I keep a Google Doc with a list of upcoming games of interest each year. And on that Doc, I've had Dragon Quest XI listed for quite some time. It seemed like one of the "big ones" for 2019. I guess because it was a new Dragon Quest game that was coming to console rather than just 3DS.
Generally speaking, if I'm already interested in a game, I don't bother with a demo. I tend to want to just wait for the full release. But this time was different. See, Dragon Quest XI's demo is estimated to be around ten hours long. And here's the thing: I'm not actually a huge Dragon Quest fan. I played the original game a ton as a kid, but only dabbled with II and III on GBC later. I played V on DS but lost interest after eleven or so hours. And VIII - often considered the best in the series - I tried starting twice over the years and lost interest very quickly. So here's the thing; as generous as a ten hour demo is, it's totally possible that that's all I'll need for this game. I have to admit up front that I'm a much bigger fan of the Final Fantasy series. You can argue that the Dragon Quest games are 'better' games with 'better' stories, but I don't know. Something about the varying quality of Final Fantasy has always just struck me as more interesting and unique. The other big thing I need to admit is this: I don't care for the art in most Dragon Quest games. The way the characters look? Not for me. It's that same artist that made Dragon Ball Z right? Yeah. I'm not into that look. At all. Which says nothing about how the game plays, but just saying. Anyway, I've played maybe 40 mins of the game so far and I'm mixed on it so far. The world is really pretty. The slimes are super cute. Unfortunately, the 2D mode is absent from the demo so that kills that for me. But it seems... alright. A little too talky right now, which is making it really slow to get going. Essentially, it's been walking in a straight line through some caves and fighting two or three slimes at a time. Fairly boring. And the leveling is slow. I'm sure it picks up as there are fans out there who I know that have gushed about the PS4 release and put in over a hundred hours. So we'll see. ... For some reason I decided to fire up that Dragon Quest XI demo again. And y'know what? I'm glad I did. I'm about two hours in now and it's actually picked up quite a bit and is a way better game than my first impression gave it. Granted, I went in with low-ish expectations and only had played about thirty minutes. But still. What I found interesting was this - there's the usual trope of "you're the Luminary" and you need to go talk to a king or whatever. You know the old cliche in RPG's of how you're the "chosen hero" or whatever? But when you get to the king he's like "no! Dude! The Luminary is a bad omen! You gotta die!" I'm paraphrasing. But I don't know, turning that trope on its head seems interesting. Setting up tactics and letting the battles play out makes grinding feel brisk. I'm level 5 now. And I've got a second party member, Erik. So yeah. I'm enjoying it more now. I think I'm gonna do some grinding for new gear for a bit. I might even do some side quests to make this demo last. Apparently the demo is about ten hours or so, and we'll see how much fun I can get out of it without paying $60. ... After spending some more time with this demo, I have to say that Dragon Quest XI is so good that it's actually making me retroactively like the Dragon Quest series even more as a whole. The more I think about it, yes I was more into Final Fantasy on NES than I was Dragon Warrior... but Dragon Warrior has enough nostalgia for me that I rebought the game three times - on GBC, and later Android, and again on the Switch eShop. And while playing Dragon Quest V and Final Fantasy IV on DS back-to-back was borderline stupid, I had a lot of fun with Dragon Quest V - and I'll always remember that game as something I played in waiting rooms while bringing my wife to doctor's appointments when we were expecting our daughter. Yes, the more I play Dragon Quest XI, the more I'm thinking about the series as a whole. The more I want to look into the rest of what I've missed. There's something about this game sort of being the perfect Dragon Quest game that's made me appreciate the series. And that's a good thing. Even the art style. For years I've talked about how I don't care for the art. I'm not a fan of Dragon Ball Z, so I've always been turned off by the look of the Dragon Quest games and Chrono Trigger and so on. But all of a sudden, it's like it makes sense here. The Dragon Quest games are a very manga take on the very western Dungeons & Dragons tropes. All the sudden that makes these monsters and heroes look more charming to me with that in mind. I'm still a bigger fan of Final Fantasy as a whole. But part of what draws me to that series is that it's kind of a mess. There's some baffling decisions and some truly bad games and that can make for interesting exploration. Will this be a good Final Fantasy or a bad one? Dragon Quest on the other hand, I mean Dragon Quest XI is a SLOW burn for sure, but the writing is insanely good. The pacing is quite obviously intentional. I'm really glad I've given this game another chance. It seems like the kind of game I could play 'forever.' Like Breath Of The Wild, it's the sort of game I might play in thirty minute spurts for months. Or I might binge several hours during a storm. Or I might drop it for months and then come back to it fully invigorated. I think this might be the most perfect Dragon Quest entry - even for someone who's played a few of them in the past but took them for granted. ... Okay, so Dragon Quest XI is turning out to be one of my favorite modern JRPG's in a long time. I think the last one I got this into was Octopath Traveler, but that felt like more of a throwback. This is like a truly modern take, and versus a lot of the stuff I've played such as recent Final Fantasy entries or Shining Resonance Refrain, This game blows that stuff out of the water. The world is huge - along the lines of Breath Of The Wild. Probably even bigger. And yet things are thrown at you at such a pace that everything feels just right. I was three hours in when the crafting mechanic was introduced. At first I rolled my eyes. I hate crafting in games. And yet... It's so good that I actually spend time trying to perfect the stuff I was crafting. They've streamlined everything here. Don't have enough found-crap to craft what you want to craft? No problem! Just pay for the ingredients. Thank you, Square Enix. Thank you. And even the tropey stuff is well thought out. We got back to Cobblestone, our hero' s hometown and everything looked normal except nobody remembers me. Guess what? It's a fever dream. The village was burned to the ground in our absence and we're talking to ghosts. All of this was revealed with trippy VHS artifacting. It was awesome. I love this game. I love that it reminds you what you last did when you fire it up so you don't forget where you were in the story. I love that you can find in-menu what your goals are for each quest. I love battling. I love the gigantic world. I love the freedom. I love that I'm four hours into a demo and that's not even half. A physical copy of the game is on my wishlist now. I'll be happy to pick up a copy once the demo has run its course. ... Well, I finished the demo which is kind of a bummer. It took me under six hours to get through the demo, although I didn't do any side quests. As it stands, Dragon Quest XI is one of the best RPG's I've played in a long time. And I look forward to delving back in once I pick up a retail copy. ... Nearly ten months after playing through the big demo, I've just now fired up Dragon Quest XI's actual physical copy which has been sitting on my shelf for a while. I don't know, something about the Thanksgiving holiday made me feel like playing some quality dungeony, dragony RPG. I was worried that I'd forget what was going on from when last I played, but thank goodness there's a little recap when you fire up a save. Soon enough I was transported to an area in which I was in a 2D world. And then I went off on a quest that was... OMG... I recognized where I was. I was in a village from the original Dragon Quest. Absolutely stunningly brilliant, this game. After that I met a prince and pretended I was him to win a horse race and impress his parents and the village, and then we set off to kill some big mythical creature that he was too scared of. In the few hours I played last night, I was immediately reminded just why I loved the demo so much. And man, really this few hours even raised the bar on that demo. This game is incredible. Easily my favorite Dragon Quest game (though I haven't played all the mainline games yet admittedly). But wow. This isn't just a really good Dragon Quest game, it's one of the finest, most well crafted JRPG's I've ever played. This game feels like a defining RPG of the generation. ... I've been playing Dragon QuestXI all week while I've been on Christmas vacation. It's become a before bed routine to bang out some progress. I've seen mermaids and demons trapped in paintings and ice witches and you name it. This game does an incredible job of throwing a million things at you all while keeping the pace brisk. I'm not sure how close I am to the end of the main campaign. I've seen the great tree fall if that's any indication. But I have so many superlatives to lob at Dragon Quest XI already. It's one of the best Dragon Quest games I've ever played; one of the best JRPG's I've ever played; one of the best of this generation; etc, etc etc.
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It's crazy to me how ubiquitous Fortnite is with gaming these days. Like when I was a kid if you said you played video games, you pretty much just meant NES. Or you might have used "Nintendo" as another word for "video games" as a whole. About a decade ago it seemed like Minecraft was the game that every kid played. But for the past few years it's been Fortnite. To the point that the game is pretty much a platform within itself. It doesn't really matter if you play it on console or PC or phone or whatever. You can play the game, or you can go watch a DJ set or whatever. It's weird.
I can also remember when Fortnite (full title; just vanilla Fortnite) first came out as a stand-alone retail game that nobody paid any attention to. And then I can remember when Fortnite: Battle Royale launched as a free mode of the full game that was there to rival Playerunknown's Battlegrounds. Honestly, in my mind, this Battle Royale would do "okay," as PUBG was the hotness, but this game was free. But I didn't really think it'd last. I thought it'd be something people played for a year or so until the next new fad came along. But who even remembers PUBG now? And yet, who can even escape Fortnite? Somewhere along the way vanilla Fortnite was forgotten, and Fortnite Battle Royale dropped its subtitle and became like... the biggest game in the world. Me? I've never been into it. I tried it once with my friend Mike and his two kids. They were all super into it. So I thought I'd play along. But what happened was I hopped into a game with them, and his kids yelled at me for fifteen minutes. They yelled at me for not knowing which gun to use; for not knowing where to go; for not knowing what to do. It wasn't a great learning experience for me, so I wrote it off. Another time, I thought I might look into the game again on my own, and I crap you not - I logged in to find that the entirety of Fortnite had been sucked into a black hole. The servers were down and a whole new 2.0 edition of the game was soon to come along. The intrigue passed, and I still didn't bother to play it. Anyway, here I am attempting once again to visit this game and figure out what it is exactly that makes kids love it so much. I think a lot of it has to do with the social aspect, so I'm at a loss there. While kids might enjoy hopping into this game to give them "something to do" while they virtually hang out and chat, that's not anything I'm interested in. But I don't really know what I'm doing. I have zero interest in crafting stuff in this game, so I guess I'm approaching it from the very straight forward last-man-standing kind of thing. This is just going to be The Hunger Games for me. So with limited time, I jumped into a game. I parachuted into an empty building, found a rifle and then set off into the world. I climbed a tall mountain where I found a... chair? I legit just hung out there alone for a good five minutes or so. I could hear gunfire and I could see the player count go down. I just walked around the mountain top, looking for anyone who might try to come on up. I was told that only 50 players were left, and weirdly this did actually "feel good." Then the storm circle shrunk, so I headed down the mountain. I found a small shack, and a sniper started firing at me from the east. I knew I couldn't hit him, so I had to hide on the west side of the shack. Then bullets flew at me from the west. I turned to see someone across a small lake firing at me with a rifle. So we danced a bit and fired back and forth. And then I went down. At any rate, I finished at like #38 or something. That's not really good. I mean, that's like 62%, which is a failing grade. I still didn't really "get" this game. Oddly, I found that matches tend to ping-pong between boring and stressful. But I was still curious. I mean, I'm a lifelong gamer, and this is the biggest game on the planet. So I'd like to at least say I gave it a fair shake and could tell you why it's not for me. Alright, and then I think I got the allure of the game. Literally my fourth time ever jumping into a match, I got a victory royale. I can't even tell you how stressed out I was by the end of the game, but it was an awesome feeling to win it. And I mean, I really don't even know what I'm doing a lot of the time. But I'm having fun just kind of experimenting. That first win involved me flying around in a helicopter, which I didn't even know was a thing until I stumbled upon it. And now that I've gotten a bit more comfortable, and played a few more matches, I'm not even feeling stressed out playing this. I'm just having a pretty good time. I've also found that my preferred way of playing is by filling in a squad. Doing this just makes more sense in my brain because of my love for team based competitive games. And after I switched over to squads, I got two more wins which was awesome. The last win had just six players left at the end. Me and my teammates were camped out around a big rig, which was maybe a bad spot. To our right was a house in the distance. I used the sniper rifle to zoom in and could see two dudes on a roof building something. I sniped one, but the others ran off. Suddenly my teammate was gone. I have no idea who hit him. The storm started closing in, so I kept zooming in with the sniper rifle and could see two players running toward our direction in the distance through the storm. I hit one hard. He went down. His teammate tried to carry him, so I hit him. Then the storm came in tighter, and I'm pushed into the center, barely hanging on to the edge of a cliff. That's when a bullet zips by my head from below. So I jump down, switch to a machine gun in mid-air, land right next to the dude - and I can feel it. This moment, we're the last two and this is it. Maybe it was beginner's luck, but I managed to hit him before he could hit me. And it felt awesome. I honestly didn't think that I'd be one of those guys that plays Fortnite all the time. But I got it then. I got why people are so into this game. And I can now say that I at least enjoy it. It'll probably be one of those games that I keep installed forever, and play random matches once in a while when I'm not sure what else to play. Good stuff. It only took me like three years or whatever to figure that out. I hate to say that I'm hooked on Fortnite. But I truly am. I've had to remind myself that I'm a grown-up, and don't care about cosmetic things in games, so there's no reason to buy the Darkfire bundle through Best Buy for $30 just to make my character look cool. But yeah, I could now totally see why this game is such a phenomenon. Each match I played wass like its own little mini story I could tell. Each Victory Royale I got was so sweet. Each time I wound up in second place is crushing and rewarding at the same time. Probably my biggest revelation was switching over to Squad Fill. There's something I really prefer about playing cooperatively. And when you end up with good teammates, it makes such a difference. A squad that sticks together, works together, shares loot, watches each other's backs... It's a recipe for success. Good game, this one. But I didn't need to tell anybody that. It's been a gigantic hit for years. I'm just now figuring out why. |
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