Dragon Quest VIII: Journey of the Cursed King is mediocre. There, I said it. It baffles me this is considered to be arguably one of the best, if not the best RPG on PS2. The only thing this game has going for it are its graphics (looks surprisingly gorgeous even today), and Akira Toriyama's art style. Everything else is painfully average, and has been done vastly better in countless other RPGs. I'll be brash and arrogant and go as far as to say this isn't even a subjective opinion.

There's not much going on in terms of story and characters. The story in its entirety is as straightforward, old and clichéd as it gets, hell, certain Zelda titles have deeper story and that's saying something. Characters are for the most part just there, each can be summed up in tops two sentences without missing anything, and I'm being overly generous here. The worst thing though, is its battle system. It's shallow, the only word that comes to my mind right now, shallow. Final Fantasy I, a 30 year old game, requires more strategy during combat, let that just sink in. Despite having huge open world exploration is extremely linear, in other words each location is tied to normal story progression one way or another, save perhaps for two locations, one of which you can access only after you beat the game. I forgot to mention Monster Arena which I have to admit is a nice and fun distraction, wish there was more to it though.

Perhaps I'm being overly harsh, but if this is truly one of the best games, if not the best game in the series, I honestly don't want to play others.

I went all out on this game, now let's hear your unpopular video game opinion.