Dragon Quest XI: Echoes of an Elusive Age (2017 Video Game) User Reviews

Let the legend continue forever!

[danistorm9 · 9/10 · 25 February 2019]

Dragon Quest XI is already a "modern classic" of the RPG genre. It has everything a Rpg player wants to find in a game. The dream team of Yuji, Toriyama and Koichi made it again.

The story is deep, interesting and complex, and it is a tribute to the whole Dragon Quest saga, the character design is superb and the music (despite no being so powerful like in V,VI or VIII) is really good.

The game play is the classic one even more polished, with a talent system which allow players to have tons of combat and party settings and variations.

This game will be remembered, as other gems of the genre are, as a must play. Let the legend of Dragon Quest continue!

Can't wait for more

[leomaz · 10/10 · 26 February 2021]

Can't stop playing this game. I can play this game forever.

Fun gameplay, bland story, childish characters

[heath-jeffrey · 5/10 · 10 September 2021]

I enjoyed playing this for around 200 hours purely because decent turn-based combat and a range of genuinely different skills to unlock is rare these days. There were also a few interesting 'secrets' to unlock, islands to explore, etc. And some areas involving riding enemies with abilities that let you get to otherwise inaccessible areas.

Sadly, that's about all that was enjoyable, and even some of those were really limited.

The story is as bland as possible. To be fair, there seems to be a really clever story, with a neat plot twist, but it comes only in a second play through, by which time I was well and truly sick of the game and couldn't bring myself to find out more. It could have been so amazing if they'd just blended the two stories together, to add a bit of intrigue and some plot twists. Such a waste to save the best part for 'post game' gameplay.

The characters are childlike in design, which could work for some games, except that this is quite an adult story with highly dramatised scenes that really need believable characters to have any of the emotional impact the dialogue is clearly aiming for. And the dialogue itself does feel a bit forced at times, in top of that. (And don't go thinking it's a game for your 8-10 year old kids: you don't want them seeing so much death, including of children, or going behind a spa or down a dark alley to meet a woman for a bit of 'puff puff').

There are far too much quests and unique unlocks built around the casino, requiring hours and hours and hours of firstly clicking auto-play (which runs for only about 7min before you have to click it again), and then clicking 36 times to place bets on a roulette table, which you have to repeat about 200 times to hit a jackpot.

The scenery is decent, and cultural elements, and unique areas impressive. But music lacking.

And sadly, a couple of key parts of the game that really do show promise, fall entirely short for no obvious reason. Two big ones are:

* A whole bunch of the abilities you can unlock are based around 'status effects': sleep, silence, paralysis, lower defense, lower attack, instant death, etc. But they all fail about 80-90% of the time, making them completely useless. Instead, you quickly learn to choose between just two abilities for each character: the one that does the most damage to a single target, and the one that does the most damage to a group.

* Certain enemies become ridable after defeat, potentially offering access to secret areas. It borders on Castelvania or Wonderboy in Monsterland style unlocking of new and intriguing areas... except that it's so rarely used an so restricted when it is, that it ends up nothing more than the occasional side game.

Ultimately, tonnes of promise, and really cool concepts already built into both the gameplay and the plot, but which all fizzle out in favour of the generic, bland stuff.

No more than an echo of the past.

[onikaso · 5/10 · 14 September 2020]

Gameplay Battles are pretty standard DQ quality but for the most part, normal encounters never feel threatening. While your characters have much more potential to diversify their skillset compared to VIII, there's never really any purpose in doing so, as every character has a pretty clear primary role which makes the other ability schools feel tacked on for flavour. You're never going to be in a situation where you need to give mages physical weapons to conserve MP due to the abundance of MP restoratives and ability to skip encounters at will.

The main game has its ups and downs but for the most part, it feels like you're just trying to get from A to B to advance the story. Despite the game giving you the option to go to a lot of different places at points, this is merely the illusion of freedom, because as soon as you go somewhere which doesn't advance the story, you're told that "You're not supposed to be here, try again." This is worsened when you go to new location 'X', are told to go to 'Y' first, only to be told to go right back to 'X', because speaking to some random NPC at 'Y' triggered the flag that made the McGuffin spawn at 'X'. Even without such extracurricular exploration, the game has a lot of backtracking throughout.

Post-game doesn't have that much to offer other than more backtracking. The "bonus" trials are the exact same dungeons from earlier in the game recycled with a different colour scheme.

It took me about 120 hours to do everything the game has to offer, so it's definitely not short of things to do. A lot of it does boil down to filler content like fetch quests/material farming/hunt quests but that's true of most JRPGs so it's more a case of how interested you are in that.

Visuals Nice environments, character designs and monster designs. However, there is a clear reduction in the effort that was put into animations. Most skills that were present in previous games are a lot less flashy/impressive here and you're forced to play as the Hero in the field, presumably because they didn't make animations for the other character models.

Story/Characters Not that DQ is especially known for its story, but this one barely feels a step above the first NES RPGs. You are the chosen one who must defeat the dark one and everybody and their mother seems to know this for no apparent reason. Your party members mostly join you for no reason other than "You are the chosen one, let me come with you" and as a result, none of them really have any synergy with each other. There are some decent individual character arcs, namely for Sylvando and Eight, but there aren't any great character interactions between party members like in VIII.

I normally don't have a problem with silent protagonists but the Hero is an expressionless, emotionless husk of a character. What's even stranger is that there is a flashback cutscene in which a childhood Hero talks, yet no reasoning is given for his muteness later in life.

Audio The soundtrack is easily the weakest aspect. The original tracks are low quality and very repetitive and the few good songs are actually recycled from previous DQ games. The voice acting, while not awful, is fairly average, and some of the accents leave a lot to be desired.

Overall Not a bad game by any means, but it doesn't have the charm of many older DQ games, nor does it bring anything new to the table to maintain engagement. A good time waster but I couldn't recommend it given the breadth of better JRPGs out there - both past and present.

Cringeworthy

[drbombs · 5/10 · 6 August 2019]

The only aspects of the game I didn't like were:

• the main storyline (so childish, and no surprising twists)
• the main characters (a group of autistic children without any real emotions)
• the bits where I had to walk between cutscenes (there were a lot. A lot!)
• the fact that the main character can't walk anywhere I want him to walk
• the non-challenging fights (it's super easy to farm exp. and beat the final bosses with 2 healers on your team)
• The casino basically never let the house win; it was just a tedious way of 'winning' tokens to get a weapon that's strong enough to equip until the end of the story.

The things I did like about the game:

• There was a white/ gold flying whale! (Spoiler alert)
• I guess it was somewhat addictive since I actually finished the game