I don't know why I expected a better game. Dragon Quest is known by many as the first jrpg. It is the standard that so many great games were built upon. And built is correct, for what is here is so barebones it is barely enjoyable.

You leave town, fight monsters, level up, get money, buy new equipment, move on. That's pretty much the whole game. And combat is mostly just hitting attack against the one monster on screen. There aren't enough options to have much in the way of strategy.

Play it for the history if you want, but there is nothing of substance here. This game could not be simpler and the formula has been greatly improved since.

I just don't think this game is for me. This is coming off of about 15 hours of gameplay, with me just finishing one dungeon and then running around for a while before deciding I'm not having enough fun to warrant putting a hundred more hours into this game.

I feel like this game is in a great conflict with itself, in terms of not knowing whether or not it wants to be nonlinear. The greatest example of this that I can think of is right at the beginning, where TotK decides to release you into the world without giving you the paraglider. Compared to BotW's treatment of the paraglider as the keys to the world, this is an extremely interesting decision. The paraglider is optional now? Something that I have to find in the world?

Well, not really. See, exploring without the paraglider is not fun or easy. I think this is fairly self evident, but an easy example is how if you ever ride one of those rocks up to a sky island you'll quickly run into the conundrum of getting back down. You'll also have a rather difficult time entering the Depths. Even if you want to do a challenge run of sorts, you'll find out that there is at least one dungeon in the game that requires the paraglider, both to access it and to explore it. So in order to unlock this essential part of my kit, I eventually asked a friend what the deal was and was told I had to go to Lookout Landing. It was also at this point that I discovered that Lookout Landing is also how you unlock the ability to actually use the towers, and that if I hadn't come here I'd have been unable to update my map upon reaching one of the towers.

I hate this! My instinct when I start up an open world game is to run in the opposite direction as the main quest indicator. In fact, when I played BotW I did exactly this, going to Gerudo Desert before I even met Impa. And you know what? That first bit of blind exploration was one of my favorite parts of the 100 hour playthrough, as I challenged myself to just barely survive exploring this dangerous region and take out Thunderblight Ganon with a measly 3 hearts. I can't do that in this game; my ability to explore is actively held hostage by the main story.

This pattern of excitement followed up by disappointment would be a recurring theme for the rest of my short playthrough. Take the Depths as another example. I love horror. When I found out that there was an entire map in this game full of darkness, corruption, and more danger than the rest of the overworld, I was incredibly intrigued. I spent an hour or two wandering around in the Depths and felt completely bored. It turns out that, while it makes for a cool atmosphere, an extremely dark overworld is a bad move. What it does is essentially remove any element of "ooh, what's that over there?" that serves as the baseline for the flow of most open world exploration, leaving nothing but going from point A to B for most of my time in the region.

Shrines were often unsatisfying. I'll go into that in detail, because I think the change in shrines is actually the most significant change between BotW and TotK. In BotW, Shrines were (assuming you didn't get one of the dreaded Tests of Strength) entertaining puzzles. I think shrines in BotW hold a more subtle purpose as well; they are changes of pace. While exploration is fun, there is only so much running and wall climbing one can do before it starts to feel tedious. Shrines serve as a reward for exploration. They give the quantifiable reward of an Orb and a fast travel point. More importantly, they give the intrinsic reward of a fun, mentally stimulating experience that leaves you refreshed and ready for more exploration when finished.

I would hesitate to call the shrines in TotK puzzles. Some would argue with me here, but I think putting a balloon, a source of fire, and a few wooden platforms in a room with nowhere to go but up to be a set of wordless instructions, not a puzzle. To me, this is what most shrines in TotK are. They provide you with the tools needed for you to set up a physics demo. This isn't to say they're badly designed. Doing this allows the player to invent things in the shrines and then recreate those same things in their overworld exploration. In that sense, shrines in TotK are covert tutorials on this game's physics engine. However, in terms of providing fun or mental stimulation, they are lacking. To me, this makes shrines less appealing. The quantifiable reward is still there, but I was left feeling more "oh, I have to do that shrine over there" than "Oh good, a shrine!". Having the main reward for exploration in this game be a tutorial on how to do better exploration is something that, to me, doesn't work out. Another thing with how the shrines are designed is that, as mentioned previously, the tools needed to "solve the puzzle" are almost always clearly presented before you. In this way, the famous "you can come up with a hundred unintended solutions for any given puzzle" attitude from BotW is barely present. Don't get me wrong, you can pull out Zonai capsules and hijack the puzzle all you want, but there's never a reason to spend resources when the game gives you perfectly functional ones. I don't envy the developers, because the alternative is no better; when a solution is obvious but the player has no way to achieve it without pulling things from their inventory that they might not have, it's even more unsatisfying. Also, slightly unrelated, I found that the game would often arbitrarily limit my efforts to move through the skies. Platforms or wings just disintegrating after long enough, despite me actively spending resources to make these things functional, feels like Nintendo personally saying "no, not like that" whenever I try to use them to get somewhere.

This is a lot of words. A lot more than I'd usually write for a 6/10 score. While a lot of this was just venting into the void, I do want to sum it up by saying that, more often than not, the game is still passably fun. It's like going bowling when you can't think of anything better to do. Like, sure , we can go bowling for a couple hours, I don't have anything going on tonight and we'll probably have a decent time and then go months before we ever think about going bowling again. But I wouldn't wanna go bowling for 100 hours.

I respect what this game is trying to do with the multiple endings, but god damn, it does not make it any more fun to spend maybe a third of your overall playtime on repeated content with little change in gameplay. (This is speculative, I only got to Route B before deciding I wasn't built for this.)
I like everything else. Every character in the cast is great. Weiss in particular is my favorite but they all bounce super well off of each other, both for comedic and serious moments. I can tell that Yoko Taro is cooking some insane shit with the plot, good enough for me to at least want to watch the rest online (a rarity when I drop games, tbh)

EDIT: Okay, I watched the extra content online. I don't feel anything about this at all, and for something that's supposed to require so much time investment to get to, that's not acceptable to me. If I wanted to experience sadness from wasting a bunch of my time, I don't need to play a video game.

I did not think I'd like this game. It's about as classic as you can get, there's little in terms of story, and the soundtrack sucks. Despite this, I found myself greatly enjoying the game after some initial discomfort (it is not fun with anything but a full party), and before I knew it, I was finishing the game with almost all the side content complete. (Note: at the time of writing this, I still intend to go and do post-game, but have not yet.)

The character building in this game is really good. Managing equipment and skill trees is very engaging for me, and it really feels like all the decisions you make in regards to building characters matter. The combat is a lot more built around RNG than I thought it'd be, but there's enough room for strategy in there to make it feel like something to work around rather than something to be at the mercy of. Another huge point in the combat's favor is that status effects actually work on bosses. It's not every the time, but it's enough for it to feel like using characters or abilities that are based around status actually feels like something viable, which is more than I can say about a ton of other RPGs. One caveat is that I was playing with the Draconian Quests for Stronger Monsters and Reduced EXP from Easy Fights, and I think the game would've been significantly more boring without those. The game not letting you turn them on after the start is a mistake, I think, when there is no real reason to do so other than to prevent people from getting achievements more easily, I guess.

As for the story, it's barely there. Usually I play RPGs for the story elements but for this one I quickly decided I just wasn't gonna have any expectations for this game's, and I'm glad I didn't. The occasional impactful scene came as a pleasant surprise, where as the rest of the "adventure of the week" type plots stayed mildly entertaining instead of disappointing.

Overall, I think this game is a great JRPG that got me interested in a series that I've been writing off for the last several years.

UPDATE: I played the post game. Note that I do not say finished; combat loses some luster once you get into late game, imo. The plot is actually pretty interesting in the postgame, but the combat and specifically the character building starts devolving. Eventually you get to a point where it stops feeling like making big choices about your new abilities and more like just checking boxes off of the list. Similarly, combat starts getting homogenized down to one-size-fits-all strategies (Magic Burst spam). I don't really hold any of this against the game; after all, it's post game, and I feel bad for punishing the game for having too much content, because I imagine there are people out there who enjoyed having all of it, even if that person wasn't me.