I've belated this for long enough, so one week after beating it I'll go deep with my thoughts of the game.
I'll try to be as spoiler free as possible, but whatever spoilers will be tagged.
Actually I come from seeing the ending again, as well as giving a sort of goodbye to the world, the PS4 I played it on was borrowed and will be returned to its owner tomorrow so I don't really know when I'll get to play it again as I don't really have much in the way of plans of getting a PS4 of my own, DQXI is the only exclusive I was ever interested in, but I digress. the deal is the I'll have a 10000 yen game that I can't play on my JP PSN account.
Anyway, back from being fresh of my first playthrough I was quite glowing of the game, so far as possibly call it the best in the series. I'd like to wait for a year and more people to play it to more properly compare it with the rest of the Dragon Quest series, so while I still think this is a fantastic videogame through and through, I'm not so sure if I'd put it with the hights of the series (III-V) or my personal favorite (VII) However I still stand on saying that its the best JRPG I've played since Final Fantasy IX (though the games aren't similar) so yes, I'd very much say that Dragon Quest XI is a better game than Dragon Quest VIII in everyway, I figure that's what most people are interested on, and the game I will most directly compare it to, as XI on PS4 is quite similar to VIII.
I'll go element from element.
Starting from the world, man, its fantastic, this feels what a fully realized Dragon Quest world should be like in 3D, there's great variety in the world, with each location having its own look, feel and personality, a huge improvement over something like VIII or IX where its mostly samey looking, the game just have an insane level or variety that made it a joy to explore, it also has a lot of verticality unlike the flat worlds of VIII or IX and this actually changes a lot in terms of how the world is designed. While VIII and IX felt more of a 2D map given some elevation this one feels like it was designed to be in 3D in the first place. This however comes with several restrictions as the game doesn't have large areas but rather the world is split into several chunks, so its not an open world game by any means, each area has a designated entrance and exit, and in this regard is way more restrictive than in its predecesors, the actual world you get to explore is smaller than in Dragon Quest VIII and there isn't any kind of huge large open areas, if you've played Dragon Quest Heroes II then XI is not any more open than that, and often not even as open as that.
This segmentation of the world in turn brings loading times, which while aren't long, can get aggravating, getting from town a to town b can sometimes make you go through 4 loading screens, its unlikely you'll get lost to make this bad though as the minimap on the bottom left corner helps out on navigating so you won't need to pop out the main map often, talking about loading, going into and out of battle is quick and painless, so that's great too.
Each location had their own story, be it its own contained story, or one party member would have something special in it, the town design in particular its fantastic, the best I've seen in a game yet, and miles above everything else in the series, towns are typically larger than ever and a lot of fun to explore, the fantastic NPC dialogue mainly highlight it, aside from just exploring I wanted to see what they'd had to say, going into Delcadar for the first time was seriously impressive.
Now about the story, I wouldn't necesarity call it the best story in the series, but its the most elaborate and built upon, the excelent cutscenes help that and makes it the most story a Dragon Quest game has had with also the largest number of cutscenes. Praising those cutscenes again, they're seriously fantastic, that direction is top notch, the vast majority of them are in real time too, there's less than a handful of CG sequences, I honestly like that better because the sudden change in quality can take you out of the moment, also the party appear in cutscenes on the real time ones.
I'll say that the story doesn't really do much outside of what other games do, but it is still expertly executed and there are very much some surprises here and there, its not some mindblowing super original tale but it is nonetheless a very memorable one with plenty of sad, charming, touching and funny moments; its got a great payoff too, definetly worth seeing through the end.
About the party now, as you probably know this one has the largest cast since Dragon Quest IV, which I thought was very interesting, IV has what I'd call the best cast in the series, problem is there's no real standout character there as the game never didicates enough attention to them outside of their own chapters, so I was wondering if we'd get that or the more fleshed out characters of VII and VIII, and well, its right in between. Each character has his or her own story within the game, issue is with so many characters, and with the main story in the way, none get the full attention they should and sometimes take huge breaks within their story with some characters getting way more story than others too.
Each character has their own distinct personality and all are relatable and likable, there was no character I didn't care about, the dialogue each character has its great and there's no more than ever, aside from the party chat option there's the bonfires too adding even more development to them, I'd like if there was more to it than the bonfires, but its good anyway. The story also goes with you having the full party at all times, there's no bar or wagon so no character is outside the story because they weren't on your party.
While Veronica was my favorite character I don't think there was anybody quite as memorable as Yangus or Maribel, still though, except for some questionable fashion choices for Martina I had no trouble with the main party. The NPCs that have their own stories, plus the ones that affect the main story are great too, a huge improvement over IX, and I'd say better than VIII as well, though their stories weren't quite as memorable as the ones of VII for me, except for a couple most are one note too, so even if the characters are cool there's not much to them.
Combat was a lot of fun, this one gives you a huge array of options between characters, spells, skills and weapons everyone here could have taken a completely different approach when building their party. Thus one doesn't have a job system, instead it has what the narutal evolution of the skill system of VIII would be, rather than the weird job skill nonsense of IX. Its similar to a skill tree in which new abilities get available once you purchase some, rather than the more linear progression of VIII you get more control here further opening up to the posibilities. On VIII after a few levels its just better to just stay on the once weapon and max out, here trying out new stuff its much more fun and rewarding, each character gets a healthy ammount of weapons to use too which makes it better.
About the difficulty, well, its pretty easy for the most part, like I died less than a handful of times, and this was for being careless on the most unique encounters rather than anything else, combat is fun, as mentioned above, but you'll have to go deep into the game for the more challenging encounters.
As mentioned before the game has costumes for all characters, and many at that, its nowhere near as deep as IX's though, rather than what its on VIII in which you'll need several equipment on so the character will change, unlike VIII getting a full costume is easy though so there's that too, costumes range from the badass to the funny and ridiculous, its great. The smithing system is also fantastic, replacing the alchemy pot of VIII and IX here you can smith certain items to create new ones, or improve current items (though sadly, there's a limit) the whole system is more involved than the alchemy pot making it much more satisfying to create stuff, the one drawback is that you can just experiment at your leasure, you need the recipe to make the item which I thought was an unnecesary restriction.
Now the music, and the weakest aspect of the game, now the actual soundtrack isn't too bad, but I'd say its rather weak, there's some great stuff here though, in particular the later half of the game has some hauntingly beautiful melodies, the battle system is also really catchy making fighting more fun, but apart from that the rest can go from forgettable to bland, many tracks feel like what Dragon Quest parody music would be like, also similar to IX the game reuses a lot of music, and I mean a lot, way more than IX, it feels like 1/3 of the soundtrack its of old tracks, the remixes are great and all but still. The actual issue is the quality of the sound, its midi music, and not of the highest quality, its very jarring in comparison with the rest of the presentation of the game, the rest of the sound quality of the game is fantastic though, all sound effect sound great, no issue there.
Finally, the presentation and performance, this is a beautiful game to look at, the details of all locations is great, the lighting is great, the texture work is great not much issues, the problem is the game doesn't look to hot up close, there are cerain scenes when the camera gets too close to something and you can see the faults, like textures not looking to good, or some low poli models (in comparison to the rest of the game of course) but all characters, even the simplest of NPCs look great, all monsters look great and everything animates fantastically, I have no complaints there. As mentioned before, the only sore thumb of the presentation is the music but on the visual side its a great through and through. As far as performance, apart from some mild frame rate drops and some pop in there's not much of an issue, I found no glitches or bugs or anything that needed a patch, and 2 weeks later, we're yet to see one.
I've played for around 100 hours in the end, getting at level 99, doing the more interesting sidequests and completing the main game plust 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 of 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 in particular there's a lot of love here. Its 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.
