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I'm playing this one right now. I'm 30+ hours in and not even sure how much more there is to go. At the shipwreck with the mermaid :/

I will say, there is a lot of optional crap to do. It doesn't seem like much at first, but eventually it really feels like a shallow grind, and the backtracking is a bit unbearable (like going back to get zoom locations, hit the 5 crossbow targets, etc.). I know some people enjoy this, but I'm already finding it tedious and grating.

I changed my mind - I have to stop playing. The game is just bad. I don't understand the 8.5 review score... it's just an average jrpg with a lot of negatives. The game actively gets worse the more you play it, and when I started reading other forums, I got the sense that I wasn't allow. Reviewers out to play past 15-20 hours :/

I'm a big Dragon Quest fan, been playing it since I got Dragon Warrior with my Nintendo Power subscription as a kid. So while the nostalgia was very strong with this game, I felt it was a little padded. I included it in my "best of 2018" stack, but it was a lot lower than I would've thought going into the year. I had no problem dumping tons of time into Dragon Quest VII and VIII (I spent more time on each of those) and XI screams high quality, so I can only assume it's because I've grown out of the ability to absorb the DQ world for that many hours. Too many of the subplots seemed unnecessary and were ultimately very boring for me. But I still really enjoyed the exploration, battle system, and overall world that it will remain a memorable game for me.

My experience is similar. I loved DQ8. I don't know how I would like it now - but I remember I came close to 100%-ing the game and was hooked. I also beat DQ9 on the DS as well. I thought 8 was better, but I remember doing a lot in that game too.

DQ11 just feels like it's sticking way too hard to the bad aspects of traditional JRPGs rather than moving on. Octopath Traveler has blended the old with the new, and kept only the good old parts, and that's what makes it good.

As I kept playing the open areas in DQ11, I couldn't help but feel that they were bland, repetitive and boring. All you do is look for sparkly spots and chests, and the only difference is the scenary. As the game went on, I just wanted to push through the areas faster and faster, and I felt like my disastification with the open world aspects was going to eventually punish me in the amount of gear, advantages and secrets I would miss out on that may or may not be necessary in the future.

I grew tired of the bad UI and menus. Why is everything under 'misc'? And why doesn't going into the menu pause the game? In fact, I couldn't figure out how to actually pause the game.

I know the optional content is "optional", but usually I enjoy doing it, and I do assess how good a game is by how good the optional content is. DQ11's optional content in its collect-a-thon nature is just boring, and the amount of forced backtracking really started to grate me. It wasn't challenging or anything - it's just all tedious. And what makes it worse is that the UI doesn't help you track your progress in any of it. Want to know which crossbow targets you hit on prior sessions? Well too bad - if you want to get all 5 and are being told that you're missing 1, you gotta backtrack to all 5 locations to double-check if you hit it or not, and there's no evidence of destroyed targets that is easy to see. To make matters worse, the arrow cursor that is supposed to pop up and target the crossbow target only shows up if your character is strictly looking in that direction, so even that red cursor is easily missed. The entire thing is just frustrating and pointless.

What I don't understand is that in 2018, we live in an era where AAA games that got 95% on metacritic can be obtained for $3-10 now. There is no point to pad out games with boring, unfun content, and yet DQ11 seems be revel in this as a virtue. Add in the casino token grind and all the other stuff... and I just had to put the game down.

I don't see that many redeeming qualities to DQ11. It has a really nice art style and excellent monster enemies - wow are they good. The characters are mostly good too. But that's all I really liked about the game. The story got blander and blander as I went on, and all of the open-world treking just started to grate me more and more that it just all felt like busy work. Even story elements want you to do so much walking around and backtracking.

I realize that the Zoom spell is there, but the game doesn't let you zoom to some pretty obscure parts of the map, like the smaller islands - which is pretty important if you're trying to complete the 5-target quest. I actually missed 1 of those targets, and omg I had to spend at least 30 minutes doubling my tracks to find the missing target. When I finally found it - on an island I had visited 3 days ago and forgot all about it - I realized that I just had to stop. This game punishes people with bad memories and/or people not playing it all in a single sitting.

And I know that this complaint is tired - but the music is really, really bad. It's not just the midi... the tunes are not really that good, and there's not a lot of variety. Every overworld has the same music. Every town has the same music. Like it's so low effort.

It's entirely possible if this was released instead of DQ8 many years ago, I would have had the same fond memories as I do for DQ8. Maybe my tastes have just changed too. But I really enjoyed Octopath Traveler. That game is very special to me, even in 2018. I really enjoyed it. Octopath Traveler has everything I would have wanted from DQ11, but doesn't have any of the drawbacks and things I hate about old-fasioned PS1-PS3 era JRPGs. It has great stories and characters, it has a lot of exploration, but it's just snappier, and I can honestly say in the same timespan that I accomplish a lot more and have more fun. All of the side content in Octopath Traveler is also fun too. There's actual problem-solving rather than just backtracking and grinding. My 72 hours in octopath traveler felt a lot shorter than the 35 hours I put into DQ11 :( And damn is the music in octopath traveler amazing... like omg it is good.

Anyway, I uninstalled DQ11 from my PS4 and put the box in my "do not touch ever again" pile. It's a shame. I was really excited for this game. I feel like for 35 hours, I really did get a sense of what the game was about, so I got that for my money I guess. But I don't feel like I need to keep playing, especially when most people say the game just gets worse the further you go :(

So sad.

Thanks for joining in on this bounty hunt for Dragon Quest XI: Echoes of an Elusive Age! It's always more fun to play through a game with a group, and it's great to have a community to share progress and strategies with.
As we embark on this journey, I'm excited to see what challenges we'll face and how we'll overcome them. And who knows, maybe we'll even find some rare dragon rings along the way! Keep an eye out for those, they could come in handy.
Let's work together and make our way through this epic adventure. Good luck to everyone on the hunt! https://dragon-vibe.com/