Hello Everyone. I recently finished Dragon Quest 11's Definitive Edition's postgame and would like to talk about it. Overall, I enjoyed my time with the game would recommend it but some issues did hamper me fully enjoying it. But I feel many of my criticisms, particularly towards navigation and storytelling may be missing the point. From what I can tell, DQ 11 is supposed to be this chill and accessible adventure that happens to have just combat that you can make harder. So often I feel like I'm criticizing Stardew Valley for not being more challenging or deeper. But regardless, I'm going to ignore that context for this review. So if you like chill and accessible JRPGs with a great story and characters, DQ11 is one of the best for that. It's already the best DQ game by a mile. Now lets get more critical.
-Gameplay
The game plays like an old school turn based JRPG, so like every past Dragon Quest game. You explore a massive overworld (in this case, represented as a fully 3D world not seen since DQ8 in 2005) and get into turn based battles when encountering enemies.
Combat is great. With countless spells, weapons, abilities, gear etc to mix and match. It gives you a lot to play around with and it's relatively straightforward to re-spec characters to try out new builds. There are some neat additions to this game that improve combat over its predecessors. Dual Wielding allows once weak weapons like knives to get more of a role as their status effects can potentially trigger twice. Pep Powers (comparable to Limit Breaks in Final Fantasy when activated and still giving you a stat buff when ready for a short while) have been expanded to allow multiple characters to share or use their Pep Powers together for even more effects. And Pep Powers can be carried from battle to battle adding more strategy. The "auto-battle" AI is much better and allows you to offload the less interesting roles to the AI like making healers automatically heal. My favourite trick against tougher bosses is Kerplunk on Hendrick as an emergency and Divine Protection on Serena to keep her going and as an emergency second Kerplunk user. Kerplunk sacrifices the user and all their MP to revive every other party member with full health. Since the user would have no MP left, they are effectively dead weight after the fact even if revived so it's 2 free revives at the cost of max efficiency.
However, combat is still very similar to past DQ games which does make it feel a little boring if you've played them extensively.
The open world/exploration is something I'm a little more mixed on. Yeah, it looks visually amazing but despite being 3D, it's navigated in much the same way as past games. You just, move through linear pathways in between towns until you reach a town, progress the story and set out to traverse the paths to get to whatever dungeon or location is next. There's very little done to mix this up. Like, you can jump now, a first for the series, but you can only jump on specific platforms. The rest you climb automatically using the "interact" command". I was expecting that now that you can jump, you can explore more places and have to be more on the lookout for places you can now reach. Heliodor initially kinda has what I was looking for as you can climb onto rooftops and use a chimney to enter a looked room but that becomes rare after that. You can't even jump over most stairs making the mechanic seem odd. There are some specific dungeons that do have some unique gimmicks. For example, you can ride specific enemies like small dragons and jumping birds and use them to navigate and explore areas in more interesting ways for a while. I wish there was more of this and more varied versions of this because just running or horse riding around does start to get pretty boring. Maybe some puzzles of Dark Souls style shortcuts one can open to make traversal easier. The game very rarely does this making most dungeons just a straight shot to the end with some monsters in the way you can choose to fight. I don't mind something like Pokemon having super simple overworld design because the overworld tends to be much smaller and there aren't many mechanics in the first place, plus there are often environmental puzzles to make up the difference. But DQ11 is bigger, you spend much more time out and about and have many more mechanics and ideas that never get used as much so it feels less engaging.
Like DQ9, you have side quests given to you by some NPCs in many towns. They generally act as fetch quests - "go to a place and bring back a thing" or a challenge - "use this specific pep power on this particular enemy". The Fetch Quests aren't that interesting as you are generally told where to find the item of interest and it's just a matter of getting it. There are some more puzzle-like ones that are quite nice. For example, in the city of Nautica, a mermaid tells you to go to Gondolia to find a boy who sang a song she liked but cannot remember. The quest log tells you to go find this kid in Gondolia and nothing more. But the catch is that, you have to remember from the main quest earlier that Mermaids live for centuries so they perceive time differently. So this kid is instead an old man you have to find. That's clever because it's a bit of a puzzle you have to put together while the pieces are there in front of you. Another side quest has you looking for buried treasure following clues in the open world. This stuff is great and I wish more side quests were like these instead of "go to this place and kill 4 coral monsters to get a gemstone I want". The Pep Power Quests, I am not fond of in principle. Because it's random when you get the pep powers and if that particular monster spawns. I'd much rather the player get pep powers through unlocks, specific items or books like recipes.
Compared to past DQ games, 11 is a lot more convenient and has way more quality of life features. If you get a party wipe, you can choose to load an autosave which doesn't cost any money, you can fast travel using Zoom indoors (only in the 3D version), just about every town now has a bank to store your money. You can sleep at campsites for free to heal up. And that's good. But you do lose some challenge from the navigation and planning aspects. For example, you lose half the money on you when you die. So normally with such a mechanic, you'd think the game would expect you to manage your money properly. Maybe plan that "hey, I am in a big town with a bank and the next several towns don't have any banks. How much of my savings should I bring with me? Knowing that if I die, I lose half of that. And If I don't have enough, I'd have to spend time fighting monsters to make up the difference to buy something I want". But with the way DQ11 is set up, that never comes into play. Every town has a bank. Even those underwater or in the clouds that haven't had any connection with humans in centuries. There are somewhat frequent campsites in between towns so you can fully heal up. And even if those things weren't there, it's easy to fast travel to safe places. So you never need to carefully manage how much money you are carrying at once. So most of the game's challenge comes from the combat side. Which is fine but it makes everything outside of combat feel less interesting to play or engage with since it feels more like a case of "walking from point A to B with little to think about". And since most of the game isn't combat, the game can drag in places.
Crafting is overhauled from past DQ games. Back then, you would just throw items into a pot and get a new item out of it if the correct recipe of items was present (which I wish was still retained as a way to reward crafty players). Now, you need to have the recipe beforehand and play a minigame where you need to select which squares to strike to fill up meters. You have a limited number of energy points, called focus, to spend on the process. You also have different kinds of strikes, like one which fills the meter by a little bit so you don't overshoot the target at the cost of a lot of focus, or one which strikes multiple squares at minimal cost of focus etc. You need to manage the temperature, which also costs focus, and sometimes, a strike may be less or more powerful than normal so you can't just spam the same tactics every time. More difficult items have more squares to fill which requires better use of focus. The better you match squares also means the item can be made even better than its normal variant. This is a neat system that makes the process more involving but can get a little tedious if you want to craft a lot of high quality items at once.
I love that Crafting also encourages more exploration of the open world for recipes and materials and you can buy some missing ingredients when in the crafting menu. Crafting also gives you access to a wider array of gear than what most shops stock and is often cheaper than shops. This makes crafting a viable means of progression and one that is especially important with any Draconian Quest Modifiers on.
Speaking of which, Draconian Quests are additional modifiers you can enable at the start of a new playthrough. And these can be intense. Stuff like even more powerful enemies, you no longer gain xp from weaker enemies, if the hero dies it's game over, you can't flee from battles, you can't wear armour, you can't buy from shops, you or your party may randomly skip a turn, and NPCs lie to you about where to go. Enabling just one thing like "harder enemies" already makes the game much, much more harder so I can't imagine playing with all of them on. Especially the Skipping turns one which feels more unfair than challenging. And NPCs lying to you doesn't really hold up on subsequent playthroughs since you'd already know where to go but catching them on their lies is neat. However, most if not all of these are combat focused. Mostly because, by the game's design, that's the only place where the challenge can exist. Regardless, I wish more games had stuff like this. I'd argue modiifers are a great way at difficulty options because they let you fine tune the experience rather than make broad changes you may not like. For example, in something like Outer Worlds, the hardest difficulty mode, Supernova, gives you a survival mode as well. But what if you want the survival mode without the combat challenge? Or the combat challenge without the survival stuff? You can't. Modifiers allow you to pick what you want. I'd especially love Pokemon games to try experimenting with this.
The Switch version comes with some extra content. A new 2D mode that makes the game play as if it were a SNES game. It’s quite charming. I like it especially because of how much faster it makes navigation. Though, in order to access it you must create a new save at a church and warp back to the start of the chapter while still carrying your current gear and XP. Like a sort of “mid game NG+”. Though, it’s not always clear when a new chapter begins. There’s also an entirely new 2D exclusive questline with these creatures called Tockles that requires you to find “pastwords” while exploring the main world to travel to events from prior DQ games as something is messing with them. These can be a fetch quest like visiting Alltrades Alley from 9 and being told to fetch a book on Bunny Girls from the main world. Or a dungeon like Trodain from DQ8 where you fight through the castle. It’s quite the nostalgic and charming affair. I just wish there were less fetch quests and more dungeons instead.
-The Story
The story is well written and quite enjoyable. It's definitely a bit cliched and I could see most plot twists coming hours before they happened. But it is a neat and simple story and world to soak in. I enjoyed the character arcs and seeing them all interact with each other. The story is great at revealing bits of characters to make them more interesting or funny over time, like with Hendricks and Oogler's Digest.
Bit of a hot take coming but I believe most JRPGs (excluding Chrono Trigger) do not enhance their stories. Like, you could take the stories of every Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy and what have you, make them into a movie or TV show or Anime and have just as good if not a better experience. Most JRPGs' only significant gameplay is turn based combat which doesn't lend itself as much to the stories these games tell which leaves most of the storytelling through cutscenes rather than the game itself. Other gameplay like travelling between points or interacting with stuff feels more like busywork rather than an integral part of the story. That's what made Chrono Trigger so much more interesting as a JRPG and storytelling because even your seemingly trivial actions interacting with objects or talking to NPCs did affect the story in many different ways.
Back to DQ11, there are quite a few places where being the game as it is made the story less enjoyable.
Exhibit 1: There's a section in the town of Snifelheim where the party has just found out the Witch Krystalida has impersonated the Queen and the guards are about to descend upon her but the Queen stands in front of her to protect her and asks everyone to hear here out..... and then the cutscene ends and everyone is awkwardly standing in place. You can talk to guards to get their opinion on the matter and obviously they are like "why is Queen defending her". To progress, you need to go up to and talk to the Queen which progresses the cutscene like nothing happened and it was all one continuous cutscene. So in this case, the player having to interact ruins the flow of what is supposed to be a tense situation. It also doesn't make sense because the player already still has to stand back and listen to what is going on. If this wasn't a game, then there wouldn't be a break like this. And there are these occasional breaks in between important cutscenes that don't add anything in other cutscenes as well though they are uncommon.
Exhibit 2: The fights in Octagonia. There are cutscenes of these amazingly choreographed fights that are a joy to see. Especially between Jade and Erik. But most of the fights are the Turn Based Battles which, while mechanically fun, are disconnected from the cool cutscenes preceding them. If this story was in the form of an anime, at least more of the fight would have been animated instead.
Exhibit 3: There's a lot of walking and travel in between major beats in the story. And very little story development happens in this traversal. If this were another medium, these would either be cut or would have more story beats to compensate.
Again, this isn't to say the story of the game isn't lacking, because it isn't. I enjoyed it. I just feel that it being attached to a JRPG like DQ11 doesn't enhance it. I prefer my JRPGS either take the Chrono Trigger approach and incorporate the gameplay with the story, or take the Pokémon approach and be in the background and give context to the combat and world. DQ11’s middle-ground approach of “splicing an animated tv show in between the combat and traversal” feels less optimal because I’d get a better experience of this already passive story through a passive medium without interruptions or gameplay. I know a common response to this is "you spend more time with the characters in a game" but, you don't spend much time interacting or developing them storywise in a game. Stuff like combat and navigation feels like filler in context with the story.
I don't even feel in control of the main character, who I named "Levin". I get the point of silent protagonists, it helps put you more in their shoes. But Levin already has his own feelings, opinions and thoughts on matters. Characters already treat him like he's polite, cool and level headed. You even see him as a kid who speaks with a British accent. So why maintain him as a silent protagonist instead of letting him actually talk? It limits character interactions significantly
There is one unique feature DQ11 has that could’ve swayed my opinion and made me argue the game has an advantage in telling this story- party chat. With the press of a button you can chat with the party. And they have a response for near every situation. My expectation was that this would make every conversation much more interesting as I love the cutscenes where the party interacts with each other. But the issue is the content of these chats. It's one sentence per character and it's usually just about where to go next and every character almost always has the same opinion on a topic. So instead of full conversations, you generally get 5 reskinned versions of "hey we should do this next". And since Levin is silent, there's not even a back and forth or response. There are some sentences from some points in the story that are more engaging and better characterize the cast. For example, telling the Mermaid about her lover. It's one of the few choices in the game and the party is divided on what to do. Or when Veronica dies and everybody has their own response to the death. I wish there was more of that kind of dialogue.
With all that aside, I still feel the story presented is quite good. However, I feel the story drops from good to passable at best in the post-game. It starts promisingly enough. Levin gets a chance to time travel back to before Mordegon gets the sword to save Veronica. I am always fond of these kinds of premises because of all the what if scenarios that can happen. But the story doesn't do much with the premise. If anything, it removes the interesting stuff that happened previously. You no longer have Sylvando making up with his father and forming the soldiers of smile (you get a reunion with his dad but it lacks the same flair). You don't have Erik dealing with his sister and how he failed her, you just have Erik curing her and quickly moving on. You don't have Hendrik rising as a hero and having a heart to heart with Jasper. You have a small fight hours later which has some of the impact. You don't have Serena growing after Veronica's death, going from being a bit of an airhead to becoming serious and wisened. And there's nothing to really replace that. Even the new villain, Calasmos isn't as threatening or personal as Mordegon. Mordegon managed to mind control the king and used that to mess over Levin's life, he got Cobblestone destroyed, he managed to swoop in and steal the sword of light and steal Levin's Luminary powers and then plunged the world into darkness. The main story sets him up as this serious threat and gives the player plenty of motivation to want to take him down. But with Calasmos, there's nothing. He just shows up as a threat and there's very little direct action he takes against the squad. Even when it's time to fight him the game just goes "go explore the world until you're ready to face him". Yeah, we learn he is the big bad and did some stuff in the past, but without that direct and present action, he's just a dumb robot looking thing sitting in the desert posing no threat.
I honestly feel the story of the post-game could have been melded into the same timeline. Most of the same events happen with the payoff lessened. Have Calasmos be hiding in wait for Mordegon to be defeated since Mordegon managed to trap him so now Calasmos can reign free. The story was basically already hinting at this before. You could even find an excuse to bring back Veronica as a projection of Serena or something if needs be.
There's a video that has a different take on the postgame-
There's a common criticism often thrown around with regards to open world games. It goes like this "Fallout 4 is a game where the main story is urgent and wants you to hurry and rescue your son but the game also wants you to waste precious time doing optional side content". The common point made to resolve this issue is to say "make the game's story less urgent". But I disagree with that and DQ11 is my counter why. The game has both an urgent main story with Mordegon and an non-urgent story with Calasmos and as I've said earlier, Mordegon is more engaging because of all he does which makes him a more threatening villain. In order for a villain to be threatening, he needs to take actions which further his goals. But he can't take action if the story isn't urgent and therefore becomes less threatening and it's less motivating to want to go beat him.
Even from a gameplay perspective, the postgame is lacking. You often just revisit prior areas and re-fight older enemies that are stronger now, despite there no longer being a story reason for that. Drustan’s challenges are a neat idea but often require a ton of grinding beforehand which drastically slows down the pace. I personally feel the game is at its best once the credits roll for the first time and everything afterwards is more repetitive, slow or not as interesting.
Basically what I'm saying is that an urgent and active main story/villain is more engaging than the opposite and I wish this "criticism" wasn't so ubiquitous. So what if there's still side quests to do in both cases? The player can still go and do them while still being invested in the drama of the main story.
To conclude, DQ11 is the best and most refined DQ game that, as a chill JRPG with good combat, exceeds expectations. Perhaps that's all the game wanted to be and it would be unfair to criticize it for not having a complicated world or navigation or challenges in the overworld. I acknowledge that, but I can't deny I was often bored when I wasn't in combat or in cutscenes. I can see the value in its approach generally for many people, but still feel stuff like the post-game was lacking despite that view.
Thanks for reading. Next up for me's probably Assassin's Creed Bloodlines. See you then.
