DRAGON QUEST® XI S: Echoes of an Elusive Age™ - Definitive Edition

TL;DR: a strong game that lands squarely in the "must play" category for any diehard fan of classic JRPGs, it suffers however from a few rather unfortunate narrative fumbles in the last third of the game. It was not nearly enough to ruin the game as a whole for me, but my friends did receive a couple incensed rants on the matter so make of that what you will. Positives: + The characters are all well written and charismatic. They won't win any "Most Complex Character Of The Century" awards, but do they really need to? + The character and monster designs are generally great- aside for the babies, which are monstruosities that should have never seen the light of day. + The orchestral soundtrack is amazing, and hearing the trademark Dragon Quest refrain played by a real orchestra was a borderline religious experience for me. + The english dub is good and, for the italophones reading this, the italian translation is frankly better than anything ATLUS has ever put out. Which is a low bar, but hey. + The gameplay runs smooth, and while the story beats aren't particularly complex or shocking if you've ever played any jrpg before, the narrative is still perfectly functional (well, mostly. But we'll get to that) and rather endearing in several points. + You can be a confirmed bachelor with Erik. + Square Enix once again preys on your nostalgia not just by allowing you to visit a few maps from older Dragon Quest games, but also by allowing you to play the entire game as if it were a pixel-art 2D demake. Yes, this edition is basically two games in one, it's actually kind of wild. Negatives: - The animation is pretty good for the most part, but it can occasionally turn rather stiff. Not a major problem by any means, but it was noticeable. Also, while I personally liked the look of the pre-rendered cutscenes, several people have complained about the designs teetering a bit too close to the uncanny valley. - While act 1 and 2 are unanimously considered pretty damn great by the fandom, act 3 is... controversial, to say the least. And for a good reason. No, I don't believe grinding to be inherently an issue in a Dragon Quest game- it'd be like going to a grill restaurant and complaining that there's meat on the menu- and I do think that act 3 can mostly pull its own weight. Dare I say it? I even appreciate the basic concept behind it, and might have genuinely thought it the best part of the game had they gone at it differently. Starting this act at all does, however, come at the cost of what somehow manages to be simultaneously a cheap, defanged fix-it fic of itself and utter psychological torture for the main character, in a mixture that only really works when you try not to think too hard at the logistics of how it came to be to begin with, especially with some particularly baffling scenes that need some extra mental gymnastics on the player's side to be justified as anything but a plot hole. There IS a reason act 3 is a massively popular candidate for novelizations and rewrites on ao3, and it's not Serena's cute devil costume. That being said, when it came down to it I hated it far less than I feared after reading the reviews, if simply because of the sheer amount of stuff to do. No, seriously, there is a LOT of content in this part of the game and some of my favourite scenes in the game were in it, so while I will never be an act 3 fan I can't quite bring myself to outright denounce it as bad, either. (This doesn't apply to the cutscene with [REDACTED] in the Tower of [REDACTED] after the final boss, which is just an awful attempt at fanservice that muddies even more the waters when it comes to how in tarnation do reincarnation, holy powers and spacetime even WORK in this game, and I refuse to consider it canon.) - There is no blackjack in the casino, I changed my mind this game sucks