One of those games where I can't see its greatest "flaw" in the moment as anything but a plus in hindsight. At points Portopia is vague and obscure enough to drive you mad. How is anyone supposed to know to search there? How is anyone meant to guess to do that or show that one item at this one place? But what this frustration does is transform what could have been a nice enough detective story into a hypnotic procedural of stasis; an unending loop of the same questions and the same faces, progress never seeming to go anywhere, everything winding back to dead end circles, beautifully reflected in the giant maze of white walls you get lost in during the climax.

It's a game that, whether through frustration or curiosity or glee, inevitably leads to you assaulting suspects for answers. And distressingly...it works.

Okay, asterisk on "you" because one of the many deeply clever things about Portopia is that you, the player character, are not the one who directly does anything. You just tell your subordinate what to do. It's a weird distinction but a VERY important one that raises all kinds of questions w/r/t your role in the story and as the player and what exactly inhabiting a character while playing a game implies narratively.

Anyway, the maze in the basement is without hesitation one of THE great moments in video games. Like, genuinely startling, unsettling stuff. You spend the whole game in menus and simple, colorful illustrations, and then suddenly as you descend below the surface color and life gives way to dead white walls twisting around themselves for an eternity, pathways opening and closing as if the place is alive. It's significant that here is the one time you take actual control. The simplest graphics in the world and yet some of the most effective atmosphere in the medium's history. Like being suddenly sucked into an Akio Jissoji directed nightmare.

One of the most important games of all time thanks to all that it inspired and not an inch of that inspirational power has gone anywhere. Meditative masterpiece. Horii my metaphysical king. Insane stuff

I fell in love with Dragon Quest at a young age with DQIX. They announced this game not too long after, and I was crazy excited for it - but I didn't really understand that it was a remake of a Super Famicom game, so when the day finally came, I was a little let down by the lack of a character creator and the "downgrade" to first person battles with sprite graphics. I dropped the game for a few months, came back to it on a random night and got absolutely sucked in. Something just clicked - the dream world plot was so mysterious, I realized how huge and grand the world was, and the class system proved to be addicting.

I still have so many moments from this game permanently ingrained in my mind and I plan to replay it again soon. The evil world you visit in that final stretch of the game was so immersive and the whole summoning scene where a demon demolishes a castle blew my mind. Gradually coming to love this game's older style was probably the beginning of my descent into dungeon crawlers

Fascinating game.

I think in some areas this is the best Dragon Quest of the first 6, but when looking at the complete package it sits at the worst.

The story is very interesting and fun, the graphics are amazing, the music is great, the quality of life improvements are so great they've added them to basically every remake of the previous games.

I feel like a few things drag it down. The mechanics are interesting and ambitious but feel undercooked and lean more towards tedious than fun when it comes to the job system. It feels like it overstays its welcome and the final parts of the main world map to explore just aren't that interesting. Finally, it just doesn't feel like it captures the charm of the previous games- it's basically impossible to follow up 5 anyway, but something is missing here and it feels hollow.

Some of it may be due to the unfinished translation I played (a lot of the return visit dialog wasn't translated, for example) and maybe the remake with an official translation would fair better but I really loved the unique way the SNES version looked compared to the DS remakes that all looked the same as each other that I had to play that one first.

Not a bad game at all though! Dragon Quest continues to be a solid series, just felt like I was forcing myself to finish it near the end and it just kinda sat there with me having just the final boss to conquer.

Bro I am a yuge freaking Dragon Quest mark, bro. I bought Dragon Quest XI twice because the Amazon deliveryman was taking too long to deliver the physical version I preordered. Dragon Quest VIII helped me through not one, but two very rough times in my life. I actively have to fight back tears whenever I hear the Overture. I'm an apologist for pretty much everything people criticize about the series. I can't make apologies for a game that just straight up doesn't fucking work, though.

Dragon Quest Swords looks nice and has a charming enough premise, but the motion controls are so inaccurate and unreliable that it feels like the game is against you at all times. You can thrust all you want, you're getting a horizontal slash. Wanted a horizontal slash? You're getting a fucking thrust and you're going to like it. Simple vertical slashes? Never heard of them, you're getting a diagonal and the group of enemies you were trying to attack with them are going to run away and it'll affect your ranking. That a game with controls this bad has the gall to judge you on your performance is so infuriating it lacks a further expletive. I'll return the favor by judging this as a bad cash-in for the then-wildly popular Nintendo console and playing some fuckin' Boom Blox instead.

this is probably the most confused i've been about a game so far, about so many of it's aspects, what's its story tried to tell me? how I should even view it's story, it's narrative, how everything about it works?

On one hand i'm given a fantastic visual presentation and unique style that no other game ever had, really good music that just fits brilliantly in every scene. Writing that's so specific yet fascinating with how much it mirrors a real life form of speech a regular person might have with the amount of swears and slurs. And to top off this segment there's genuine peaks of stories like in the entirety of the Parade chapter.

On other i got such an uninteresting first half where I questioned if it's worth going through more of it, often wanting to drop the game for a while. placebo segments that are an absolute drag in their pacing and mindless repetition and every time I had to do them i felt discouraged to boot up the game. There's a lot of characters but it's so hard to keep track of them and remember every single one since you won't know if they will become a major part of the chapter's plot or if they'll be gone forever in the very next scene. It has plathera of moments where I could not understand a single bit of what is even happening as so much of it is presented to the player yet might mean absolutely nothing as you cannot tell if what you're seeing is meant to be a metaphor, forshadowing or just an artistic flair

I genuinely have no idea how I should view this game, this work, this art piece. It's so fascinating and confusing to the point where i'm trying to comprehend so much of it that isn't supposed to even make sense.

And just for that.

I have nothing else but tremendous respect.

It's weird to see a Initial D game released before the anime, so the official version of the game lacks the classic Eurobeat soundtrack. This may take away half of the fun, but thankfully there's a mod that fixes it, which turns the game into a an early 32-bit version of the Arcade Stages that people are more used too.

The driving is kinda weird but its between the Special Stage and the Extreme Stage games in terms of handling.

It's perfectly beatable if you put some effort on it and memorize the turns in each race.