Dragon Quest XI (PS4): First Impressions

After being royally disappointed (pun intended) by Final Fantasy 15: Royal Edition, I didn't want to give up on Square Enix entirely. I think they just kind of lost their way with that 11-year-in-the-making debacle. They still hold a special place in my heart as far as RPG's are concerned. So I figured I would give their "other flagship" franchise a go. This is the first PS4 game that I have ever paid full price for and yes, i was drunk when i ordered it.

Dragon Quest XI is a more "traditional" RPG in that it is a fantasy game with turn-based combat. The world is quite family-friendly and the art is more like a cartoon and that is just fine with me. Most nerds would refer to this sort of game as a "JRPG" and if you are a nerd like me, you already knew that.

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The graphics are pretty solid and as you would expect there is a ton of equipment to play around with for each of your individual characters to mix it up a bit. Managing HP is essential and while the very beginning of the game was absurdly easy, I did actually get wiped in the first hour of playing.

Generally, I am a relatively negative person with very high standards for games, especially RPG's. Therefore, I have identified a few things about Dragon Quest XI that I do NOT like so far.

There is soooooo much dialogue!

I knew this was going to happen since it is a Squenix game. They tend to develop their games for a Japanese audience first, and the rest of the world later. I guess Japanese people quite enjoy a really long and drawn out story and that is precisely what you shall receive here.

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_{Go ahead and get comfortable in your 299 Pewdiepie chair, because every time "Erik" sees something remotely interesting, he is gonna talk to you for 4 minutes about it}

I think in the first 2 hours of gameplay I was actually controlling the action for about 40 minutes or so - the rest was cutscenes and dramatic interludes with a whole lot of reading mixed in.

Where TF do you save?

There is no autosave in this game and this is not made evident in the "tutorial." I found out after i got wiped that it is actually up to you to save at various churches that you encounter along the way. I had to go back a REALLY LONG WAY and then be forced to watch about a dozen cutscenes simply to have another go at the battle that kicked my butt.

Kind of irritating voice actors

It sounds as though they hired their entire team of voice actors from a dangerous area of the West Midlands and then asked them to really speak as though they have never read a book in their life ever. It would be endearing I suppose if it was a character here and there, but basically everyone in your home village speaks as though they just walked off the set of Peaky Blinders and were still in character.

I am only a few hours in and maybe this will change later... i hope so since most of the scenes are unskippable.

The music is set waaaaay too high by default

The music in the title screen actually scared me when it started. I don't know what they were thinking but the volume on this game is somehow something like 3 times as loud as all my other games. I normally have my TV volume set to about 80 (out of 100) but found it necessary to put it to below 20 to not have the neighbors call the cops.

The music is so loud that it drowns out a great deal of the dialogue in the opening acts. This can be changed later (which I did) but who decided to take the soundtrack to 11 on this? It seems sloppy.

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tl:dr

My first impressions of this game so far is that it is an extremely casual game and that is precisely what I was looking for. So far the game is very simplistic but like I said, I am only a few hours into a game that is meant to have 100 hour-long story. For fans of JRPG's that don't feel the need to rush through everything (and that is me...sometimes) this is a solid purchase. It has a few issues right out of the gate but for the most part someone who is looking for a RPG experience akin to Final Fantasy 7 but with modern graphics, this seems like a winner so far.