The only game ever in which the prerendered cutscenes look way worse than everything else. The difficulty curve is a straight line until you're 80 hours in, then it jumps up 10 feet, becoming somewhat challenging, until the last 3 or 4 encounters where it jumps up again and becomes very challenging(in a good way, mostly). Silent/self-insert protagonist at its worst, passively watches as everything goes on around him despite the story telling us he's the more important character ever it's only really true when you get a special glowing hand during cutscenes. This is massively made worse in the 3rd act post time-travel, where at times you literally have a flashback of seeing how things are about to go down and you don't say a thing? It's not like the protagonist is mute in-universe either, he's clearly shown to be able to communicate...
Some instances of truly weird(read: bad) game design, like letting you farm coins in the monster casino only to take them all away at the end of that scene or taking away a ton of levels from your party after time travel(granted they do give you those back so that's only a half-complaint).

And yet, despite all that... It's so much goddamn fun. Toriyama's artstyle and designs never disappoint. The combat is about as fun as you can have it in a traditional turn based rpg(no doubt in large part due to the huge number of QoL upgrades in the Definitive Edition). The story, basic and cliche as it is and with the major flaw regarding the protagonist I mentioned before, feels like a cozy bedtime story you'd be read before bed as a kid, perhaps because of those elements and not in spite of them.
Dragon Quest XI is a game made up of all the things I have heard a million times before, and mostly hate to hear. "It's simple, but that's what makes it good!", "It gets better 20 hours in!", "It's so much better than the sum of its parts!". This time, they're all true.