Instead of a class system that is found in all of the previous Dragon Quest titles where players upgrade their player through beating monsters a certain amount of time, Dragon Quest VIII uses a skill system to level up the characters and learn new skills by placing skill points earned through battle into the available skill tree, this allows for a more fine grained approach of leveling a character up.
Things like the original orchestrated music and voice acting that were in the original North American Playstation 2 release have been removed from the mobile version of the game. Most likely to save room.
The way the game plays out there are many story options that will be triggered due to previous choices in the game. Being that it branches out like this it will take many playthroughs to experience all of the stories options.
Pretty much a visual novel, 80 Days should interest anyone who enjoys reading and makes for a great introduction to the visual novel genre due to it being spearheaded by a big name in text adventure fiction, Jon Ingold.
80 Days does not need the device it is being played on to be connected to the internet to be played, which makes for a good game during air travel as well as other places where one does not have an internet connection.
Once completing a playthrough the routes that were uncovered will stay uncovered for the next playthrough, thus helping the player chart better courses the more they play the game.
With the Steampunk motif and the way that the game transitions, users can see that a lot of style and imagination was used in the creation of the game. Being that it is based off of Jules Verne's novel "Around the World in 80 Days", fans of the author should find a lot to like here and those new to the author should be able to find something they like being that it is an established classic.
Lasting about 2 hours a single playthrough is pretty short, though with all the branching story triggers there is plenty of reason to play over and over again.
The game is easily accessible to anyone, gamer or not. The story is well written and what is asked of the player is explained adequately, so there is little confusion of how to control the game, which is great for those new to the text adventure genre. For those that are familiar with the genre, the story is intriguing and allows for plenty of exploration.
This is a text adventure game that has been target for mobile, meaning that there is no forced typing of instructions, but dialog boxes the player can click on. This makes it easy to select what you want to do in the game without having to spend a large amount of time using a mobile keyboard. The game also saves on the fly, so there is no need to remember to go into a menu to manually save. Over all the UI lends itself quite well to mobile, which makes the game a pleasure to play.
The story starts out strong but by the middle of the game it wains and by the end it gets pretty uninteresting. The detracts from the users time spent in the game as the poor ending makes for an overall bad experience.