izigame.me

Although I won't say this game sucks, I was pretty disappointed. I played and enjoyed all the dragon quests up through 6 or so, and was wondering what they were up to these days... wondering if the series survived the journey to 2020~. I'm gonna say not really.
What this game has is a fairly enjoyable basic anime story and presentation. Characters look nice, there are cute anime characters flipping around, and the lovable slimes and etc are still in the game. I overall like the scenes despite their being totally cheesy. What the game does not have is almost anything else.
Certain UI stuff that was done better on random super nintendo rps, like comparing equipment without pulling your hair out, are somehow worse in a handful of ways. Personal inventories per character is fine in concept, I think, but the menus for moving stuff around is a hilarious failure that ruins it and creates meaningless chores. SO much about this game is stupidly clunky and does not respect your time. I know there is much more I'm forgetting but I haven't played in a few weeks.
The challenge available at the point I got to was approximately zero. My grandma could probably get where I did without trying that hard and she isn't even alive. I don't consider the ability to self-limit and add handicaps in a menu a respectable design choice for creating difficulty. No, I don't want to close off several of the game's systems or reduce the experience monsters give me to artificially create more hardship...what the heck.
I was initially excited about skill trees, then depressed in seeing there is about zero investment at all in any choices you make the entire game because you can spin it around at the drop of a blue slime. There is no reason not to put most everything in the same skill tree because of how it's laid out. Kinda of like ffX sphere grid, which gives you nearly no choices despite looking grand (until very late game FFX with unlocking things).
Long-term planning is close to totally meaningless. It never really was a part of the classic DQ games, but this game pretends you're making decisions yet none of them matter at all. This is a gross attempt to adhere to modern rpg sensibilties without even trying to make it matter. A check box of character growth and decision making but really just a facade.
Enemies are no threat to getting through a dungeon or across the overworld. Or even if they are, you can walk around basically every single thing you see out in the world and in dungeons. It's really weird. It isn't even that you're sneaking by... you stroll by like a four year old not even watching where he's walking and avoid anything you want to. Why would anyone want to play 2d/classic art mode when it just slows the game down and reintroduces random battles for some reason? It's an entirely different game like this, so it's weird to be able to toggle it and cause more than visual differences. Not only does it make the game weird, it makes getting around take 8 years in comparison. Further the 2d mode battle UI painful to look at, eye straining and all around horrible. Yes worse than in the originals. Being retro doesn't mean everything has to look and function like crap.
Finding items strewn around is never exciting, it's all junk, almost always. Why are you suggesting we walk up to all these shiny pots, with a slow stupid animation, and filling them all with junk? Just remove them from the game and stop wasting my time making me thinking something useful will happen. Do not put literally useless excess crap every six feet, what is wrong with you?
There are not enough songs. Every town has the same song... overworld song doesn't change at least in my 30 hours...really? This really damages an environment and makes it more obvious everything in the game is no different from the rest.
Compared to the originals, this game added so many things. And every single one is time wasting fluff. In the end I played around 30 hours and couldn't stomach the boring gameplay grind any longer. I was interested enough in the storytelling and characters, but every single thing about the rest of the game screams babby's first rpg. It's a little deeper than Final Fantasy Mystic Quest though : )