DQ XI

[Jumpin]

Cerebralbore101 said:

Jumpin said:

I still have yet to play it. It looks a lot like Dragon Quest 8, and I'm one of the few people who don't really like that one. Dragon Quest 1-5, to me, is one of my favourite bunches of RPGs ever, but the following stretch of Dragon Quest 6-8 wasn't my thing. I loved Dragon Quest 9, but I think that's an outlier, as I enjoyed it mostly because of the local multiplayer. I don't know how much I'd like it without that (kind of like Secret of Mana, a game I love, but don't really like without the multiplayer). I have Dragon Quest 11, though.

DQ11 is basically DQ8, but with huge improvements. Depending on what you hated about 8, you might still love 11. So what did you hate about 8? 

Mostly the the lack of fun factor or satisfaction compared to early Dragon Quest games; I found the game boring. I can’t really say specifically what elements made it feel that way, since I haven’t picked up the game since the PS2 generation and I kind of forget it.

Some things I specifically recall was we kept chasing around this clown enemy I didn’t care about (Dull Magus, a fitting name) for like 40 hours. The world was overly spread out and slow to move around. The mechanics took too long to use. The encounter rate was brutal in that game, worse than any other DQ game. It was like Phantasy Star bad.

The dungeons were obnoxiously long and excruciatingly bland - worse than the worst from Witcher 3 and Xenoblade games; and I’ll note that these games still don’t have nearly as much dungeon stuff. Only Xenoblade 1 had a significant amount of it; Witcher 3 and Xenoblade Chronicles X have hardly any, only that the little that’s there is the worst part of those games...

Not that I hate dungeons absolutely, I like the dungeons in some games like Chronological Trigger (I’m just going to leave that English auto-correct spelling), Dragon Quest 5, Breath of the Wild, and Link to the Past. But I had no love for DQ6-8 dungeons.

In short - The things I remember most from DQ 8 were its slowness (everything from battles, to moving around, menus, etc...), obnoxious dungeons, and obnoxious encounter rates. I don’t recall the story at all, other than Dull Magus. I don’t even remember why he was evil, only that he was an angry clown with an irritating laugh that the main characters were annoyed by.

Last edited by Jumpin - on 29 February 2020