missed something important. The way the game locks you in rooms also reminds me a lot of Fusion.
Gato Roboto isn't visually impressive, but it runs well, at least. I played it on Switch and didn't notice any framerate issues or anything. The game has a cute style, but I have to say that the black and white graphics are kind of boring and make everything kind of blend together. I don't just mean the different areas either. I often lost track of fast moving enemies among the rocks and plants and sometimes wasn't sure what was an enemy what was some kind of plant or crate in the environment. There are a bunch of other color palettes you can find, but they're all still only 2 colors. A few are easier on the eyes, but most actually make things harder to see. There are some color palettes with cool names, though. Like a red and black one that references the Virtual Boy, a green and light green one that references the original Game Boy, and a green and black one that references The Matrix. Then there's one simply called "Urine". Seriously.
I just finished watching Stranger Things 3, so Gato Roboto's soundtrack really reminded me of its score. It's very haunting, ambient synth music. I guess it's also kind of like Metroid's soundtrack with a little bit of Daft Punk. I thought it was really good. It perfectly fits the Metroid inspired 80s sci-fi aesthetic.
I liked Gato Roboto. It's nothing mind-blowing, but it's fun while it lasts. And it lasts about 4-5 hours. The timer doesn't stop while on the pause menu, though. It has a fun gimmick with Kiki and the robot suit, good music, a cute story, a cute kitty, it doesn't overstay its welcome, and the price is right. You definitely will not find a better Meowtroidvania for the price.
