I may be apologizing to the judges in advance, as it seems unclear as to if I'll have a new review up this week, or I'll be tossing them an old one (if I do, though, at least it will be one that you three haven't judged).

Main reason for that is that for the last couple of days, my sole gameplaying has been me getting back to my replay of Dragon Quest VIII. One of the sole downsides to getting the occasional free copy of a game is that I'm expected to get through the game and fire off a review as quickly as possible, meaning I don't really get to savor the good games (or, in most cases, even finish any of them, as my memory cards are loaded with near-finishes of about every freebie I've gotten).

So, I figured I'd start the game back up again a few months ago and every few weeks I pick it up and binge on it for 2-3 days before going back to whatever I had been doing. This way, I'd get to do some of the stuff I missed out on — mainly the post-game optional dungeon and bosses.

Right now, I'm back in Pickham getting ready to head out, talk to Red and do the dungeon in this area and am just as amazed by how killer this game is as when I first played it. Still can't get over how vast the overworld is. I'll set out with the intention to just run around looking for treasure chests in a specific area (like, say, the area east of the bridge and north of the road leading to Ascantha or whatever the place with the depressive king's called) and by the time I've done that, I've been playing for over an hour and I'm completely convinced I still probably missed at least one goodie.

When I'm playing a game like this, picking up a control to finish off Hydlide just doesn't seem so appealing. Come to think of it, that never seems appealing....just less so when DQ VIII's on my mind.