izigame.me

My overall thoughts on DQ11... It is an incredible game that is primarily marred by its first act. By that I mean it's boring, the story is cliche and the characters (while cool) have very little background given throughout. That combined with the old school turn based combat (RNG/%) which is boring, repetitive, grindy; makes for a bad combo. That's the nature of those old style games though, as you level you gain more abilities, which allows you to fight more thoughtfully instead of just spamming the same attack over and over. Act 2 the game improves vastly! The main story is still close to cliche but better than average. You get the real juicy bits of character background finally and its interesting and cool! The combat while still being the slow grindy turn based system opens up now that you have a bunch of characters and abilities, buffs, debuffs, heals, etc.

However! The first half of Act 2 has a ton of gimmicky battles due to story and you are more or less railroaded from one location to the next. During Act 2 you see the world open up much more fully for exploration. Then you beat the game? But not really? You go through all the New Game+ motions. You more or less get a wave goodbye and the credits roll, save your game and reload the new save and thats how you begin Act 3. Why??? What was the point of all that...

Anyway now there is Act 3 games not done, still got lots of new sidequest, past words, several tiers of armor and weapons, primary main storyline stuff!!!!! Also end of Act 2 going into 3... This is where the story is getting way better. Its not only optional post game content you need maxed out specs to do. At least 3/4 of the Act 3 content you can do at the level you beat the game. The game world feels both big and small, lots to explore but you also get sent to a lot of the same places over and over. Each Act you are making a loop around to all the different places.

Lots of weird collision problems if you're trying to move between various objects, or you can jump from some places but not others, invisible walls?? The menu organization is whack AF. You have a (start button menu) a (triangle,Y menu) and within that menu is also a (misc menu). This game has a lot of weird menu, organizing, item use issues that the industry as a whole has already streamlined and I see this so I'm like wtf?? The music is good... average, lots of marching fanfare type stuff. Their are issues with switching between audio moving in between cutscenes and such that I felt had an affect on the tone of some scenes. Like the overworld music would be playing while the cutscene that was initiated is about something sad (trumpet noises) The voice acting was ugg so I switched to Japanese, much better... But of course the English accents are baked into the translation so you have to read gibberish half the time...

The difficulty... easy for the most part. I did little to no grinding of exp through out the game, just worked with what was given to me along the way. I only found myself hitting a wall once and it was less about being under leveled than that having that one extra level gave me the healing I needed to survive from that point forward.

All in all I've had lots of fun playing Dragon Quest 11. I'm around 124hrs, did the max level grind, finished all the story content... still have a few things left...checkbox/RNG stuff mostly... There is tons to do, lots of little secrets to find, challenges of increasing difficulty. Despite feeling like the game gets off on a bad foot... about 40hrs of bad foots... the more you play the better it gets.