Exactly what is say in the title. The point of the “One Hour Review” series is to figure out what a game is about and whether I’ll like it or not. In the case of Dragon Quest XI: Echoes of an Elusive Age, this was quite unnecessary. I won’t go so far as to say “All Dragon Quest games are the same,” but if you’ve played one, you know pretty much what to expect from all of them.
The turn-based battle system is the same, the moves are largely the same, the general feel, look and sound of the game is the same. The main difference is usually the story, major characters and the upgraded graphics between installments. Therefore the only point of checking out the first hour was to see whether I liked the story and characters or not.
In the first 30 minutes, we had a “chosen” baby get attacked by bad guys and swept away to a little village, then a time skip, then he becomes an adult and sets off to find his true destiny. That’s how far I got in the first few minutes, and that was enough for me… to decide I don’t feel like playing Dragon Quest XI for a while.
Don’t get me wrong; it’s clearly a very high-quality game. But it’s also clearly going to take a looong time to finish, and if it’s like the other Dragon Quest games I’ve played, I’m going to be visiting a lot of different towns and villages and solving all manner of minor and major problems as I inch slowly and painfully towards a conclusion. I’ve got to be in the mood for something like that, but after my long drawn-out experience with Dragon Quest VII, it’s going to take a while for me to get into that mood again.
What gives me the most pause is the battle system and the encounters. I’ll be honest, I’ve never liked the DQ battle system. It’s too clunky and repetitive, unnecessarily so. Encounters are also way too frequent in most of the games I’ve played, and if you do avoid grinding somehow, you’ll sooner or later run into That One Boss that expects you to have been beating every mob since level one to progress. I really have to be in the mood for that one.
Long story short, 30 minutes is enough Dragon Quest XI for me. I can tell it will be a good game, and maybe one day in the future I’ll be in the mood to play it. For now, it’s going way to the bottom of my backlog until the day I really need a solid, generic JRPG to sink my teeth into.
