Anybody that plays this game absolutely needs to play it with the Retro Music Mod on PC. The terrible, grating music is really the only thing preventing vanillla from being a 10/10 game, and the vastly expanded soundtrack adds an unbelievable amount to the sense of adventure in the game
Trying to play as much of this as I can before it leaves Game Pass. Enjoying it so far. My first experience w/ 'Dragon Quest'. What's the ideal route to take when it comes to other games in the series to check out?
I'd legitimately just play anything from DQ 4 to DQ 9 and I'd honestly recommend the Nintendo DS versions of all of them.
8 is very comparable to 11. I also think 5 is extremely charming and has the same appeal only in 2D so I have to shill for it. 9 is pretty well respected but it's worth noting that game doesn't have characters, you create your own party.
If this is the best Dragon Quest game ever made?... damn. Shallow characters. Empty story. Episodic, meaningless contrived story beats. Glacial pacing. Overlong. Too easy. You can play the whole game with 4 characters and completely ignore the rest of them bc its so easy and there's no strategy you just dps every boss and enemy. Tons of pop-in and low-res textures looking like this could be on ps2. Empty, lifeless, plastic environs. I'll take random encounters over exploring this awkward, teensy world while they pretend this is "epic" scale. Horrible dialog and writing overall even by jrpg standards. Useless abilities and spells that are never helpful while you optimize the best (same) way to kill everything (dps). The "emotional" moments are shoehorned in when I don't know who any of these people are after 60 hours. Sidequests are all fetch and cookie-cutter "kill this monster". Overwhelmed with gold and items you never use bc it's so easy. Limited character and enemy design with palette swaps and "vicious" variant of each one in second half of the game. Every main story boss is just some random character that appears out of nowhere and if they even do go into their motivations, its all in a 2-minute exposition dump. And the music... the MUSIC. Jfc. God-awful programmed midi from 90s/00s and forgettable compositions. The s/t is grating and repetitive. Every locale is just a thinly-veiled copy of a real-world location, which is cool for 10 seconds. Missed opportunity to have mood- and culturally-appropriate music in the different places but instead it's all the same bland (at best), dated elevator corporate music. I'm visiting Cambodia and there's a loud, irritating 35-second loop of circus music with repeating 3-note trumpet solo blowing you to smithereens. Way to set the mood. And it's like that everywhere you go.
Extra half star for the voice actors doing a decent job with the trash writing, and the balls for having classic turn-based combat in 2017 AAA bc as you can probably tell I'm a grumpy old-school Square fan. The rest ranges from sub-par to downright offensive. It's a whole white bread sandwich of 3 slices of white bread between 2 other slices of white bread, salted and buttered. It's a 150-hour game of nothing. At least Sylvando's in it.
....anyway great great game shame about the OST though but hopefully the new blood will shake things up (literally only the yggdrasil song is a new track worth listening to outside of the game lol)
8 is very comparable to 11. I also think 5 is extremely charming and has the same appeal only in 2D so I have to shill for it. 9 is pretty well respected but it's worth noting that game doesn't have characters, you create your own party.
Extra half star for the voice actors doing a decent job with the trash writing, and the balls for having classic turn-based combat in 2017 AAA bc as you can probably tell I'm a grumpy old-school Square fan. The rest ranges from sub-par to downright offensive. It's a whole white bread sandwich of 3 slices of white bread between 2 other slices of white bread, salted and buttered. It's a 150-hour game of nothing. At least Sylvando's in it.