She proceeds to speculate that it is Rhapthorne, and not Dhoulmagus, who maintains the curse on Trodain: therefore, Rhapthorne must be defeated if the curse is to be broken. He seeks to escape from his prison by killing the descendants of the sages. After the party releases Jessica from her possession, Jessica tells them that the scepter contains the spirit of Rhapthorne, the Lord of Darkness, who was imprisoned in the scepter long ago by seven sages. Jessica later returns, possessed by the staff and battles the remaining party members in an attempt to murder a young man. The player may find enemies visible on the world map that can be recruited if defeated and used during the Monster Arena mini-game and during battle. There is also a monster capturing feature, but it is not as fundamental to the gameplay as it was in Dragon Quest V. This can be done while walking on the world map. Another new feature, the Alchemy Pot allows players to mix items in order to create new, stronger items. By using it multiple times in succession, the character's attack will do more damage.

This command allows the player to skip a character's turn in order to build 'tension', making that character's next attack stronger.

New to Dragon Quest VIII is the tension system, which allows the player to choose the 'Psyche Up' command for a character during battle. During battle, each character in the party has the ability to attack, use items, or use magic and skills. For this installment, the battles are shown in a first-person perspective while choosing what to do, but the view then shifts to a third-person perspective with all of the members of the Hero's party shown on the screen along with the enemies. In the earlier games, battles were shown from a first-person perspective. These battle scenes have visually changed dramatically from earlier games in the series, yet retain a similar text based menu system for battles. When encountering an enemy, the game switches to a battle scene with the enemies facing the party where characters from both sides take turns attacking each other. Battles are randomly occurring and turn-based.

Dragon quest viii map treasure