When comparing Adventure Bar Story vs DRAGON QUEST VIII, the Slant community recommends DRAGON QUEST VIII for most people. In the question“What are the best JRPGs (Japanese role playing games) on Android?” DRAGON QUEST VIII is ranked 4th while Adventure Bar Story is ranked 5th. The most important reason people chose DRAGON QUEST VIII is:
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.
Specs
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Pros
Pro Well-balanced mix of entrepreneurial and combat-RPG mechanics
While the dungeon-crawling and recipe-management components of Adventure Bar Story could each get tiresome on their own, alternating between the two keeps both fresh.
Pro Gameplay is balanced without in-app purchases
The premium items available in Adventure Bar Story are most accurately described as optional cheats. The game is not overly difficult or otherwise restricted without them.
Pro Impressive strategic depth
Purchases must be balanced between adventuring gear and cooking supplies. Adventuring is the cheapest way to get ingredients and the only way to advance the story. But adventuring will never provide enough of certain stables (salt, milk, etc.) so you'll need to spend a lot of your cash on them, along with additional kitchen equipment and (optional, but convenient) recipes. You can't just ignore cooking, either -- in addition to being your primary income, character levels are gained only by eating!
Pro Fine grained controls over leveling each character
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.
Pro One handed gameplay design
The game plays in portrait mode to cater to the hardcore Japanese gaming audience that enjoy being able to play with one hand while commuting.
Pro Really long game
Including side quest the game can easily last over 100 hours.
Pro Classic JRPG battle system
As one would expect of a JRPG there are random battles on the map that are strictly turn based.
Cons
Con Recipe discovery doesn't always make sense
Trying original recipes is not completely essential, but definitely an important game feature. Sometimes, ingredients go together exactly as you would expect based on other in-game recipes or real-world equivalents. Sometimes, all the things that should work don't.
Con Aesthetically bland
Graphics, sound and dialog are adequate but nothing more.
Con Progression is slow
It takes several hours just to encounter all the core gameplay elements.
Con Removed content from North American PS2 release
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.