Pros:
+While not revolutionary, the game has some quality turn based RPG gameplay, which for me is a fun way to play despite it being a bit ancient.
+Soundtrack is lively and fun.
+Enemy designs are creative and varied. I actually got pretty excited to get to a new area and find new enemies.
+The 2D side-missions (as well as full 2D optional mode) were a nice callback, even though I couldn't truly appreciate them as this is my first Dragon Quest game.
+There's some decent quality of life stuff, like if you're missing purchasable items for forging, you can buy them right there instead of having to go to a shop.
+All the different prep power animations look gorgeous. Also prep powers in general having unique teammate set ups adds some personality to them.
+Toriyama art style. As a huge Dragon Ball fan I had to add this.
+There are a whole bunch of costumes you can find to dress your characters, ranging from silly fun ones, to story-related ones, to downright cool looking ones.
+There's a few times when you get specific moves or skill trees based directly on the happenings from the plot. Like Jade learning Re-Vamp, or Rab's Pearly Gates.
+The main cast are all charming and fun.
+A toooon of content, even post-game. Hell, especially post-game.

Cons
-The way items are managed in this game is awful:
-You can't use any item from the bag in battle. You have to specifically equip it to a character. And it's not like a "Battle bag" either, you have to give each individual item to each individual character. I honestly just gave up on this about 5 hours in and never used an item in battle all game.
-Items don’t merge in a characters bag. If you give a character 5 potions they'll take up 5 slots, which just looks messy and cluttered.
-If you steal from an enemy, it goes into the characters personal inventory, meaning you have to manually remove every single one (there is a way to remove all non-equipment at once, but that would mean removing all the items you want to keep on them)
-The battle music gets overused too much. I don't mean "there's too many battles", but like during the last lap of a horse race it suddenly starts to use the battle music and it feels so out of place.
-When you're looking at a list of items in a shop or forging you can't compare them to your parties current equipment. It'll show only ONE stat of the new item and whether it's lower or higher than the same stat on your party. I bought or forged so many items only to realise the other 5 stats provided are lower than my current one.
-There's too many invisible barriers everywhere. Can't just jump over this little fence to take a short cut, gotta go the long way around.
-The silent protagonist is common in RPGs, but as the story gets more and more involved, and spoken dialogue becomes more common place, it makes them look really out of place. It's so distracting for this huge story to unfold around the main character as he just stands there silent, emotionless. There's one point where he actually starts crying and I was so taken aback because I just can't see him as a character.
-There's no way to find out battle information on enemies like their weaknesses or their immunities. It led to a lot of trial and error, or more likely just avoiding using any status moves and powering through with my strongest attacks rather than waste time experimenting and wasting turns with things that might not even work.

Mixed/Not important enough to be a pro/con:
~Tactics always being the first option that comes up in battle. It’s very very minor but it slows things down a bit for every fight. Since pressing X already brings up the tactics menu there’s no need to have it be the default as the amount of times I didn't want to change my tactics every battle far outweighed the ones I did.
~The variety of rideable enemies you find are fun, but they're so limited and are often just there to solve an easy "puzzle". It feels less immersive when only one out of the thousands of other enemies of the same type you find can be ridable.

Neutral/Notes:
•The game doesn’t pause when using menus. It doesn't really matter at all, it just feels weird to me.
•There's an option for "Heal All" and "Handy Heal All" in the menu. The first option heals your party to full health, the second one does the same thing but "in the most optimised way". I just don't understand why I'd ever want to use the option that heals me in a way that isn't the most optimised.
•The Slime Slot Machine feels way too overly complex for a mini game...

This was my first Dragon Quest game and it definitely made me a fan of the series. It's endlessly charming through the dialogue and art style (shout out Akira Toriyama!). On the writing front I think it does a lot of interesting stuff, especially in the post game. It also feels like it has an endless amount of content, the main campaign took me about 50 hours and the post game added another 15 or so, not to mention all the side content I didn't do. Super simple yet satisfying combat system that feels even better due to all the attack animations.

Really my only complaint is the soundtrack, there's some neat themes in there for sure, but with such a small track list you'll be tired of every song by the time you hit the end.

Overall, despite being a very traditional take on the genre, this is definitely one of the best JRPGs of the last decade.

Dragon Quest XI is an aggressively uninteresting game. Like I realize this series is all about nostalgia, and that DQ1 practically defined the genre, but good lord — this might be the most generic JRPG I’ve ever seen. It’s a NES game with voice acting (though it is cool they happened to include an 8-bit mode I’ll never use, I guess). The story is an almost parodically vanilla Prophesied Chosen One Must Fight the Dark Lord After His Home Village Is Destroyed, yet after two hours they still haven’t destroyed the village or even introduced the Dark Lord beyond references to his inevitable return (which seems to bother no one much at all) (and yes they actually flat-out call him The Dark Lord).

The combat is cosmically bad; it’s DQ1-style "mash A through the menus" to grind and win. Luckily they added this cool new feature where the combat can play itself! At 3x speed! Wonders never cease.

There’s a “free move” combat mode that lets you move your party characters around the battlefield. You would think this would let you setup backstabs and blocks and stuff like a Tales Of game — and you would be wrong! It does nothing. Purely cosmetic timewasting.

Which is more or less what this game amounts to: the most stultifying, time-wasting take on the JRPG formula you can think of. You can literally auto-run from point A to B, take your hands off the controller, and let the game play itss bland-ass self for you. Why isn’t it just a visual novel at that point? Why have combat at all? Who knows. This series has millions of fans somewhere, apparently. Ask them.

So the combat is bad. The dialogue is drivel. But the music is truly awful. They added full orchestration for the Switch version and it’s still possibly the worst RPG score I can remember, all blaring obnoxious fanfares devoid of the emotion of the most forgettable Final Fantasy theme. Words can’t describe how much worse the MIDI versions are.

This game’s only saving grace so far are the Akira Toriyama character designs, yet the characters themselves have none of the life or animation or humor that makes the Dragon Ball and Chrono Trigger casts so memorable. They’re cardboard cut-out stand-ins for RPG types so stock they might as well just be named Fighter, Thief, and Village Maiden in Distress. The protagonist, ofc, is silent — not because you have any real control over the dialogue, mind you.

I can honestly say I don’t think I’ve played a less inspired RPG since early childhood. Dragon Quest XI makes The Outer Worlds look like an astonishing masterpiece of depth and innovation.

It's a pretty standard and generic RPG, and does nothing inherently interesting with it's story telling and characters, but it does all of it's average generic stuff better than any other RPG. Sometimes you don't need to reinvent the wheel to make something truly special.

It loses half a star for the awful soundtrack (lack of variety + loops that get extremely grating due to the lack of variety), and due to the immense amount of grinding needed for a dungeon in Act 3, as well as Act 3s extremely repetitive story beats (it makes sense why if you've played it, but it's still annoying, because it's all done worse)