iirc, you liked the intro dungeon's puzzles, right? That was removed to get to the rest of the game faster. I do find it a little regrettable because I liked that dungeon, but I guess it was done to get people into the game faster. Finding shards is easier this time around because there’s a shard radar on the bottom screen
and the shard itself shows up on the map on the bottom screen. There was one point where I didn’t realize I had forgotten a shard but it was easy to go back and look for it because of the radar alone.
If you put the game down for a while like I did, there’s a journal of your adventures in the menu that recounts everything that’s happened so far, or everything that’s happened recently. In addition, in the menu, there’s a “next shard” option that will tell you if you can get a shard in any of the areas that you have access to. There’s also a shard list that tells you where you got each shard you have. There may not be party chat during bosses (the talk option was removed), but there’s more party chat outside of battles.
The remake has orchestrated music this time around, which I feel adds to the new scene direction and camera angles during scenes. Battles also feel really fast since you don’t have to make time to watch slow animations.
The World Map can still be disorienting even if you select the second camera option (which automatically moves the camera up if it hits a boundary or allows the player to see the moving characters even if they're behind a tree, etc). It's mostly because sometimes you can't see the enemies pop up around you sometimes. Keeping the camera default on the World Map isn't a good idea since boundaries and structures get in your way when you're exiting a town, which can be disorienting if you're not constantly moving it with L/R.
The Monster Park is available much earlier than it is in the PSX version, and thus you can get monster hearts much much earlier than before. Additionally, when you get to the Immigrant Town, Tia (the girl who replaces the old man there in this version) sends you to find townspeople who want to be monsters (this
is useful for this). You get a shard when they join, and you can put these shards on a pedestal in the basement in the town. You can complete monster shard dungeons this way (with treasures and a boss, and you can redo these dungeons but you won’t get the first reward again). The shard dungeons themselves have like one enemy type, and then a big version of that enemy at the end. I haven’t played around with the Internet Tavern yet.
About classes, since I didn’t get too far into class progression in the PSX version before dropping it in favour of playing this version, I guess my impressions might not be as in-depth as people would like. Plus I haven’t played around with them enough. But while skills can’t carry over through class changes, the advanced classes get way more of a spread of skills than before. It has no hybrid skills, but those skills are basically moved to other human/monster classes instead. Jobs also seem to level up faster.
I guess some of my issues are more for the beginning of the game. The Dialac part was changed and that was something I disliked a lot since you miss some story stuff that was in the PSX version. It just cuts to the chase for the main NPC for that town instead of expanding. But outside of that, it seems pretty good with respect to retaining content.
So far, I think it’s balanced despite the changes. But Dragon Quest games are usually balanced. I don't mind the pacing as much, either, since I realize that the game is trying to do some worldbuilding. Slowly, but surely, it's doing some genuine worldbuilding.
Going through this makes me want to go through some of the other DQ games again. I have the SFC versions of 5 and 6. I've played through 5 SFC, but I haven't played through 6 SFC. I'd like to give the 1-3 SFC a shot again since I've only played them once. I suspect that if I did go through the series in its entirety, I wouldn’t have as lofty an impression of DQ8 as I once did (especially since it has been years since I’ve played DQ8).
Maybe it's because I've gone through so many Tales, Persona, SMT, and Final Fantasy games in the past few years that I want to revisit Phantasy Star (which I didn't get to do as much for its 25th anniversary), Ultima, and Dragon Quest. Doing a series playthrough would take a while, though, since I have other things on the table for now.
