This is the absolute perfect 'comfy adventure with your homies' game and the quintessential JRPG in modern times. Its not afraid to be super old school, and only implements new things if necessary (no real time battles, no super serious complicated storyline). Every new city you discover is huge, fun to explore and makes you just want to live there irl. Your partners are never annoying, have their own problems to face and really feel like your homies in the end. The enemy designs are obviously perfect. I also loved to collect all the different outfits and spent way too many hours in the casino just so i can get fonny bikini for hot babe. It can slow down a bit and I think the second half isnt quite as strong as the first one, but i still loved it. Didnt play the third arc yet, but i count it as a bonus, not as an integral part of the story. Also I can marry my homies in this. 10 outa tené

Music review: chief.....it kinda sucks also the composer denies the holocaust so it fits i guess. Some city themes are fun and fit the kinda fairytaleish old school vibe of the whole adventure but the battle theme is grating after one hour and this game is 70 hours long. 3/10

Juegazo en todos los sentidos. Historia épica, personajes carismáticos, gameplay profundo y divertido, mundo denso que disfrutas explorando... Al final resulta que a Square Enix no se les había olvidado hacer JRPGs pese a que la saga Final Fantasy parecía indicar lo contrario.

Mi única pega, aunque es un poco nimia, es el postgame. Esconden el final verdadero del juego tras una batalla en la que si no llegas casi al nivel 100 y con determinado equipo y habilidades desbloqueadas es prácticamente imposible superar, y para lo cual debes pasarte 10 horas farmeando experiencia tú sabrás como. Sinceramente, me ha parecido muy barato, facilón y para nada a la altura del resto de la aventura. Además, TODAS las fases y bosses del postgame son reciclados de la horas anteriores. Muy decepcionante y es la razón principal de por qué no le he puesto directamente el 10.

Dragon Quest XI is not a game I went into expecting to be so taken by it. I like Japanese Role-Playing Games, Pokemon and Chrono Trigger were both very formative games for me growing up. But I also tend not to like games that take longer than 40 hours or so to beat. This game took me almost 75 hours to complete, and yet I was with it every step of the way, to the point where this is now my second-favorite JRPG, behind only the aforementioned Chrono Trigger. How did it manage it? There are three major points, gameplay-story integration, the pacing, and the combat system. All of these ultimately center around the point that what makes a video game story effective has very little to do with the story’s concept or intended themes, and a lot more to do with the execution of how it is delivered.

Video games are primarily interacted with by playing them, no matter how cinematic their inspirations, they must ultimately deliver their story through gameplay. The Last of Us would not work as a harrowing post-apocalyptic journey if its gameplay did not have its commitment to keeping resources extremely scarce and enemies dangerous. JRPGs, as a genre, tend to struggle with a problem known among pretentious people as “ludonarrative dissonance”, a conflicting sense of tone and themes from the gameplay as from the story. These are games about climactic battles to save the world against unimaginably terrible beasts, and the combat all takes place in this little pocket dimension where everybody’s polite enough to take it in turns. There’s an inherent silliness in that, it can make it hard to sell your story with real stakes when, say, Cloud Strife is doing something in state of the art for 1997 CGI one moment and then in low poly early-PS1 character mode to do the actual combat. This game does the best job I’ve ever seen a JRPG do to combat this by expertly working character personalities into the combat. The main cast in this game is its strongest point, and they’re all worked into the combat very well. The Hero is a strong physical fighter, but he’s also a support character, showing off the sort of generic hero bravery and friendship angle that his character is about. Sylvando, the flamboyantly gay party member, is able to use both swords, reserved mostly for male Dragon Quest characters, and whips, reserved mostly for female Dragon Quest characters, and his personality of being there to keep everyone happy is used in his having the best set of buffing spells in the game. There is another major example in the late-game involving a character death that I will be vague about as to not spoil things, but it’s very well done. This is a video game about the strength of the bonds between a generic fantasy Hero and his very fun companions, with gameplay that requires you to make the best use of those bonds to do well. There’s a bit of Chrono Trigger in the linked attacks that different characters can do when they’re “Pepped Up”, but it’s rarer as to not clutter up the combat system past its very simple and elegant basics.

This game, as previously mentioned, is long. My 75 hours was a fairly straightforward playthrough in which I did some of the more interesting side content but nothing near an exhaustive list, and did not even touch the apparently very beefy postgame. I care a lot about pacing in games, so you might think I wouldn’t like this, but good pacing is not the same as saying a game is short. In games that are action-packed and are trying to be all-killer-no-filler, like Chrono Trigger, that generally does mean short. I love Doom 2016, but frankly even 12 hours is too long for a game that is 95% combat. Dragon Quest though is a slow game that wants you to take your time, and despite being a game where the “challenge” (in the sense that you can reach a failstate) is exclusively in combat, I would guess that only something like 25% of my playtime was actually spent in combat. By running time, this is a game primarily about building up character relationships and exploring various locales through the world. The cutscenes are fun, and while some of the voices for the ancillary characters are pretty bad English voice acting in a Japanese game stuff, all but one of the main cast have voice performances that do a good job of just being the characters (Veronica is, uh, less so), so these talky bits really do a good job of making the pace work. There is a hypothetical version of this game with forced random encounters instead of overworld enemies that can be faced or avoided at player pleasure, and that version would be a hundred hour long slog (I get the sense that the 2D mode very much is that, based on what the sidequests that must be completed in 2D mode feel like). The only place where I really felt like the game was dragging a bit was a series of vignettes right around the halfway point in the game, which I have now learned were added extras in the Definitive Edition, and I think they probably should’ve just cut them. Regardless, this is a 75 hour game I got through in less than three weeks, so clearly they were doing a lot right.

The combat system in this game is genuinely incredible. A lot of western critics were sort of bemused by the idea that one would do pure turn-based combat in the modern era. These people are fools, this is the best single-player turn-based RPG combat system this side of Persona. It’s fast, the animations feel good, and it has a mathematical elegance that’s hard to explain without having experienced it. It has a sort of Final Fantasy X style turn order system where people make their move as they’re about to act as opposed to at the start of each turn before seeing everything play out (though unlike Final Fantasy X, you can’t see this ahead of time, and it has Dragon Quest’s trademark RNG fuzziness around turn order). Numbers start small and don’t get big until very deep into the game, so you’re going to have an understanding of exactly what 1 HP and 1 MP mean. Characters have a Final Fantasy XII license board style character builder sheet for additional skills and passive bonuses on top of normal level up gains, but it’s done with enough restraint and methodical rolling out that it doesn’t feel remotely as cluttered as western AAA skill trees, which almost universally suck. The ultimate greatness of the system lies in the balance that the game takes such that you always feel like you’re in danger in any major fight, but if you’re playing smart, the game is pretty easy. Many western critics seemed to describe the game as “grindy”, and I am usually the absolute last person to say “lol dumb games journalists just need to play better”, people have deadlines, but I did maybe 30 minutes in the whole playthrough that I would describe as grinding, and I did not find the game particularly difficult. I suspect the main culprit is people who are primarily familiar with turn-based RPGs through Pokemon, a series where buffs and debuffs are pretty superfluous unless you’re playing multiplayer, not realizing just how important buffing and debuffing is in this game. Also, basically everything is randomized a bit, but in a way that is well calibrated so that it feels more like input randomness that you have to react quickly on your feet to than output randomness making your effort go to waste. The combat system is excellent, and leaves me wanting more to the point that I probably will go in and do the postgame at some point for an extra challenge.

In a world where almost every big-budget game is trying to be some flavor of action RPG, whether they’re well-suited to it or not, Dragon Quest is one of the only remaining franchises left standing. A continuous evolution of a game system that they already got basically correct in 1988 with the third game, extremely restrained and conservative with evolutions, has created an incredible product that still holds up in the modern video game landscape. A simple story, with somewhat immature basic themes, when told through gameplay and with charm, works far better for video games than any sort of David Cage Choices Matter style weighty melodrama. This feels like a PS2 game, but it’s the best damn PS2 RPG there ever was. A lot of modern game design trends are bad, so don’t use them, make a game with a silent protagonist going through an only semi-open world with limited voice acting and no real cinematic aspirations, and be a legend. For the first time in my life, the RPG I’d recommend to someone if they told me they wanted to get into the genre for the first time isn’t a Pokemon game, it’s Dragon Quest XI: Echoes of an Elusive Age.