After completing Dragon Quest VIII last night and seeing the first ending I was determined that I was going to get to the end of this game today and find the true ending. The storyline was way too engaging to let it go without knowing the “truth” of the characters’ backgrounds and how they are supposed to wind up in the end.
I started playing early this morning. Dominica is very anxious too to see the end of the game as well. It was evident quite early on that this little “extra” bit of gameplay after the first ending is not simply a little “tack on” that they did to add a little something to the game. This is a serious extension to the main game with a LOT of setup going into it throughout the game.
During most of the day that I was playing DQ8 Dominica worked on King’s Quest VII which we recently got in the new King’s Quest Collection for Windows XP from Sierra (Vivendi.) She had wanted to play Space Quest but that collection (also from Sierra / Vivendi) is not installable – it simply throws an error and exits without giving you any way to do anything. Pretty unimpressive for an installer that just needs to unpack some cabs and put them in the right place. Nothing complicated at all. So she played King’s Quest VII all day because we were able to get that installed (this turns out to be an illusion as the game does not actually work and is unplayable – a known bug that Vivendi just left in assuming no one would actually play the game apparently – but we wouldn’t discover this until tomorrow.)
It took almost fifteen additional hours of gameplay to get to the real end of Dragon Quest VIII! I was just shy of one hundred and twenty hours on the game clock when all was said and done and there were sections of the game that I decided to just skip as they would not alter the ending! This is a seriously huge game.
It was almost bedtime when I finally reached the actual end of the game. Dominica came into the living room and joined me on the loveseat, along with Oreo who slept on my chest, while I, once again, defeated the final boss and then we watched the REAL hour long end of the game movie. This movie was much better and we were much happier with this ending. Much of the “loose ends” were tied up during the fifteen hours of extra game play so the movie only had to do so much differently that the first time through.
After one hundred and twenty hours I have to say that Dragon Quest VIII is possibly the best video game that I have ever played!