The court jester of the kingdom of Trodain, Dhoulmagus, was responsible for stealing a mighty magical scepter hidden beneath the royal castle. Dhoulmagus used the wand’s power to curse the kingdom and its people and transform King Trode into a troll and the princess into a horse. He also used this power to destroy the palace. The king, the princess, a former bandit Yangus, and a few other travelers set out from the castle with the lone surviving member of the castle guard to find the villainous jester and discover a method to lift the curse.
Dragon Quest VIII: Journey of the Cursed King is a classic role-playing game in the Japanese manner. It features random encounters with enemies, straightforward turn-based combat mechanisms, and the management of a party consisting of four characters, each of which belongs to an explicitly defined class. Unlike its predecessors in the series and most Japanese role-playing games, the game has a continuous globe with relatively vast landscapes and integrated cities and dungeons. This contrasts with its predecessors, which featured world map travel and locales represented by icons. The camera may be rotated 360 degrees, and playing in first-person view is also an option. Many objects can be interacted with, like in the previous Dragon Quest games. For instance, barrels can be physically lifted, carried, and broken open to reveal items concealed within them.
In addition, to experience points, the player obtains skill points from combat. The player can manually slot these skill points into a category of their choice from among the available skill categories. These categories consist of three distinct types of weapons, hand-to-hand combat and discipline-specific to each character. After investing the necessary skill points into a particular variety, the correspondent character can learn a new ability or become more proficient with the chosen weapon. Players can amass recipes and combine existing items to produce new ones using the Alchemy Pot system.
The original Japanese version of the game has been updated in several ways for the worldwide release of the game. These changes include the addition of voice acting, a graphical menu, symphonic music, and flashier effects.
Alterations were made to the game before it was available for play on the Nintendo 3DS. Random encounters, except those that take place while sailing, have been removed in favor of players initiating fights by running into enemies visible on the screen; battle animations can now be skipped; quick saves can be performed anywhere; a new photo mode allows players to take screenshots and annotate them; the alchemy pot now produces items instantly and can also make multiples of the same thing right out of the gate; and the game’s difficulty has been increased. The two characters, Red and Morrie, are now able to be recruited into the player’s party, new story sequences have been added, two new challenging dungeons have been added, new monster arena challenges have been added, new costumes have been added, new recipes have been added, new equipment has been added, and there have also been new monsters added.
