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Let's talk about the best JRPG ever made. Dragon Quest XI was released in Japan in 2017, and then worldwide in 2018. An enhanced version, known as Dragon Quest XI S: Definitive Edition was released some time later and is available on basically everything: Nintendo Switch, PS4, and Xbox--it's even on Game Pass! Dragon Quest is a hugely popular and influential RPG franchise in its home country, but it's never quite caught on in the same way in the anglosphere. For a long time, I was like most other western gamers, aware of the existence of the franchise but never actually trying it. In April 2020, locked in my apartment, I downloaded the demo, and then almost immediately bought the game, and played it obsessively all the way through. Recently, stoned and bored and scrolling through Game Pass, I downloaded the game again, expecting to slide right off. Thirty hours of gameplay later, I'm about to cross a major story threshold (if you've played the game, you know the one). The game is that good. A lot of the earliest video game RPGs strove to capture the feeling of playing Dungeons & Dragons with your friends. Games like Akalabeth or Wizardry are basically just a dungeon dive from D&D, Ultima is an open world full of adventure, the Gold Box games are complex with shifting narratives and player freedom. Dragon Quest I, a game I have since gone back and played all the way through (seriously, the phone version is the best bathroom game ever made), tried to capture the particular D&D feeling of going on a quest. Dragon Quest XI is that, filtered through thirty years of technological advancement and improvements in game design. It is the best D&D game I have ever played. It is very difficult to capture in words just what makes Dragon Quest XI so great. I could talk about the combat system, simple to learn but complex to master, that continually adds new wrinkles for the entire duration of this monstrous adventure. I could talk about the main cast, characters full of life and personality, who constantly surprise and delight with every new twist and turn of the narrative. I could talk about the world design or the forging system or the episodic nature of the story or the frankly refreshing focus on "there's a bad guy out there, you need to stop him" in the main story. Heck I could even just link you to Tim Rogers's now-classic DQXI review--seriously, go watch it sometime. But I think most of all the thing that makes DQXI is the vibe. Part One: The Vibe Every other Wednesday, four friends and I meet up and play our biweekly game of Blades in the Dark, a tabletop RPG about criminals in a dying Victorian fantasy world. A single session is generally fairly rote: the players figure out something their crew needs. I list a few possible places they might find it, they pick one, and then they go and get it. Over the course of the game, however, they've developed memorable moments, in-jokes among characters, recurring villains, growing story arcs, and more. This, to me, is the core of a good tabletop RPG experience: simple stories that slowly build to something more. Dragon Quest XI is that, but as a video game. You play as the Luminary, a descendant of the hero of old, born to fight back against the Dark One. However, the Luminary himself is extremely roughly-sketched in the narrative. For one, he has no name (I named him Hero, because I have no creativity). Second, he's a silent protagonist throughout the entire game. This is not Final Fantasy where you play as Cloud Strife, the spiky-haired ex-AVALANCHE soldier fighting back against Shinra. You play as, well, you. No, there's no character creation system like Skyrim, but that's ok. The Luminary's design is intentionally bland, just interesting enough to be distinct while still allowing a lot of room for you to project your own ideas of who he is onto him. Your friends, on the other hand, are not that. Erik is a spiky-haired anime protagonist, a thief with a heart of gold, a person thrust into bad situations through no fault of his own. Veronica and Serena are spellcasting sisters, full of faith in the light of the Luminary, there to build you up and support you without ever letting you become full of yourself. Rab and Jade are martial artists with a flair for the arcane, and their relationship to the hero--well, I won't spoil it. And then there's Sylvando. Sylvando is so great that he gets a special shout-out in every review of Dragon Quest XI. It's the law. Sylvando is, in pure RPG terms, the bard of the party. He's an acrobat and entertainer, he gets the buff and debuff spells, and his function in the story is pretty much to remain happy when everyone else is miserable. He is also an extremely catty gay man, leaning into every stereotype just enough to feel believable without ever looping around to offense. Together, you and your six friends travel the world, visiting towns, taking in the local culture, until you get mixed up in some kind of crazy quest. Maybe the Doge's son has gone missing and you have to find him. Maybe you shipwreck and encounter a mermaid, pining over a human she fell in love with. Maybe there's a weird mural that clearly has something else going on beneath the surface, and you need to solve that mystery before more tourists disappear. You finish the adventure, maybe learn a little something else about the world you live in or the Dark One you're hunting or your traveling companions, and then you're on to the next adventure. All of this is then tied together with beautiful art directed by Akira Toriyama of Dragon Ball fame, which always helps keep you in this same chill adventuring vibe, even when the story turns dark. Which it absolutely does. Part Two: The Story You'd be forgiven from the artwork, trailers, and early hours of the game for believing that the story of Dragon Quest XI is simple and uninteresting. I would probably agree with the descriptor "simple", although to call the story "uninteresting" is to do it a disservice. Let's dissect that. Note that I'm going to be talking about some spoilers in here: if the game has seemed interesting to you, read as little of this as possible. Don't hesitate to read it some so that you can get a sense that yes, the game is actually going somewhere, but once your interest is piqued, stop reading and go play it. The game opens like so many stereotypical fantasy games with you as a kid from a small town who receives a very Hero With A Thousand Faces-style call to adventure. It is clichéd, but for the sake of efficiency. You're going on an adventure and the "why" isn't super important. Go adventure. Within these opening hours the game throws its first twist at you: on arriving in the city of Heliodor, where you are due to meet the king who will send you on your way, the king instead proclaims you to be the Darkspawn, whose coming heralds the arrival of the Dark One, and you are immediately arrested and thrown in prison and scheduled to be executed. Obviously, you escape, but for the next several dozen hours you are continually pursued by his two loyal knights, Jasper and Hendrik, setting in motion plot threads that won't be fully wrapped up for a very long time. This is, in a word, unexpected. The thing that DQXI presents itself as, a completely unchallenging JRPG with a simple story, simply isn't what the game actually is. Don't get me wrong, it is cozy in the same way your favorite beach-read fantasy novel is cozy, but the heroes of Dragon Quest XI go through just as much turmoil as the heroes of whatever book that is. Nowhere is this as clear as the ending of the first act of the game. This occurs roughly thirty hours in, and this is definitely a major spoiler, but I present it so that someone who does not believe this game goes places can see that no, it actually does. The first act is all about the aforementioned adventure--you travel from place to place, solving minor problems, and slowly acquiring macguffins that will allow you to access Yggdrasil, the world tree, upon whose branches each life in the world is a leaf of the tree. There rests the Sword of Light, the only way you can hope to defeat the Dark One. You acquire all of these orbs, ascend to Yggdrasil, reach the Heart of the World Tree, find the Sword of Light and then immediately get ambushed by the first-ever time you see the villain, who roundly defeats you, corrupts the Sword of Light, and then kills the World Tree, thrusting the world into eternal darkness. The entire second act is the ramifications of this moment, and the postgame third act involves literal time travel to undo it. The story is wild and I highly recommend anyone who likes a good Saturday morning cartoon or lengthy fantasy epic to check it out. Yes the game is long, but the story wouldn't work in a tight twenty hours. Part Three: The Game I've spilled a lot of words here about the story and the tone of the game, but not about the game itself. JRPGs with good stories have come and gone, but on some level a game needs to be fun to play, especially if it's going to be as long as DQXI. Thankfully, the game delivers in spades. At the core of the gameplay is the battle system. It is at once very simple--you've seen a million battle systems exactly like this--but it is so perfectly polished and balanced that it shines. Every one of your party members has a unique role in combat, and every one of them interacts with every other one in interesting ways. Enemy designs are memorable and creative, and the composition of different types of enemies is a masterclass in forcing different strategies for the most efficient wins. And, if you get tired of the battle system for a bit and just want to turn your brain off and grind, there's an extremely simple but effective autobattle system. Seriously, don't feel bad about using it. I use it for almost every random fight and then turn it off for boss fights. It's fine. As characters gain experience and level up, you can unlock new perks on, essentially, the Sphere Grid from FFX or the License Board from FFXII. They're much smaller skill trees, however, meaning that it's much easier to see where you are and how your build is progressing. Additionally, hidden skills become unlocked as you unlock other skills, and new abilities come at a fast clip--especially since a lot of abilities are automatically gained by leveling and aren't just gained through the skill tree! Plus, you can respec for a modest fee at any save point, encouraging experimentation. Wonder what happens if you spec Serena to use spears instead of focusing on healing? You can totally do that, and then bail if you don't like how it feels. Equipment is also great. You'll find some equipment out in the world, and the game constantly drip-feeds you new gear in stores across the world. To get the best gear, however, you'll need to engage with the crafting system. Using materials you'll find throughout the game, you can play a simple strategic minigame to make new gear. Even if you do badly you'll still get the gear, and if you do well you'll get enhancements make the gear even better. Plus, each time you play the minigame you get Perfectionist Pearls, which you can use to attempt to reroll a piece of equipment--and if you fail, you get the equipment back just as it was! And, when you're making something new, if you don't have one of the crafting materials you need? You don't need to go get it. You can buy it right from the crafting screen. The main thing about the game itself though is that there's just so much of it. You can play the main story for upwards of 100 hours, and then if you hit the New Game button, you can enjoy the whole thing all over again and make new decisions the whole way. The narrative of the game might be strictly linear, but the way in which you engage with that narrative is anything but. It is a DM who railroads you on the main story but lets you run wild with everything else. Play the game how you want. It's fine. Part Four: Everything Else I could keep talking about this game forever. I could talk about how the world feels huge but fully hand-made and how every NPC is just so happy to be an NPC and give you new quests to do or pieces of lore to tell you or new loot to guide you towards. Or I could talk about how the game is full of great quality-of-life features: need to heal your team to near-full while on the overworld? Open the menu and hit the, uh, left face button (Y on Switch, X on Xbox, Square on PS) and you'll instantly heal. Need to heal your team all the way? Open the menu and pick Heal All. Need to unlock multiple skills at once with a respec? There's an option for that. Need to fast travel? There's a spell for that, and it doesn't even cost mana. The Definitive Edition in particular is chock-full of this stuff, and I think it's the version you should play. It adds a run button, which is amazing. You can use the forge anywhere, not just at campsites. You can change the battle speed. You can even set the entire game to play in a SNES-style 2d art style, if you want (I don't recommend it but hey, there you go). And there's a huge extra sidequest full of references and nostalgia for the other games in the series, if you're into that. Oh, also the Definitive Edition includes the Draconian Quest options, which are basically modifiers you can apply to your game at the outset. You can turn these off in-game, so feel free to experiment with them, knowing you don't have to rely on them. I personally recommend Townsfolk Talk Tripe, where townspeople will randomly tell you little white lies and then see if they tricked you (and is surprisingly funny!) and also Reduced XP From Easy Fights, which in my opinion significantly decreases my desire to grind. Try them yourself! Part Five: Conclusion DQXI is a masterpiece of game design, of interface design, of story design, of character design, of world design. It is the D&D quest you want, a hero's journey you get to play yourself, a quest in the most literal sense imaginable. If any part of you has ever wanted to travel the world and find new weapons and kill screaming monsters on your way to stop a great evil, well, this is the game for you. Yes it's long, but so is a fantasy saga or a TV show or a movie series. Settle in and let the game work its magic. Trust me on this one. quiggy fucked around with this message at 20:16 on Dec 2, 2021 |
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Dec 2, 2021 20:09
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bewilderment posted:There's one big thing dragging down DQXI for me and that's the music. The music is probably the worst aspect, true. That said the Definitive Edition at least has an orchestral soundtrack (and a synthesized one if you prefer it for whatever reason) and the soundtrack isn't bad per se, just weak.
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Dec 7, 2021 14:14
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You could probably do this for any game in this series, but let's do this one. Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate is an action RPG released in Japan in August 2017 under the name Monster Hunter XX (pronounced "double-cross") and August 2018 internationally for the Nintendo Switch. To understand MHGU, its appeal, and its impact, it's probably necessary to start with Monster Hunter as a series and go from there. Part One: Monster Hunter, the Series Monster Hunter began on the PS2 with the 2004 release of the same name. While the series has seen a lot of changes and refinements from that first game up through the modern releases Monster Hunter World and Monster Hunter Rise, the core gameplay loop remains functionally identical. Players take on the role of a nameless hunter who works for the Guild, an organization of hunters that works to keep communities in this world safe. In the world of Monster Hunter, the wilds are full of huge, terrifying, and profoundly dangerous monsters, and it's your job to, well, hunt them. The core loop looks like this: in town, a Guild representative offers a wide range of quests, most of which are of the "Hunt an X" persuasion. After selecting a quest, choosing your equipment and items, eating a meal, and maybe gathering with other hunters online, you set out into one of several regions, find your target, and either kill or capture it. Once the monster is defeated, you return to town with loot in the form of gathered items and monster parts, the latter of which you can give to a blacksmith NPC to turn into better weapons and armor to hunt bigger and more dangerous monsters. Not unlike Pokemon, the Monster Hunter games are generally considered to exist in generations, with each generation largely sharing certain gameplay mechanics and technical advancements compared to generations prior. However, unlike Pokemon there's no equivalent of versions: there's no Monster Hunter Tri Red and Monster Hunter Tri Blue, just Monster Hunter Tri. Prior to (and during the earlier years of) the DLC era, games in the series would get pseudo-sequels usually subtitled either G or Ultimate, that included expanded and refined versions of the base game as well as an entire new tier of monsters called G-Rank, that extends the endgame and difficulty significantly. Already long games with frankly embarrassing amounts of content, it is not uncommon for diehard fans of the series to spend hundreds or even thousands of hours on an Ultimate version. The Monster Hunter series biggest overhaul was 2018's Monster Hunter World, which kept the core gameplay and compulsion loop but dramatically overhauled the aesthetics and non-combat gameplay to appeal to Western audiences. While they were working on that game, however, Capcom decided to celebrate the four generations of the series that had already come out, leading to 2015/2016's Monster Hunter Generations, of which MHGU is its Ultimate version. Part Two: MHGU and an Embarrassment of Riches There's a lot of ways to measure the size of a Monster Hunter game, but maybe the best way is to look at the number of so-called large monsters, the monsters that form the targets of the majority of hunting quests. The original game had a paltry 17 large monsters. Monster Hunter 3 Ultimate, my entry point to the series, had 52. MHGU has an astounding 93 large monsters, far more than any other game in the series, spread across Low Rank, High Rank, and G-Rank. Keep in mind that a hunt usually takes at least 10 minutes and against larger, more dangerous monsters can easily take half an hour or more, and that players will be hunting each monster several times to get the pieces they need, and you can begin to get a sense of the scale of this game. Mind you, not ever monster a winner--Capcom pulled deep from the series backlog for some of these fights, and in some cases did not get the chance to overhaul them as much as you might want for a new iteration of the games. Still, the vast majority of the monsters in the game are wonderful, and they even added a bunch of new monsters for series veterans to cut their teeth on, including the flagship Fated Four (Gammoth, Astalos, Glavenus, and Mizutsune), a new elder dragon called Valstrax, and the final boss Ahtal-Ka. MHGU also brought all 14 weapon types from fourth generation in, each bringing its own unique mechanics and playstyle. Want to play defensively and have the easiest access to items of any weapon? Try sword and shield. Want to flip and jump over enemies? Try insect glaive. Like having a big fuckoff sword that does big numbers? That's greatsword. Want to hang back and shoot a gun? You've got two options, the light bowgun and heavy bowgun. No matter what you like from action games, I guarantee there's something here you'll love (I use the switch axe, an axe that transforms into a sword. It rules!) On top of the weapon types, each weapon features six different "hunter styles", which change the gameplay in various ways. Guild Style is the closest thing to a default and closely resembles the gameplay in earlier iterations. Striker Style focuses on offense, Valor Style focuses on defense, and Adept Style focuses on dodging. Rounding out the styles are Alchemy Style, which lets you fill a barrel with stuff to get various interesting effects, and my personal favorite Aerial Style, that lets you jump all over the monsters and just generally ignore gravity. Oh but we're still not done with hunter customization! You also get access to "hunter arts", weapon-specific super moves you can equip and unequip in town to serve various utilities in fights. These can range from quick reload abilities for weapons that need it, powerful dodges that sharpen your weapon as you perform them, and ultimate abilities that dish out huge damage at a cost of leaving yourself vulnerable and exposing yourself to long cooldowns. And also the game continues the core customization of the series at large: your armor is composed of five pieces (head, chest, arms, waist, and legs), each piece of which carries points for/against certain passive skills, letting you either rely on a set from a specific monster for abilities that align with that monster's general theme, or letting you mix-and-match to produce your own overpowered combinations. Weapons carry a large number of variations even within a single weapon class, meaning that just because you and your friend are both longsword users, you might be playing very different games. Did I mention you can swap out all of this customization for free whenever you're back in town? Because you can. You can play this game however you want, and you can play it forever. Part Three: Hunting MHGU's hunts closely resemble those of all the games prior to it: you spawn into a large map made of individual zones. In Low Rank you'll always spawn into a camp area with a few items available to help you, but in High and G Rank you'll usually spawn in some random area. Your target monster spawns somewhere too, depending on where they nest in that region. You'll pick these up over time, which I think feeds into the central fantasy of the series: you aren't just playing a video game, you are hunting monsters, and over time you will pick up on tons of tricks to make your job just that little bit easier. Monster fights are often compared to the Souls series, being focused on big scary enemies, deliberate animation-driven combat, and harsh penalties for death. In most quests, three deaths across all party members will fail the quest. The game rewards learning enemy animations and behaviors--for example, many monsters are weak to certain status effects or items, so bringing in the ability to exploit those weaknesses can make those hunts easier. Struggling against Rathian? Throw a flash bomb at her when she's flying and she'll fall to the ground stunned, giving you time to get a few free hits. Fighting a Zinogre? Be sure not to use a shock trap on it, or you'll power it up! This has always been and will likely always continue to be the core of the Monster Hunter experience, and MHGU nails it better than any other game in the series. You will hunt so many monsters that by the end of the game you'll remember when you running in terror from an Arzuros and laugh--at least until you're fighting a G Rank Deviant Arzuros and it completely dumpsters you. Do you want a game made up almost entirely of Elden Ring-quality bossfights that you can play with your friends, where there's so much content that you'll never 100% the game unless you're completely insane and have thousands of hours to dedicate to it? Monster Hunter Generations Ultimate is your game. Conclusion I didn't even mention the Palicos, cat followers you can train and take on hunts with you, and can even play as a cat if you want. And I didn't mention the surprises the elder dragon fights have in store for you, even if you're a series vet. There's just so much to the game that it's impossible to do anything more than scratch the surface in a forums post--and we wouldn't have it any other way. Play Monster Hunter. quiggy fucked around with this message at 21:21 on Aug 4, 2022 |
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Aug 4, 2022 21:19
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