I’m kinda curious to hear about late game complexity/options. I recently read a lot of commentary about the sheer depth and breadth of DQ7 (which I still don’t have an easy way to play, lacking a 3DS, and owing to the Android port’s continued nonexistence in the West), and know that a lot of that was cut back noticeably in 8. I never played 9 cuz I didn’t game much on my DS. . .
edit: curious to hear if anyone’s seen a review talking about that stuff, since, well, barring Scott, none of us are gonna be very far into this anytime soon :)
Notes:
Exit game actually exits the game, rather than taking you to the main menu where you have to exit again. This is a huge pet peeve of mine, so I’m happy.
Launching the game gets me into it very quickly, another good way to keep me wanting to play is not having to skip past a ton of splash screens.
Continuing your adventure gives you a splash page with the “what’s going on so far” which is a nice touch.
Windowed full screen seems to work excellently, except I don’t have a cursor until I tap the Windows key. Not a big deal, but note worthy.
Put a few more hours in, it’s super, super fun so far! I can’t get enough of the visuals, either, there is a lot to drink in with my eyeballs.
And I don’t mean to praise with faint damning, but the load times are so blazing fast I literally can’t read more than the first few words of the tool tips. And some of them seem worth reading, but it’s just not possible.
There doesn’t seem to be. Maybe that was a JP version thing? There is actually very little loading, and I literally mean when it loads it’s so fast I an only read the first 2 or 3 words of the tip. It’s crazy fast.
It seems like it might be possible to unlock the frame rate - someone on ResetEra found the line in .ini for frame rate and set it to 120 and claimed it worked. No idea if that’s true or if works but might break something or what, but it may be possible. I don’t really myself notice a vast difference between 60 the high end range, but I may test it out here in a bit.
It’s kind of hard with the hard monsters option enabled. But in a “oh, so you really wanted to grind” sort of way, I think. I’m at level 6 with the first companion and we’re supposed to heard through some forest. But right now I will basically exhaust non consumable resources in 2-3 fights tops. And if I just try to stick to auto attacks (with the primary character; I don’t have any other options on the other guy yet), I’ll probably wind up with a death (although I may get lucky) within that # of fights. Decided to buy the copper sword, and I’ve found a few armor upgrades. But it’s harder than a lot of DQ games at the start, as is.
I haven’t felt the need to grind so far, in fact I feel almost under leveled (probably because I have strong monsters on). I only lost one fight so far - a little bit of a boss battle (of sorts) that put us at level 7. I did splurge and spend 3 of my skill seeds to get a powerful sleeping stab abiliy for Erik though (effectively one level earlier, which isn’t really meaningful and I could have saved those seeds, I suppose), and I equipped the Healing and Mana recharge items I got as an Edition of Light bonus (I think) which replenish 2-3 hp and 1 mp (respectively) per turn, and that helps as I can have my hero toss a heal when needed and get some of the mp back. There is always a camp site nearby to rest at if needed, too. It’s been about right for me, difficulty wise, I think. So far, at any rate.
I recorded some gameplay but both times I tried to record the resulting video was choppy. Not sure why there, I’ll review this new one when it finishes rendering and see how it turns out, but I can upload it even if choppy if anyone wants to see what “strong monster” combat look like at level 6-ish.
Played it for a few hours. It is the polished perfect exemplar of Dragon-Questitude. I can see why reviewers expecting something new or different would be disappointed. But if you want to hear those old riffs on waking or leveling, if you want to fight slimes, break pots, collect mini-medals, and hear those crappy voice talent attempts at cockney accents, it’s all there. Really this could be Dragon Quest 8.1 or whatever, just with modestly better graphics. But that’s fine. Because lots of people really liked Dragon Quest 8.
Can someone tell me why I would play this instead of getting back into Ni No Kuni 2? I’m not trolling! As someone who thinks DQ only ever stood for “Dairy Queen”, I’m seriously curious what the answer would be.
This is a much more traditional (j)rpg in that it features turn-based combat, a party of (memorable, so far) characters that come together through story, a staggering amount of content to explore and no RTS pieces whatsoever. I played NNK2 for about 4 hours and had to make myself play the last session and didn’t have much fun - the combat is silly and meaningless, not tactical or interesting (as far as I got, to be fair) while I enjoyed this from the jump.
Dragon Quest has a huge history that I’m not really a part of (I only played the first one, Dragon Warrior, when I was a kid on my NES and then I played VIII on my 3DS last year and had a lot of fun with it) but I can appreciate adjacently. There is a lot to unpack here, and I’m probably the wrong person to try and sell anyone on Dragon Quest, but for what this is and what I’m in the mood for right now, it’s nailing it.
Dragon Quest is THE pure J-RPG franchise - a barometer for the genre itself.
It has always been a character driven pure fantasy game focused on exploration and monster killing and has avoided overly complex battle systems. It has also been great at giving experiences that give a sense of time progression over the course of the game (heck DQ5 spans 3 generations), which I think is pretty tough to pull off.
