Dragon Quest XI: Echoes of an Elusive Age is a beautifully designed game from story to gameplay construction. To boot, the game is absolutely gorgeous and is fun to watch in motion. The fact that you have easily over 70+ hours of gameplay (teetering on 100) makes the longevity of the adventure more memorable. This is how you make an RPG, and I hope that the good folks at Square Enix continue to develop the series the same way.
Way back in the PlayStation 2 days, I explored a Dragon Quest game like no other — Dragon Quest VIII. It was a fun distraction on a holiday trip to the in-laws. It was also one helluva adventure for a 2005 game, where my expectations were rocked. It was one of those games that I simply could not put down. I didn’t even try. Related, Dragon Quest VIII was coming out right around the time everyone was teetering toward a new age of RPG evolution, where action was replacing turn-based. Thankfully, Enix (now Square Enix) believed in the ‘old reliable’ method of building an RPG. Grinding out enemy fights, leveling up before going into any fight, and all the things you would want out of a traditional RPG that wore the shadow of the Phantasy Star’s of the world. It was old school for the right reasons and it worked incredibly well. I spent so much time playing that game and found it to be a refreshing old experience that was hard to find again in the next decade.
When I heard that Square Enix was on the way with a new Dragon Quest game this year, I couldn’t help but be excited, although I maintained some caution because nothing as good as DQVIII, at least in gameplay structure, could be maintained for all those years, right? With Final Fantasy rolling out, where it switched up from turn-based RPG to action RPG, and games like Zelda, which switched to an open world model, what chance did the Dragon Quest series have with maintaining its roots, while still pleasing people who were flowing with all this RPG change in the air? Thankfully, really thankfully, Square Enix didn’t try to fix what wasn’t broken with the series, and that is what makes Dragon Quest XI: Echoes of an Elusive Age quite good.
The gameplay structure of DQXI is as bare-bones basic as any good turn-based RPG. You start a fight, you go into it, take turns from side to side, have the option to choose technique before executing, and you go round and round with the enemies until one side is defeated. It is what made Final Fantasy (the first) great, Phantasy Star II memorable, and it works just as well with this release. You keep washing, rinsing, repeating the method until you gain enough levels to be dangerous against any foe. That also means you’re going to grind out the process of leveling, which is just fine. I spent the first 6-7 hours of the game killing every living thing in sight. I didn’t really start the story until about level 10 of my first character (the one you make and start with in the game). More leveling, means better attributes to the character. Better attributes to the character, means easier killing of the enemies. Easier killing, means more money and levels. All of this repeated means that, while you might feel like you’re taking an incredible amount of time, you’re slowly building up to a badass status. Believe me, grinding in the game is expected and it helps tremendously on your journey through the story.
That grind through the story just isn’t impactful on numerical leveling, but it’s also impactful to gain experience points that equal out to unlocking upgradable skills unique to each character via a skills tree. For example, my main character in the game that I created and named at the beginning has a tree that is broken up into categories such as “Sword” and “Great Sword”. Each branch has unlockable hexagon shapes, which have specific attributes attached to them, such as leveling up the strength of the great sword. As you progress through the tree, the hexagons demand more and more XP points, which keeps the grind more rewarding than exhausting. It’s a deep balance that makes the effort of the grind feel meaningful. It’s dangling a set of carrots in front of you that makes you forget you’re running your ass off. I’m sure there will be reviewers that will bitch about this gameplay structure, but honestly it’s perfect. Anytime you can motivate players to keep going and fighting, even if the process of maintaining the motivation equals out to repetitive gameplay, then it’s worth the grind.
Beyond XP, you also have a steady progression of offense/defense through out the game as well. Again, much like you’ve read over and over again, this is how a traditional RPG works. When you visit new towns during the story, or while you are exploring, you’ll run into weapon/armor sellers. Each new town brings with it stronger weapons and armor, thus progressing with your leveling. It’s incredibly balanced in this department, as is how much coin you can gather from defeating enemies as they get stronger, which plays into what you can and can’t afford. You have to appreciate that kind of balance because, as with the grind, you stay motivated in the game.
All of these moving parts on the backend to keep the player engaged is what makes Dragon Quest XI a good RPG, as well as makes it deeper when compared to traditional RPGs with this type of gameplay structure.
Shifting gameplay gears for a bit, let’s talk about the actual adventure. For the first 15-18 hours of the game, the adventure feels very restricted. The lands, while they’re gorgeous visually, felt like they were small-time in girth. This means that the world itself seemed like it was tiny, even though when you looked around you could see the land absolutely sprawling out. After the story shifts, and I’m not going to tell you any details of the story, around the 19-20 hour mark the land got big — super big. We’re talking about near Skyrim-like capacity. A piece of the story unlocks the world and you get to see the true size of the adventure, which opens up new lands, new enemies, and new opportunities to explore and enjoy. This is comparable to unlocking all the lands in Horizon Zero Dawn, as once you did unlock them, the game quickly became unrestricted and you knew to buckle up for the ride. Dragon Quest XI is no different when it comes to that feeling. The story progresses, the land unlocks and zooms out, and you know that you’re in for one helluva ride. It’s also comparable to that feeling I had 45 minutes into Mad Max Fury Road, where the characters journeyed out to nowhere, only to decide they have to go back the way they came and back into the arms of the enemy — it was a rush.
As adventures go, the game is a blast. There are some good multi-tier areas to explore, all colorful and different in culture. You get to meet different people with different backgrounds as you travel from land to land. For example, there was a land that was straight out of a dutch painting with giant windmills and endless fields of wheat. Then there was a land that was on the coast, in the same vein as Hawaii, that featured fishermen, sea creatures, and a different way of life. You see, it’s not enough that the devs gave you a land to explore, anyone can do that, but taking care and making every land a place of its own to make the world feel bigger is what makes this special. Even the enemies feel different from place to place. That’s some impressive detail when you’re appreciating it from afar.
Now, the story attached to the game helps to emphasize the need for different lands and cultures. You play a character that is on the run because you’re seen as a threat to the Heliodor throne and have been mistaken as the “Dark One”, which is slowly explained as the story unfolds. The need to keep running and moving through the game and occasionally running into Heliodor soldiers makes the story critical and more intense. That said, I’m going to tip-toe around the story because you should experience it yourself, and I don’t want to give anything critical away. I’ve erased more than a few sentences here during the review process to keep that information from you. Just know, there aren’t a lot of restful moments in the game’s story, but there is plenty of time to enjoy the story and world built for you.
That said, the game offers you up plenty of distractions to keep you from a non-stop chase-fest. Every village you happen upon in the game, you’ll find side quests inside of them. Some are easy to complete and almost self-contained, while others require you to take extended journeys to deliver goods to certain NPCs. The side quests are great distractions and sometimes equal out to meaningful rewards. You shouldn’t ignore any of them, if you can.
Aside from side quests, you also get things like casinos and exploration. I may have lost all my initial money in slot machines and hands of poker in the casinos. Of course, the casinos bring their own rewards, such as equipment, if you have the gumption to stay in them and gamble. It’s just like Vegas, so to succeed it depends on your ability to know when to hold ‘em and fold ‘em. The exploration part of the game is just you trying things and going places. While there are certainly boundaries in place, and you’ll find that with basically any RPG these days, DQXI really wants you to take in your surroundings. You will find chests and various other items laying across the landscape. Some of it is as simple as minerals, some of it is gold and items. Regardless, they’re usually useful things that you can use to build and grow your team while adventuring.
Speaking of minerals and useful things, there is a crafting component to this game. There are certain spots in the land, campfires specifically, that allow you to take all the minerals and objects you find and actually craft weapons/armor/items with them. The crafting isn’t simply mixing and getting something in return. Nope, rather Square Enix made the crafting a game by giving you a certain amount of ‘hammering’ to shape items. If you hammer in the right spots at the right time, with the right amount of strength, then you end up with an item. Sometimes that item is standard, sometimes it comes with added damage or protective bonus attached to it. The more you do, the better you get at it, and the better stuff you get from it. It’s a neat distraction outside of resting at the campfire and saving the game (which can be saved at religious statues and churches). All in all, it’s added cog in the Dragon Quest XI machine.
Pulling things back just a bit, on the AI side of the tracks, the artificial intelligence of the NPCs, both enemies and teammates, is brilliant. On the teammate side, my healer knew who to heal and when without me needing to control her or tell her. It was such a load off the mind. Sometimes it’s tough to play God with multiple characters, especially if you don’t trust the AI in the game, but no worries this time around. Putting faith in computer AI to know when to keep a team alive during a boss battle is a rare thing. It’s perfected here in DQXI. I trusted my healer and trusted my teammates to do what I needed to win. Related, the enemies knew when to attack, when to take advantage of a hurt player, and when to retreat. The enemies were just as methodical as the cohorts in the game, which made for a strategically wonderful time.
Overall, Dragon Quest XI: Echoes of an Elusive Age is a beautifully designed game from story to gameplay construction. To boot, the game is absolutely gorgeous and is fun to watch in motion. The fact that you have easily over 70+ hours of gameplay (teetering on 100) makes the longevity of the adventure more memorable. This is how you make an RPG, and I hope that the good folks at Square Enix continue to develop the series the same way.
