After playing the Dragon Quest 3 HD2D remake, I enjoyed it so much that I decided to jump right into Dragon Quest 11. Instead of doing a review for a single game, I am going to review them together and compare (and potentially even contrast) them. Warning, there will be major spoilers for both games.
Something mundane and stodgy about Dragon Quest is that a lot of features, items, fan service, characters, references, and locations are recycled across games. There are needless and constant callbacks, at least in my experience for these two games. Dragon Quest 11 is a prequel to Dragon Quest 3, which is a prequel to Dragon Quest 1 and 2, so these associations made sense and were direct references when they were first created. I find it drab and insipid, and since I played Dragon Quest 3 HD2D before Dragon Quest 11, I was entirely sick of it by the end of the game. That ends up being the general motif of Dragon Quest 11, the fun doesn't last until the end. If I never see these Dragon Quest references again, it will be too soon. Dragon Quest 11 especially felt like accreditation for the sake of it, and I honestly couldn't give a shit about the other Dragon Quest games. Even if you played all of them, I don't want to be reminded of it constantly.
One of the unique features that I enjoyed, however, is the town structure. Characters in towns are used in an interesting way. In a more modern RPG, town NPCs will say something about the town, or their lives. It's an effort to make it feel alive, a town filled with living people you can talk to, but it ends up being wholly empty. Dragon Quest has an almost mystical quality, where they usually say something about a quest you need to do elsewhere, or about something you can do in a dungeon, or there is a bard that is singing a song, and you have to unravel his ballad to solve an in-game mystery. It doesn't make sense narratively, but it works really well to deliver important information to the player. It feels like the townsfolk might know a rumor, but it's something you can follow for quest hints without the annoying to-do list quest structure. Dragon Quest 3 does this wonderfully, and then Dragon Quest 11 throws that in the trash. In Dragon Quest 11 they decide to just have a pink marker above the head of the person you need to talk to directly, who tells you exactly where to go. ZZZzzzzZZZzzz. There is no player agency. When they don't have a boring checklist and giant neon sign pointing the way, you are forced to interact with the world, and become more engrossed in it. This isn't the perfect method, as sometimes things can become too obscure or difficult to figure out, but that exists in other facets already. Also, it is the game developers job to do this. After 11 iterations, you would think they have a better system in place than this.
Dragon Quest 3 HD2D excelled in being simple and straightforward. The game starts with an unnamed, unspeaking hero, and they say "time to go on an important quest." You go to a recruitment center and pick the exact class of the other 3 people you want in your party. In Dragon Quest 11, you have very heavy story segments, with characters that are tied into it, who are delivered to you over time. I prefer the method of Dragon Quest 3 HD2D, because I could forge the exact team of people I wanted, and it streamlined a lot of sections that provided a great gameplay experience. When I would receive a new character in Dragon Quest 11, I was faced with conflicting feelings about new characters. I might like them and want to use them simply because they were a character with a fun personality, or not want to use them because I find them boring or annoying, but that doesn't mesh well with how good they are for battle. I would end up with a dissonant feeling, where I am using character I actively dislike in order to have the best battle team. I loved my homemade team in Dragon Quest 3 HD2D. I could maximize my battle output and still love the characters. Both of these games fail in that there is a wonderful middle ground here where all of the characters are useful in battle, so you can develop them in regards to the story, and I can play the ones I want, and still succeed. This balance was not achieved in either Dragon Quest game.
There are obvious drawbacks to the characters being a stand-in for the player in Dragon Quest 3 HD2D, but I much preferred this system to what happened in Dragon Quest 11. I enjoyed not having any of the main characters talk and were simply a vessel for the story unfolding around them, via other people whom with you interact. It is an older and unique design choice to have the non-player characters have such weight and importance, because they tell the story to you and at you, so you can be involved exclusively in action.
Dragon Quest 11 has a good story for the first third, passable middle section, and unbearable end. I liked the characters and how they interacted with each other. The intro section is grounded and real and fun. You finally get to the World Tree and you are sneak attacked by the big bad, Mordegon, and his crony. They defeat you and destroy the World Tree, killing one of your party members and scattering the rest. The initial segments of the second section are awful, as you have to play long, tedious segments with 4 of the other characters. You do a parade with Sylvando, a gauntlet with Jade, a dream sequence with Rab, and a completely pointless segment with Erik where he loses his memory. After putting dozens of hours into the game so far, having your party split and have to regain them all, just like the beginning of the game, was tiresome and disheartening. It picks back up after that, and you have a bunch of great moments after you regroup, do a ton of quests, and find out how to defeat Mordegon. You defeat him and resurrect the World Tree and bring peace back to the world. This is where the game gets really weird. At the end of the credits it says "to be continued," and you can continue playing. Any semblance of a normal story has gone out the window and they start doing the most low-effort, contrived, and banal cliche horseshit. Any justification is completely superficial. Veronica died to save the party from Mordegon at the World Tree, and they randomly hear a rumor that they can bring her back. The party ends up sending the Hero back in time to right before they lose to Mordegon at the World Tree, to "fix" the world. This not only makes the entire middle section pointless and unfulfilling retroactively, it starts putting bland and senseless time travel and hand-waving story beats in ad nauseum.
The entire end section has you re-doing all of the quests you did during the second section, but the "correct" way. For example, in the middle section of the game, in the town of Hotto, a woman's son gets turning into a dragon, and they must sacrifice people to him to appease him. The dragon ends up attacking the town and his mother sacrifices herself to him to stop him from eating the townspeople, and because she can't bear to see the party attack the dragon. We go to the volcano and defeat the dragon anyway, and he turns back into a boy, before dying. It's heartfelt, it's tragic, it's not all tied up in a neat little boring bow. In the third act, you simply walk into the volcano, where the woman is with her dragon son, but you find an item to fix him. He turns back to normal and they go to the town. Horrible, awful, boring, dirty asscheeks quests. Every single town was like this. The entire end section was a slog, but I had invested 70 hours completing the second act because I thought it was the end of the game, so I wanted to see it through.
They have a similar bait and switch in Dragon Quest 3 HD2D, but it is much simpler, cooler, and quicker. The entire game you are told the ultimate evil, Baramos, needs to be destroyed. You go to his tower and destroy him, and when you get back to town, a random evil being who has never been spoken of the whole game, Zoma, shows up and says Baramos was just his second-in-command. You follow Zoma to the Dark World, which is actually Alefgard, and it is now revealed to the player that Dragon Quest 3 HD2D is a prequel to 1 and 2. Players playing it for the first time had an incredible twist. It was fun, it was cool, and it was a good callback. It served a valuable purpose. Sure, the introduction of the final bad guy was a deus ex machina type switch, but it didn't really matter. You weren't tired of the game at that point. It only added a little bit more to the game, and I was happy to have more. It seems that Dragon Quest 11was influenced by older Dragon Quest games, especially being a prequel to 3, and it wanted to have it's own moment of revelation, but it failed miserably.
Dragon Quest 3 HD2D is also far more difficult than Dragon Quest 11, and in better ways. It was continually challenging in battles as you progressed, and it made me have to try my hardest every step of the way, instead of coasting through. Random battles were fun almost all the way to the end of the game. When I defeated Baramos, I lost the very first fight in the underworld to a strong random encounter. Overcoming the challenge was fun, and creating an efficient party even more so. Alternatively, Dragon Quest 11 doesn't have random encounters, so for large sections of the game, I would run past every enemy and just fight the boss. I never felt like I had to stop to fight monsters, and there was no point to it, which made the game, and the entire gameplay loop, fall off in the third act. There are very few encounters you have to do. The enemies in Dragon Quest 3 HD2D are balanced well, and every fight felt fun to overcome the difficulty. There were many tactics and team groupings that could succeed. Dragon Quest 11 could not replicate this, and instead did the ultimate sin of breaking it's own rules. They could not figure out how to make the endgame enemies more difficult, so they make debuffs do nothing, they give them attacks that removes your entire parties buffs, and it forces you to overcome it with a single tactic that you have to discover, or to spend a ton of time grinding for the best gear possible.
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| My Dragon Quest 3 characters: Hero - Brine Squama, Martial Artist - Fleximus, Mage - Zapp vonBoom, and Theif - Nabitha |
Games should not always be assessed on their merit alone, but also compared to similar games in their field. When directly comparing Dragon Quest 3 HD2D vs Dragon Quest 11, I enjoy Dragon Quest 3 HD2D far more, but I still enjoyed the first two thirds of Dragon Quest 11. However, the first game I played after Dragon Quest 11 was Final Fantasy 10. To have another game to compare them to, and to replay it to remember it's merit, I replayed Final Fantasy 10 as well. After playing through Final Fantasy 10 again, it truly emphasized how shallow Dragon Quest is as a franchise. This isn't inherently bad, but it does reinforce my point that more traditional RPG guidelines, as Dragon Quest typically follows, makes for a worse experience. In this regard, Dragon Quest 3 HD2D succeeds over Dragon Quest 11 again. The sophomoric story, bloated quest system, flat characters, and too-often-repeated callbacks that feel like passable flaws when contained within the franchise, are magnified tenfold when compared to a well-crafted, story-driven RPG like Final Fantasy 10. Dragon Quest 3 HD2D is a much better RPG and game than Dragon Quest 11, but both feel somehow outdated when put up against the adaptations of a 24-year old game.
The problem with the end game grind of Dragon Quest 11 is the problem with all video game grind. It serves no purpose but to artificially inflate play time by making a simple task stretch out beyond its means. There are several gimmick bosses in Dragon Quest 11, and those are generally decent, if unfun, but the very final super boss you can fight in Dragon Quest 11 is the epitome of grind. In order to make the bosses more challenging in Dragon Quest, they typically give them several turns in a row. This isn't bad in itself, and even leads to very fun boss fights when balanced well. For this final boss, I had all level 99 characters when facing him, and he would take 2 actions in a row and kill 2 of my party members flat out. Debuffs didn't work on him at all, and buffs placed on your character are removed by a full-party buff removal spell. Not to mention the design of the character was "the regular final boss but all gold." This type of difficulty is arbitrary and fake. Instead of providing a dynamic and interesting fight, the solution to the fight is to narrowed into a single solution. You need to have all of the best gear and equipment, which, surprise, takes needless hours of stealing from monsters and other mind-numbing tasks. When the only solution to a problem is the same everyone else takes, the only real accomplishment is not overcoming difficulty, but overcoming time. Acquiring these items is not difficult, but the thought of spending the time to get them was enough for me to turn the game off.
This practice also goes directly against the core facets the game has championed until this point. Each character has multiple weapons they can use, and specific abilities they can only utilize if they have that weapon type equipped. Instead of making diverse and powerful builds and synergies with these abilities, it shows how little depth it actually has, in that none of it actually matters. You need to do the highest DPS strategy with the absolute best gear. This is a problem they created on their own. They did not need to make this process to beat the post game boss, but they chose to. They wanted to highlight how shallow their systems actually were, because they were greedy and wanted to add the hours count to their game.
The comparison of these two Dragon Quest games, with the addition of playing Final Fantasy 10 afterwards, helps to highlight what an RPG can achieve if it has the right elements. Dragon Quest 3 HD2D shows that the story can take a back seat to the gameplay, even in a long RPG, if the difficulty and balance are tuned properly. Final Fantasy 10 outclasses both, showing that you can transcend other RPGs with an engaging story containing amusing and compelling characters, even if the combat is not upper echelon. Dragon Quest 11 unfortunately is the worst of both worlds, with the gameplay the same as Dragon Quest 3 HD2D, but not as fine tuned, and a story far worse than Final Fantasy 11, and without interesting characters.
If you enjoy classic RPGs that added natural advancements, you'll love Final Fantasy 10. If you enjoy CLASSIC classic RPGs, you'll enjoy Dragon Quest 3 HD2D. I cannot in good faith recommend Dragon Quest 11. It has the bones of a good Dragon Quest entry, but it does so much wrong in so many ways, that it is trending in a bad direction for games. It's evil beauty is that it does a good job of masking it's bad decisions with quality of life issues and lifelong addicts. Dragon Quest 11 is like a cigarette. It looks cool, but it will slowly kill you.
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