u/ItsAndrewXPNintendo

Even though DQ 3 nearly broke Japan when it first came out, I wasn’t sure if I was the right target audience.

I recently played through 11 and thought it was great. My favorite aspects were its story, amazing personalities of party members, visible enemies that I can easily avoid, and the fast turn based combat.

With 3 hd2d, I saw that it was going to have a much leaner story, no personalities on the party members, random encounters (with pretty high rates), and traditional turn based combat that is more phase-based rather than acting immediately. So on paper, it did not sound like it was for me.

I honestly went in playing it for completionism since I am really looking forward to 2 HD2D…but I ended up loving every bit of 3 hd2d.

Its visuals were so amazing that I somehow even preferred it to 11’s full 3d visuals.

I grew up on Pokemon Gen 1-3 and Super Mario RPG, so I have a soft spot for 2d sprites. The character sprites with the 3d backgrounds, vibrant lighting, and beautiful animations really brought the game to life for me.

The story, while lean, felt serviceable for most of the game. BUT the ending was extremely amazing and bittersweet and actually made me tear up.

For the party members, I really enjoyed the ability to customize them and change jobs. I probably changed jobs too many times lol.

Thief (until mid 20s) > Priest (until 37 for Kazing) > Merchant (until 20 for Service Call) > Warrior

Priest (until mid 20s) > Gadabout (until 20) > Sage

Merchant (until mid 20s) > Priest (until 37 for Kazing) > Gadabout (until 20 for Sobering slap) > Martial Artist.

If I were to go back in time with the knowledge I have now, I probably would have made the Merchant (and possibly the Thief too) switch to Gadabout for 20 levels and then into Sages to get both Priest and Mage abilities until 37 instead of them initially being Priests. I just really wanted them to have Kazing for more guaranteed resurrection abilities.

It definitely would have been challenging leveling. I felt a lot of pain when I had a Gadabout and 2 priests and could not get the Green Orb with that party. So I grinded a lot until having everyone at their final jobs and crushed the boss fight.

It’s interesting that in the early game, it felt extremely punishing and difficult. But after doing all of those vocation changes, the game felt really easy. I loved that rewarding feeling of being powerful after hours of grinding.

I went into the game mostly blind besides for researching the jobs a tad bit. I didn’t know that Padfoot worked in dungeons and for some reason thought it only worked on the overworld like Holy Water. So until Alefgard, I fought every single enemy I encountered on the field, while sailing, and in dungeons. So dungeons took me a long time to finish until Alefgard lol.

I mostly played on Dragon Quest difficulty but I switched to Dracky Quest whenever I was farming metal slimes so that I could be watching YouTube on another monitor while playing and not worry about dying. I think that was a great QOL. It kind of felt like using a booster in the Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster games. Whenever I was done with grinding sessions, I would switch back to Dragon Quest difficulty to have that fear of possibly being killed in dungeons.

With this only being my second ever DQ game I’ve beat, it was nice that the spell names were consistent with 11 for the most part. So it was easy to jump into.

I did not play any of the post-game content yet because I’m just really excited to play DQ 1 and 2. After beating 2, maybe I’ll go back and do the post-game content for each of the hd2d games.

I think this game was a masterpiece and I’m very glad I gave it a chance. I now understand why the original game broke Japan back in the day!

Dragon Quest 11 has become my favorite game of all time! While it does have a few flaws, the satisfied feeling I got at the end of Act 3 after almost 170 hours in game is like nothing I’ve ever felt before.

In a world of brain rot and instant gratification, this was just the game I needed to give me real satisfaction.

Although I grew up on Pokemon and Super Mario RPG as a kid, I never really got too into JRPGs because I was too intimidated for some reason.

I recently played Chrono Trigger and it got me interested in both Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest.

After having played Final Fantasy VI on GBA, I decided to go with Dragon Quest 11 for my first game since that seemed to be the most common recommendation as an entry point.

**Story**

Interestingly, at first, I wasn’t too impressed. Everyone talked about how this was the greatest DQ game of all time, so my expectations were really high. The opening cutscene showing the birth of the Hero/Luminary was really cool, but I found the initial Cobblestone Tor (pseudo tutorial) to be just okay. I guess I was expecting it to be like Final Fantasy where big drama starts more immediately. I was not aware that DQ had a different, but arguably superior, approach to storytelling.

While the start was a bit slow, I realized that it was showing me the world and getting me attached to it. Since I grew so attached to the world in Act 1, Act 2 felt devastating and really personal.

All of the party members were great. I think they added a ton of depth to the game. Veronica was my favorite party member, >!so defeating Mordegon felt incredibly personal. I think he was a fantastic villain. Seeing that he was just a flawed human being that was seduced with power made him even more relatable. !<

I was a bit torn on Act 3 at first but ended up loving it. Act 2 was just so incredible. >! There was so much loss and everyone worked so hard to grow and recover from the devastation, so I felt like being able to just fix everything might have been cheap. !<

&gt;!In the end, it was great. I still had to leave behind the Act 2 world and accept that they would live in a world without the Hero. It’s just a game, but I had grown so attached to the world I just helped rebuild that I genuinely considered not going back and even kept a separate save file from before going back. Knowing that both Calasmos (thanks to Mordegon) and Mordegon himself were defeated in that timeline, I was comfortable with going back.

When solving the same issues in Act 3 (e.g. Erik’s sister Mia), their versions of the stories objectively had less depth since I was going back with more knowledge and just solve them almost immediately. I guess I like wish fulfillment because it felt satisfying for me to go back and fix everything. It even felt great to defeat Mordegon before he got fully powered up.

I preferred Mordegon as a villain to Calasmos since he more personally and directly affected the hero’s life, but it was also really cool defeating the ancient evil Calasmos that even Erdwin was not quite able to do.

Serenica’s fate was so tragic and saving her was my favorite person saved in Act 3.

I have not played any other DQ games besides for the first minute of DQ1 and 3 HD2D after purchasing them on sale a while back. Thankfully, since I at least played that much, I recognized the DQ1 hero drawing the sword and the DQ3 hero being woken up at the end! !<

**Combat**

Since I grew up on Pokemon, turn based combat is my favorite. While I did enjoy the ATB in Chrono Trigger and FFVI, I think that DQ11 might have my favorite battle system out of any game. I know that traditionally you queue up all 4 party members and then watch the battle commence (my only experience with this in gaming was Digimon World 2 on the Playstation), I think I prefer this.

But despite the combat being relatively simple: the pep system, variety of weapons, and large number of skills gives a pretty good amount of freedom on different play styles.

I like never dying, so I would often have >!Hendrik!< using Forbearance on every turn, Serena healing him on every turn as well, and then having 2 dedicated damage dealers safely attack.

The electro light leveling was interesting, so I ended up over leveling to level 99 making the >!Calasmos!< fight really easy.

**Crafting**

I kind of ignored the fun sized forge through most of the game since I wasn’t using a guide and was missing a lot of recipe books, but in Act 3 I felt like I spent more than half of my time crafting. I had a lot of fun farming materials and being too stubborn to not get a +3 on every single piece of gear before fighting >!Calasmos!<. I did not realize I was heavily over preparing. On top of being level 99, I also had +3 on the “best in slot gear” (according to another reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/dragonquest/comments/kiavqe/dragon\_quest\_true\_best\_equipment\_guide/). So it felt really rewarding to completely destroy >!Calasmos!< after my several hours of effort.

**World**

I think that they successfully made the world feel alive despite the story being mostly linear and the existence of invisible walls and buildings you can’t enter. It was mainly the NPCs and the party members that really excelled in this regard.

I think that the world maps were a bit too large, though. Even on horseback, it felt like there was a tad bit too much walking, but that is a minor nitpick. I’m sort of torn on that because it still beats most modern games that overly optimize everything.

**OST**

One of the few actual weak points of the game is the OST. I thought it was just me, but after maybe 30 hours into the game, I was getting so sick of the same Overworld theme. Thankfully, I found the Retro Music Mod that gave this game new life for me. I wish I had known about it from the start. I hope to never hear the DQ11 default Overworld and Battle themes ever again.

**Localization**

I played with Japanese audio which greatly helped, but I think another weak point of DQ11 is the localization.

Before I criticize it, I will give one example of a good change - Sylvando.
He uses “atashi” to refer to himself and refers to everyone with the “chan” honorific which doesn’t really have an equivalent in English. I think making him call everyone “darling” and “honey” were great alternatives to that and they managed to capture his fabulous spirit really well!

For negatives, the first is the written in accents. I researched and saw that this is just a staple of the DQ franchise. Many see it as giving flavor to the game and its different regions. Unfortunately, it just annoyed me. I think it was too over-done. If it was a lot more subtle, I would not have minded it. The problem was that it killed my immersion by reminding me I was playing a video game when I had to slow down to parse what the heck some NPCs were saying. It wasn’t enough to kill the experience, but it is easily the worst aspect of the game for me. It just kind of felt like the localizers took TOO much of a creative liberty and weren’t trying to make a good adaptation at that point. It felt like ego and that they were trying to put their mark on the game.

Second negative, which isn’t as bad as the accents, were the name changes.
Some made sense like Homerosu > Jasper, but with Hendrik why not just change Gureigo to “Greg”?
Changes like Emma > Gemma, Martina > Jade, Senya > Serena seemed pointless to me. Once again, does not really hurt the experience in game, but it did seem like weird changes for the sake of change.

**Steam Buttons**

Maybe nobody else ran into this specific issue, but I played the Steam version with an 8bitdo Controller with a Nintendo button layout. So it felt weird having Y open the menu and X open the map.
Of course the easiest solution was to just set per-game controller settings, but then the in-game glyphs did not match the controller.
I forked a “Switch Buttons Mod” mod by mike9k1 and swapped the X and Y buttons. So that mod in addition to my per-game controller settings resolved the issue I had.

It would have been nicer if there was just an in-game setting to re-map the X/Y button and not just the confirm/cancel buttons.

**Rating**

I gave this game a 9.5/10 (with the retro music mod).
If I played without the retro music mod, it probably would have been an 8/10 for me.

Even though I can’t give it a 10/10 due to the localization issues, it still is subjectively the greatest experience I’ve ever had playing a video game.

I guess I’m a Dragon Quest guy now! I am now off to play Dragon Quest 3 HD2D. I may come back and do a pseudo New Game+ (switch to 2d mode, switch back to 3d mode, select very first chapter) and then tackle the optional fights someday. But for now, I’m excited to play some more new Dragon Quest games!