Talk:Dragon Quest VIII/GA1

GA Review[edit]

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There are quite a few issues, which for the most part I have written below. Feel free to mark which ones you've addressed.

MoS issues

The lead is too long per WP:LEAD and with respect to the overall length of the article. Please try to cut it down to about two (or three) paragraphs.

Prose issues

For me, it would make more sense that "Plot" would come before "Characters" (at least after having read it) as the most basic descriptions of the characters are already given, which allows those descriptions to be further elaborated in the following "Characters" section.
In the "Characters" subsection, Other non-player characters assist the protagonists in their struggles and are both prominent characters - "prominent characters" seem a bit indicative of original research here, at least how that's worded. Can that be tweaked so it sounds a bit more neutral?
In the "Reception" section, Released for the PlayStation 2 on November 27, 2004 in Japan, Dragon Quest VIII went on to ship over three million copies within its first week, making it the fastest selling Japanese PlayStation 2 title ever. - please clarify more instead of saying "ever", which sounds a tad weaselish and ambiguous. Is it still currently the fastest-selling PS2 title? Was it the fastest-selling PS2 title at the time?
In the "Reception section, However, several critics pointed out that it works for Dragon Quest VIII. - What works for Dragon Quest VIII? The simplicity? Gameplay? You need to be more specific here.

Verifiability issues

Please source the following sections with reliable sources, or alternatively, remove them (they have all been marked with {{fact}} tags for ease of locating them):

In the "Gameplay" section,

- The game even records the distance travelled on a battle statistics page. - is completely unsourced. (It also needs to be rewritten, if you decide to keep it in and source, as it sounds rather weaselish.)
- Both the Hero's party and the enemies have different animations for their attacks, based on whether they are attacking with a weapon or spell or other special ability. - also unsourced.

In the "Development and release" section,

- In 2003, Square Enix registered the Dragon Quest trademark in the US, making the Dragon Warrior name obsolete. Thus, this installment of the series was the first after 2003 to be released outside of Japan and to receive the Quest in its title.
- The European version did not contain a Final Fantasy XII demo.

All of the content after the first sentence in the "Voice actors" subsection is completely unsourced and also looks like original research.

In the "Legacy" subsection (very last sentence in the article), These characters have appeared in Dragon Quest & Final Fantasy in Itadaki Street Portable for the PlayStation Portable (PSP) and Itadaki Street DS for the Nintendo DS.

I don't think the netjak.com (#17) source would be considered a reliable source. I looked on that website, and I can't find any evidence of fact-checking and accuracy present.

The very last source given in the article (#38) doesn't look like it's reliable; that is, it looks like it's self-published.

Original research issues

In the "Reception" section, A staple to the Dragon Quest series is its simplicity, which is often called into question. - I'm not quite sure that's what the staff in the source provided quite said. Also, who called it into question? Which source exactly from the ones given on that page? You need to specify that and/or go into more detail (i.e. through examples from various reviewers on those reliable sites who reviewed the game).

Coverage issues

The Gameplay section needs to be expanded a bit more. It seems to only skim over new features in Dragon Quest VIII. It needs to include basic Gameplay elements, as well (i.e. the basic RPG elements, turn-based system, EXP/gold system, etc.). Imagine someone without a huge knowledge of RPG video games, let alone Dragon Quest VIII is trying to read the article. Try and make people like them understand how the gameplay goes.
If there are other stuff that can be explained anymore in detail as far as Plot is concerned, try and explain a bit more. Just make sure that it's verifiable and that you don't make any inferences yourself that the game or the sources don't make.

Image issues

The caption behind File:Dq8landscape.jpg needs to be a bit more descriptive than it currently is. How about something like "The Hero in the introduction of the game" or something like that? To me, "taking in the scenery" doesn't sound very professional style-wise.

Other things to watch out for

Watch the descriptive words like "wicked" and "sinister". Overly-descriptive adjectives like those likely run afoul of the writing about fiction guideline. I removed these for you.
Watch weasel words that overdescribe/editorialize (similar to the previous bullet-point) such as "near-perfect" and "impressive". Usage of such words in this manner detracts from the neutrality of the article.
Make sure you're consistent with wording. For example, you start with "scepter" and then later the article says "sceptre" (the latter I corrected). In the future, stick with one spelling throughout the article.
Remember that titles of video games are almost always italicized. There were a couple of instances where "Dragon Quest" wasn't italicized, which I corrected.
Unless the quotation is a sentence itself, the end-quotation goes before the end-punctuation. I've made the appropriate corrections here.
Try and keep non-free images as small as possible (rule of thumb for thumbnails of non-free images is 300px wide) in order to comply with the non-free content policy. I've went ahead and minimized a couple of the images for you.

Conclusions

I'm afraid the article still needs some work in order to get it up to GA, but I'll place the article on hold and see what we can get done in about a week's time as far as improvment is concerned. You can always request another GA review in the future should this not pass.

As an aside, for future reference, you may also want to consider getting a peer review done first in order to iron out the big issues before nominating for GA. At least that's what I have done with the article I've worked on. MuZemike 22:26, 10 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks for your help so far. I went ahead and corrected most of the problems (most of the sentences in question really needed to only be deleted), but I still will need to find a few more reliable references before I've done everything you said. It'll probably take me a few days to get back on here, but I should be able to get them soon.?EVAUNIT^{神の人間の殺害者} 15:35, 11 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

I can't seem to find a good reference for the censorship : / ?EVAUNIT^{神の人間の殺害者} 17:26, 11 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Just to let you know that I haven't forgotten about this GAN yet; I just had some other things to take care of in the meanwhile. I'll try to get back to this shortly. MuZemike 20:40, 18 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Passed. The corrections look good enough, now to pass for GA. –MuZemike 22:24, 22 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]

One more thing to look at are the citations (but I'm not going to obviously gig on that). The convention has been to list the website under the "publisher" parameter as opposed to the "work" parameter. You also need to keep the date formatting in the citations consistent. Either have them all spelled out or have them all YYYY-MM-DD format. Nice work on the improvements, though. –MuZemike 22:24, 22 December 2009 (UTC)[reply]