Dragon Quest XI Review

This is a review of the PlayStation 4 version of the game, after some 100 hours of playtime, played on the original PS4 model.

I really like Dragon Quest, something that might be obvious if you’ve been following me, just look at the name of this blog, I’ve played most games of the series and I’ll call it my favorite JRPG series, as such I was very excited about it since it was announced two years ago.

Problem was I don’t own any of the consoles the game would be releasing on, and sadly, by the time of its release I couldn’t afford one either, so I had to ask a friend to lend me his PS4 and then I just bought the game digitally, I had two weeks to complete the game, in the end it took me around 10 days to go through the main story and the post-game, the following days I spend doing side quests and messing around with the world.

This isn’t any kind of professional review, I just figured some of the people that follow me might be interested on my thoughts on the game, as such I won’t be scoring the game, I’ll simply write my thoughts on it and you can draw your own conclusions from there.

I’ll go element to element.

Dragon Quest XI doesn’t break the mold, nor does it have any sort of new radical ideas, don’t expect some Breath of the Wild changes, this is a Dragon Quest game through and through, so if you didn’t enjoy the previous ones I wouldn’t expect you to enjoy this one. It’s not without improvements of course, rather than try radical new things the game just fine tunes just about every mechanic brought from older games so even if it’s not a completely new experience it’s a much more refined one, a Dragon Quest game has never felt to play as good as this one.

The world of XI is the best in the series, it feels like what a fully realized Dragon Quest world would be in 3D, unlike those of VIII or IX that rather feel like 2D maps with some elevation, rather ironic as the map of XI is in 2D. It’s rather hard to explain this, but the world of XI makes good use of elevation in comparison with previous entries, VIII and IX are mostly flat while XI is full of hills and slopes.

It still has the same variety as the previous games, grasslands, forest, deserts and the like but all areas get much more care and craft than in previous games all areas are beautiful to look at, the towns in particular are the best part, this game has the best town designed I’ve seen on a game, and are so much better than in previous outings, each town as its own personality and story and are all quite distinct to one another in look and feel, they’re also larger than ever before and their excellent design shines as they aren’t boring to explore, the excellent NPC dialogue helps out here too, moving around the world feels fantastic in the game.

There are of course some drawbacks, for one the game is much more closed and restrictive than in previous entries, if you were expecting the huge areas seen in Dragon Quest VIII then you’ll be disappointed, this is not an open world game by any means, for this title the world is split unto chunks, areas with clear boundaries and designated entries and exits, if you’ve played Dragon Quest Heroes II then XI works almost identical. This in turn brings loading times, sometimes going from city A to city B can make you go through some 4 loading screens, not a big issue as loading in the game is quick, including in and out of battles, but still, can get annoying, at least the game gives you a mini map visible always to prevent you getting lost so you won’t need to see unnecessary loading screens if you don’t want to.

These areas can be a little small though, the largest one will probably take you two minutes to traverse on horse, apart from the cities we also have the dungeons, and XI has some fantastic dungeons as well, the beginning of the game has some rather linear and slow dungeons but as it opens it gets much better, I’m not sure if I’d call them the best in the series, but dungeon design doesn’t disappoint at all.

Moving to another integral part of the game, the story, as mentioned before the game doesn’t really break from tradition, this isn’t some groundbreaking story or anything, if anything it’s very typical for a Dragon Quest game for the most part, it is expertly told however, and telling a story well can really enhance it, even if the story itself is very simple, not like there aren’t any surprises however, because they very much are and the game is filled with funny, charming and touching moments. Don’t expect anything brand new for a high fantasy RPG, but what is here is fantastic.

What really sells the story is the excellent cutscene direction, even if it doesn’t have the best story in the series, it has the most and most of the story is told through fantastic cinematic real-time cutscenes. Every shot within the cutscenes is framed well with excellent character animation and music, each cutscene tells every story moment exactly as it should, I have no complaints there its excellent.

The game also has a handful or so of pre-rendered sequences, but most is done in real time and their work on them is very impressive.

Talking about the animations, as mentioned before they’re excellent, both in and out of cutscenes, all characters move and interact in very fluent ways as do the monsters, NPCs don’t get quite as much attention obviously, but all story characters move excellent, they even have lip movement despite there being no voice acting in the game, they really went the extra mile.

Dragon Quest games typically have mini side stories going about outside of the main plot, so obviously this one has that as well, in two varieties this time, there are stories for the party members and then some story within each town. One of the problems other DQ games have had with their world building is that most towns have one off stories, meaning that after your one visit there’s no real point on returning, this being a particular big issue in IX, XI alleviates this to some stent, similar to Dragon Quest VII towns will have multiple stories as the story goes own and you’ll have to return to previous towns to do additional objectives, it’s not quite as deep as VII but it’s very well done, there are still of course the typical one off stories but for the most part they’re better than before, in particular, one some 20 hours in is one of the highlights of the game. As mentioned before this game has the most story of the series, combined that with the excellent world design and you get stellar results.

About the party, XI is interesting because it has the largest party in the series since Dragon Quest IV, enough to fill two parties. IV has my favorite cast in the series, however I’d agree on saying that not every character there gets fully developed as part of their respective chapters they don’t get much story, and some not even on their chapters, this for the most part was adverted in future games as the smaller cast gets more attention, for the most part at least. With that in mind XI sits right between IV and future entries in terms of character development, this time all characters get their own stories outside of the main plot apart from their actual development within it, while most stories are pretty good, with the main game in the game, as well as the stories of other characters they don’t get much attention and will often take huge breaks within them, they all pay off very well, and give for some memorable moments, further developing the personality of each character.

I’ve got to say though, some characters get way more attention than others and will have key story moments while others just stand around, one of the best parts of the game is that it pretends you’re with all the main cast at the same time, so a character will appear in an important cutscene even if he or she is not on your active party, so outside of certain story points, no character is outside the story, you can talk with all of them in party chat too as all of them appear there as well, there’s no wagon or bar or anything, nobody leaves the story.

Party chat has been one of the coolest mechanics of these games ever since introduced in Dragon Quest VII, if you’re not familiar with them, at any point you can just talk with your party members to see what’s on their mind, they won’t always say anything though, but checking on them after some cool story moments usually brings good results, they may also give you hints on where to go or what to do if you’re stumbled, their dialogue in turn helped develop their character and personalities and some of the best dialogue in the game is sometimes in this, XI also haves it, and as mentioned before you have the full cast to talk to rather than just your active party apart from that is the addition of camp fires, across the world there are many parts where you can just camp, you’ll see your party members around and you can further talk to them, some important moments are here and the camp fires also serve to save, heal and smith items, they can also cut on the traveling time as you can fast travel to camps aside from just the towns it’s a great mechanic.

About smiting, this is one of the mechanics introduced in Dragon Quest X and it serves as a replacement for the alchemy pot introduced in VIII. What that did was combine two or three items to create new stronger ones, you couldn’t just combined everything of course, but it was a good way to get strong weapons and armor before the game would let you with some items only available through alchemy, it was a pretty good system but with some drawbacks, smiting is similar to that except that instead of just putting the items in the pot and hope for the best here you get to forge them, it requires player involvement and as such creating items is much more rewarding than before, aside from just creating items you can actually improve your current gear, a really nice addition. There are some drawbacks of course, for one there’s a limit as to how much an item may be improved, which is fine for weapons and armor, but it’s a shame for the costumes, also, unlike the alchemy pot where you could just try your luck with items here you can only smith if you have the recipe for the item in hand, the recipes aren’t hard to find, but still, it’s an unnecessary restriction.

Costumes! Yes, as mentioned before you can dress your party on different costumes, the system isn’t like the one in IX, but closer to that or VIII, where you’ll need the character to be equipped with 2 or 3 certain armor for them to change appearance, it doesn’t serve much purpose aside from looking really cool, but it’s a nice addition, however once again there are issues, poor Senya and Martina suffer from far service costumes, now don’t get me wrong, they’re (for the most part) entirely optional, however certain costumes they can wear clash with their actions in the game as well as their personalities, they also aren’t just for the player as some NPCs on certain quests will draw attention to that, not game ruining by any means, but it bothered me.

All characters had great stories, all were relatable and likable hanging around the world with them was a lot of fun.

Now onto combat, and the game excels here too, once again this doesn’t reinvent the wheel, its regular turn based Dragon Quest combat without much in the way of additions, however the flow of the game has been fined tuned in a way that fighting isn’t a chore like it could be in previous games.

For one there’s no random battles, all enemies are visible in the overworld, and are much easier to avoid than in IX, so you’ll only get into fights if you really want to, enemies also give more experience than before so you’ll be gaining levels quicker too, being high level isn’t that important, as much as its unlocking skills, this game builds up the skill system from Dragon Quest VIII, there are no jobs this time, here every time you level up you get a certain amount of skill points which you can use to unlock certain skills, the skill itself is tied to a certain weapon the character can use, as well as certain skills exclusive to each character, skills range from inflicting higher damage, more MP, higher chance of critical hits as well as certain moves the character may only do if equipped with certain weapons, all of this is retained from VIII, however the way skill re unlocked is changed and this is a really big change, previously progression was linear, you’d only unlock certain skills when crossing certain threshold on each weapon, this in turn made it better to just stick to the one weapon for most of the game and just max out the skills there, here we get something closer to a skill tree where certain skills will unlock once you get other ones, most importantly you get to see what you’ll be unlocking and when making it much more interesting and rewarding to experiment with multiple weapons, especially as many characters can dual wield now.

Apart from that there are the new Chrono Trigger style team attacks which are cool, but I mostly stick to using the skills, I had a lot of fun as I kept experimenting combining skills with magic even after finishing the game so I was never just using the one strategy as with previous titles, you can just play the game like that sure, but this game encourages, and rewards, experimentation much more than previous outings.

The game is easy, I only ever lost on the more unique fights but apart from that it was smooth sailing, it wasn’t a cake walk mind you, but it never got truly challenging either, I think adding some Ni No Kuni style option would be a great addition to the series moving forward.

Now the music, and we get to a disappointing bit, now don’t get me wrong, the actual compositions aren’t too bad, but the quality is, the music is midi, which really clashes with the rest of the presentation of the game, and it does a disservice to the truly fantastic pieces here, there are some forgettable tracks, like really forgettable, but there’s fantastic stuff as well, the game also reuses music from previous entries, like a lot, much more than IX, it felt like 30%-40% of the music of the game is reused, the arrangements are great and all, but it’s disappointing. Mind you that the issues are with the music, all sound effects sound excellent.

Let’s end with the more performance side, first of the presentation, this is a gorgeous game to look at, I really like the art style in the game, rather than going full blown cell shaded, for an anime look, the game uses something in between, despite using the Toriyama cartoony looking monsters and characters the game uses more realistic and detailed textures rather than simple colors, it makes the game stand out on its own, however the game doesn’t look too great when it zooms in on itself, for certain scenes the camera does some extreme close ups and you can see pixilation on the textures and some low polygon parts on the bodies, not too often but it’s clearly noticeable, apart from that no issues on the visual side, there’s no screen tearing or stuttering and the image quality is really high, lights and particle effects are excellent and look great.

On framerate, the game runs at 30fps, but it’s not locked, there are some clearly noticeable drops during certain monster fights, but they last maybe a second so they’re not that big of a deal, at least I found no issues just running around the world and through most fights, for the most part the game runs very fluidly.

I've played for around 100 hours in the end, getting at level 99, doing the more interesting side quests and completing the main game plus the post-game and I can say that this was a fantastic experience through and through and what truly feels like an evolution of Dragon Quest, while still looking fondly to the past, even with all its improvements it still plays like a classic Dragon Quest game through and through. It really feels like they looked back, to each individual game and see what made them great and implemented that in the game because you feel traces of all of them in this game, for long time fans there’s a lot of love here. It’s no spoiler that Dragon Quest III is the game with the most influence, if you like it you'd love this one.

If you like JRPGs, hell if you like videogames, you owe it to yourself to play Dragon Quest XI.