Dragon Quest XI

lostforever

SasqWatch
Joined
October 8, 2009
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UK
Been playing this for about 20 hour now and here is what I think.

The gaming is charming is all I have to say. It gives the same feels as watching old cartoons on raining Sunday morning in bed. The graphics are amazing and they use colours in very clever ways. It gives a very child like innocence to the game even though you are dealing with horrible stuffs.

Combat/RPG system
The turn based combat is really fun. Its an odd thing to say but there were plenty of edge of your seat moments. Do I heal now or go for attack and finish the monster off? Its very tactical like that and I am enjoying it.

There is no difficulty setting for the game as far as I can see but as true RPG you can make it hard or difficult as you want to be in that you can grind and level up if you choose.

Another interesting thing is about 80% of all the combat are optional! I went through fairly large dungeon running pass all the enemies and looting stuff and I was only forced to fight the end boss. However, because I ran pass, I was under leveled for the bosses and I died very badly so I did end up killing some to level up. But there were plenty of times I was running pass thing since i was not in the mood for combat. I think this is an pretty interesting design when you have monsters which re-spawn.

There seems to be an nice gear progression and you can loot, buy or craft gear. They seems to have real impact on things as you see bigger number in combats. Each character seems to have multiple skill tress with interesting choices of new skills and passives but I am not high level yet to unlock all them.

Story and NPC companions

As I said, the game has "feels". Its very cosy and warm. Right from the start you are told that you are the chosen one but it seems they are going for some sort of twist here.

The NPC party members are so far typical Japanese/anime stereotypes but I don't mean in a negative way. Even now they seems to far more interesting than your recent Bioware edgy and dark NPCs. I find that Japanese/animes are very good at taking these stereotypes and adding layers to that and then they somehow very emotionally get you in a way that I can't explain. I think or hope that how DQ XI goes but I am not that far in....

UI and PC Port

Japanese developers don't know or care how to do PC interface. Its really lame. There is thing called mouse on the PC you numbnuts! Leaving PC aside, the general interface is designed by morons even in console mode. For example, each of your party members have a limited inventory of their own but there is also an infinite(?) shared inventory. What is the point of this? When you try to equip an item, your limited inventory is full and you have to move an item to the shared inventory. What is the point of this crap? Also then need to learn about UI context and reusing the keys based on current context etc.

Apart from the UI, the port is technically solid i.e. no crashes. Sadly no ultra wide support out of the box but there is hacked up binary available.
 
Joined
Oct 8, 2009
Messages
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Location
UK
Unfortunately for myself the UI is very important to enjoying the game. I mean who wants to drive a car where you have to turn upside down to access the controls ?
 
Joined
Oct 20, 2006
Messages
7,758
Location
usa - no longer boston
Dunno about Nintendo Gameboy UI nor care.
And example on PC - to save game you need to click like 5 times if not more. And then it's not instant but you need to wait about a minute as if it's not being saved on SSD but on floppy drive on C-64. I mean, WTF. Stop with the outdated annoying designs! In case you missed it, it's year 2018.
 
Joined
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