NOTE: This article was originally published on March 18, 2019 on the original Wholesome Hot Takes tumblr blog.
Image Credit: Jason Wilson/GamesBeat
Since the New Year, I’ve already chipped away at three monstrously huge RPGs out of Japan (this is what happens when you live by yourself and it’s too cold to venture outside). I played Persona 5 all the way to completion, clawed through Kingdom Hearts III twice, and saw Dragon Quest XI: Echoes of an Elusive Age through the end of its massive postgame. Persona 5 was a fresh new take on the JRPG genre with half of its gameplay serving as a high school simulation of all things and a constant fear of improperly budgeting time as a resource. After finishing mere days before Kingdom Hearts III’s release, I declared it my favorite game since The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. Kingdom Hearts III was a game I’ve been waiting literally half of my life for, and while parts of the ending certainly rubbed me the wrong way, it was still one of the most emotionally fulfilling experiences of my life as I watched my one remaining childhood wish finally granted.
Dragon Quest XI was an overly traditional JRPG that did little to move the genre forward in a series I have zero nostalgia for.
It was my favorite of the three.
Dragon Quest XI is living proof that entertainment doesn’t always have to be innovative to be great. It’s neither a daring subversion of story tropes nor is it a mechanical leap forward for gameplay systems that have been set in stone for over three decades. On the contrary - every major story scenario and plot point has been done before, and anything “unique” in its core battle mechanics can still be traced back to games as early as 1995’s Chrono Trigger. Instead of breaking new ground, DQXI’s development team focused on honing in on what’s already been done and refining it to such a perfect degree that the 140 (!) hours it takes to complete everything it has to offer simply melt away.
A World Worth Living In
Dragon Quest XI’s world is not deep, but it’s rich with detail. Very few of the characters you meet along the way have very much depth (although if you want it, Sylvando’s backstory definitely has some for you), but it’s the way that the world slowly builds up a sense of interconnectedness that keeps it feeling lived in. Main characters have pasts that intersect in interesting ways (and no, not that “We apparently grew up in the same orphanage” bullshit from Final Fantasy VIII). NPCs scattered across various towns will slip hints that they know each other. Even the little side quests you engage in or books you comb through on random bookshelves can reveal little tidbits about a character’s past. Few characters are actually complex enough to write a provoking analysis on, but everyone is given the chance to feel like they exist and impact others in Erdrea to some degree, making the world one the player can live and breathe.
On the surface, Dragon Quest XI’s pacing resembles that of a shounen anime. You go questing from town to town. Each town has a unique flavor and a specific problem facing the locals. You hear ‘n’ deal with their issues, maybe collect a colored orb with some vague relevance to the main plot, and move out to the next brightly marked location on your map. Rinse and repeat.
Fun fact: I personally can’t stand the pacing of shounen anime. Try as I might, staying invested in loosely connected arcs that can last for dozens of episodes at a time culminating in multi-episode climaxes of seven simultaneous fights kills the pacing for me. Thankfully, Dragon Quest XI sidesteps this issue through exceptionally tight pacing. Pick up the game for more than two hours, and you’ll probably go through an entire town’s arc where you’ll explore the area, meet the locals, discover the fairy tale trope that’s bothering them, and finally go out and take care of it. As you’re interacting with the game the entire time, the pace becomes player-defined and never devolves into an arc going on and on and on to the point of nausea.
These perfectly sized narrative chunks keep the momentum going, even when the overarching plot is barely progressing. What’s more, each one is rich and detailed enough to leave a lasting impression on the player. I recently did an exercise while I was bored in the shower and recited every main scenario the player encounters as they traverse Dragon Quest XI. I not only remembered each of the dozens of little encounters, but I found myself grinning at the specifics of each one and how they wormed their way into my heart despite their relative brevity.
My favorite example: around 20 hours in, the protagonist finally gets his hands on a boat and can set sail anywhere across the world map. As he sails out into the open sea, a mermaid named Michelle (get it?) asks him to find a human who once offered his hand in marriage. You visit this man’s hometown only to find a prejudiced mistrust of mermaids and the revelation that the man she speaks of died dozens of years ago, survived in name only by his stoic grandson. She discovers this truth and pulls herself up onto the shore, triggering her death near her lover’s tombstone. This leads to you discovering the underwater utopia of mermaids to converse with their queen about Michelle’s fate and what to do next.
In just that short little segment, you get a new species of creatures (who speaks exclusively in rhymed couplets which is adorable), a town whose prejudice is a not so subtle allegory for stereotypes and racism, the tragic fate of those who devote themselves to a long lost love, and you get to explore an aesthetically beautiful underwater city. Keep in mind this game has dozens of episodes like this, and each are as carefully crafted as the next. As you slowly navigate the world, these little details create the sense that the world is richly crafted, even if no one particular part is overly complex or deep.
Repeated Visits
The secret sauce to DQXI’s world building is spaced repetition, and it’s here that spoilers come into play. Fair warning.
Halfway through the experience, Dragon Quest XI pulls a plot twist that is daring in the context of itself, but not within the genre. The bad guy wins and effectively triggers a apocalypse. Given the light-heartedness of the game up until this point (come on, literally EVERYTHING in this game is a pun), this definitely comes as a surprise. Of course, you, being an astute player of classic 90s Japanese games (is that fair to assume?), recognize this trope as a continuation of what Ocarina of Time and Final Fantasy VI have done before. It’s still too unexpected for you to roll your eyes at a cliche, but immediately you wonder, “How can this game possibly better what those classics got right over 20 years ago?”
Like those two games, Dragon Quest XI’s second act has you revisiting every past location to see what’s happened since the villain took a massive floating tree that’s literally the source of all life and chucked it at the center of the world. The spaced repetition of returning to towns dozens of hours later keeps this from being an exercise in tedium and rather a mechanism to feel the way this world persists beyond little episodic misadventures. To begin with, our silent, unnamed protagonist with impossibly silky locks (I unoriginally christened him Michael, although perhaps Fabio would have been more fitting) revisits his previously demolished hometown of Cobblestone only to find it’s now the last bastion of hope for humanity led by none other than the knight who’s been pursuing you for the last several dozen hours. Setting aside your differences, you fight to protect the townspeople and agree to join forces for the remainder of your quest.
What’s that? A purple-haired major antagonist joins your party after realizing the error of his ways?
Yeah, Chrono Trigger did that, too.
What DQXI does exceptionally well is the way its second act is ultimately wrapped up in the past despite the horrific ongoings of the present. Even in this opening bit, the subplot that really hits home is the history of rivalry between the knights Hendrick and Jasper, and how the bitter jealousy of the latter drove him down the road to darkness. As you revisit more and more locations and track down the remainder of your party, the subplots you encounter are increasingly less tied to the fact that some freak with a mohawk blew up the Earth and are more intertwined with events that happened before the game’s main story even started.
Perhaps it’s finally saving your younger sister after a terrible accident turned her into gold. Maybe it’s reliving the final moments of your parents’ lives in their attempt to save you and giving their souls the eternal rest they deserve. It could be finally confronting your father years after abandoning him and his notions of chivalrous masculinity in favor of how you believed your individual talents could make the world a happier place. Every major plot point in the second act turns away from the present drama to focus on the wrongs of the past and the way they haunt Erdrea’s citizens more than anything for years to come. No matter the present, the past becomes their future.
This theme carries over into the less gripping but still engaging third act. After the credits roll, reloading your save file gives you the chance to go back in time, defeat what’s been the main villain up until this point and prevent the apocalypse, and confront the real baddie who’s been pulling the strings all along. Like every story beat in this game, this comes across as a trope on a surface level: secret villains not being revealed until the very end are littered across old school JRPGs, not the least of which include a sudden last-minute trip to the freakin’ moon to fight the alien Zeromus in 1991’s Final Fantasy IV. However, Dragon Quest XI still puts in the care for this last section to be relevant towards the theme of the past becoming our future.
See, Dragon Quest XI has a familiar Chosen One narrative. You’re the reincarnation of a legendary hero, who is heavily implied to be the reincarnation of the hero Erdrick from the original Dragon Quest trilogy on the NES. However, in an interesting turn of events, the true ending reveals that both you and your legendary ancestor are in fact the ancestors of said hero Erdrick. Players who have followed the series for decades have found their own past tales to suddenly take the form of the game’s future. These are the subtle touches that make Dragon Quest XI worth experiencing and talking about, even if it’s not as daring as a Virginia Woolf narrative.
Pepped Up
This review has been devoid of the battle mechanics of this game up until now. That’s because although they have received the same love and attention to detail as the rest of the game, they aren’t quite the strongest part of the experience. In fact, any legitimate criticisms of DQXI can be directed here:
- Dragon Quest XI is too easy (at least until the third act, a.k.a. after the first 80 hours of gameplay)
- The most interesting part of Dragon Quest XI’s battle system, Pep Powers, are so locked away behind invisible random dice rolls that you can’t constantly keep them in the back of your mind as you evaluate your options in the turn-based combat
I don’t mind so much that the game is easy. If anything, it means that no part of the game stands in the way of your average Joe enjoying the world and story progression. The second point is the more troubling issue. Dragon Quest XI’s Pep system is, on the surface, the clear highlight of its mechanics. As characters take damage, they are more likely to become “pepped up” and gain significant stat bonuses for the next few turns. If multiple characters are pepped up at once, they can collectively cash in their pep status for a “Pep Power” where they team up for a super attack that can dish out damage to enemies, provide stat buffs for the entire party, and trigger other bonuses in the current fight. The obvious comparison are the Double/Triple Techs from Chrono Trigger. In addition to being plain useful, these are enacted with drop-dead gorgeous animations to boot.
Unfortunately, the sheer randomness of when characters are pepped up leaves much to be desired. Like Final Fantasy IX’s “Trance Mode,” there is zero visual indicator of when a character is about to enter this heightened state. As a result, it’s impossible to plan around. Players instead just go through the motions as they’re working through boss encounters. If a Pep Power happens to become available, that’s great, but otherwise, players can’t strategically plan to trigger them and pull them out as necessary.
Memories of the Past
In the long run, these minor complaints don’t actually mar the experience. Dragon Quest XI probably isn’t going to be remembered for its core gameplay, but I do believe the experience wouldn’t be as effective in any medium outside of a video game. The greatest moments in Dragon Quest XI are walking into a town for the first time after a major story event. Early on, it’s likely the first time you’ve been there period, and you’re struck in awe of the colorful architecture and the sense of cohesion that builds as you wander around conversing with its citizens. As you progress, you’ll revisit these towns dozens of hours later, but things have changed enough where you want to revisit everyone and find out what’s been going on in their lives. This continued sense of exploring a world that truly feels lived in is what kept me coming back day after day for hours on end, and it’s why I feel a gaping pit in my heart now that it’s all over.
In any case, you better believe I’m picking up the definitive edition for the Nintendo Switch later this year with an orchestrated soundtrack and even more character-focused plot points to explore.