Dragon Quest XI: Echoes Of An Elusive Age

3DS, PC, PS4, Switch

Last month we suggested Octopath Traveler might have erred on the side of tradition once too often for its own good. Yet here’s a JRPG that makes Acquire’s game look positively avant garde. Even by Dragon Quest standards, this is an astoundingly conservative game – one that, for its first act at the very least, actively seems to lean into its genericness. Take its protagonist: a young man, abandoned as a baby and raised in a tranquil rustic village, who is quickly discovered to be the chosen one, a so-called Luminary destined to drive back some nebulous evil. Then comes tragedy, as the boy’s home is destroyed. Hunted by an evil king and his two knights, he escapes thanks to a thief with a heart of gold, eventually finding himself charged with finding six magical orbs that will allow him to access the Tree Of Life, Yggdrasil. Rituals are part and parcel of the genre, sure, but the option to don the garb of Dragon Quest VIII’s hero says it all. As we noted in E318, the series’ fans don’t really want a new Dragon Quest; they want another old one. Well, here it is, again.

After a clumsy into-the-screen escape and a stealth section so feeble it makes the equivalent in Zelda: The Wind Waker look like Splinter Cell, the game assumes a familiar rhythm. The opening act, inevitably, is about assembling your party. You’ve already got your archetypal all-rounder and your nimble thief, and so it’s no surprise when your next stop introduces you to a powerful mage and a healer. There are three more to come – at least before a second-act plot development all but pushes the reset button – though you’re limited to the standard four characters in battle. Unlike Octopath, however, you needn’t fret about levelling them separately – they’ll gain experience and skill points whether they’re fighting or not, and you can swap them in at any time, even during combat.

While in one sense that should speed things up – likewise, the ability to preset battle tactics for all party members, including the protagonist – tectonic plates have shifted faster than this. Missions are drawn out to the point of absurdity. Though the (unskippable, unpausable – unforgivable) cutscenes are generally well-acted and animated, there’s only so much a strong localisation can do to punch up the overwritten script. You are regularly sent on wild goose chases: the various baubles you’re tasked with obtaining have an annoying habit of being somewhere else. We’ve played enough JRPGs to expect to be waylaid by someone asking us to find their missing sibling, but on the third occasion we began to lose patience. Despite ostensibly labour-saving devices like fast travel, auto-run and optimised loadouts, it constantly finds ways to waste your time. On several occasions a cutscene will end, you’ll walk forward a few steps and another will begin, while one third-act costume change inexplicably prevents you from running. In one story mission you traipse from the town to the dungeon entrance and back twice, before it finally lets you enter on the third visit. Given how many quests conclude without having meaningfully developed plot or character, you’ll sometimes look back over the last hour or two and feel you’ve made no real progress.

At least you’re in good company. Your early rescuer Erik is a slightly bland but likeable right-hand man, and if healer Serena is a bit of a drip, her sister Veronica – trapped in the body of a young girl, an idea from which the game gets plenty of comic mileage – is wonderfully combative. We’re less fond of shriekingly camp trickster Sylvano, but the game perks up with the arrival of canny old Scotsman Rab and Amazonian warrior Jade. They each bring something appreciably different to the party, whether it’s Jade’s lithe acrobatics or Rab’s dark magic. Meanwhile a skill grid lets you choose between at least three different areas of mastery per character, meaning you can pursue a specialist path, or become a jack of all trades – and for a small fee you can reassign them if you change your mind. Yet it’s not until the final act that you’ll really feel the need to tinker, since regular encounters are often trivially easy: set everyone to ‘fight wisely’ and you can sit back and watch for the most part. You can make things harder for yourself by selecting a Draconian Quest option at the outset: selfimposing a rule that prevents you fleeing battles, perhaps, or one that won’t let you buy from shops. But then that would further stretch out a game that already feels like it’s dragging its feet. There aren’t enough surprises here, story-wise or otherwise. The ability to ride certain defeated monsters proves only fleetingly amusing: you’ll usually find them next to cliffs you couldn’t otherwise climb, or below platforms you need springy legs or flapping wings to reach, but you’ll be forced to dismount soon enough. Though Dragon Quest’s most significant plot development is unexpectedly dark, you already know it’s not the climax it’s being made out to be – leading to a set of missions that present you with objectives you’ve essentially already completed once before. And one supposedly shocking reveal is so transparent a five-year-old could guess it. In its defence, the game is aimed towards a younger audience – but then how to explain a subplot involving a magazine Rab splutteringly claims to read “for the articles”, or, for that matter, the camera’s habit of ogling its female cast?

For all our carping, there’s plenty to like here: an engaging cast, an oddly compelling forging minigame and a world that, for all its barriers and loading screens, feels vibrant enough to put in the effort to save. But that, you would think, is the bare minimum for a Dragon Quest game. Its makers – and many of its players – might see ‘old-fashioned’ as a compliment, but in covering such well-trodden ground, this isn’t much more than the echo its title suggests.

One supposedly shocking reveal is so transparent a five-year-old could guess it