(This is the worst review anybody has ever written. I’m sorry. Basically, I hugely recommend this game to anybody looking for a good, relaxing, wholesome experience. I should probably just copy+paste this at the top so you can know my opinion straight up and skip the rest of this nonsense.)

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I’m a little late to the party, here, but Dragon Quest XI is the best JRPG I’ve played in years. Five or six years after release, when everybody else seems to have finished talking about it, it is my game of 2023. It is a lungful of fresh air. It is joyful like I haven’t known in the longest time. It is a mirror that shows not the adult you’ve become but the child you forgot about.

“Oh. There you are,” you might think to yourself as you’re running through the greenest grass you’ve ever seen in your life, grass that glows at the edges when it catches sun. “There I am.”

Am I being a little too sentimental? Maybe I’m just tired. Over tired. I work five days a week, man, and I write fiction every morning and lunch time, and some evenings, and I'm training for another marathon. I’m probably a workaholic. I’m probably running from something. At any rate, video games are supposed to be my down time activity. Yet whenever I sit down to play something new these days, particularly new AAA games, I find myself growing even more exhausted. Exhausted by the mindless, cynical stories with nothing to say, by the recycled, towering mechanics, all waving at you to keep your attention, by grim art styles, edgy dialogue, blood and violence without stakes or point, existing just for its own sake, because most people won’t play a game if you can’t remove somebody’s brains from their head through a hole in the back of their skull.

If I’m lucky, I’ll play one big budget game a year that actually makes me feel something. It’s completely mind-numbing, and makes me feel hopeless about an activity that used to bring me so much joy. Memories of Pokémon Yellow, Final Fantasy X, Ocarina of Time, Resident Evil (GC) and all my other childhood favourites are buried under a stinking and growing landfill of Resident Evil 7 and Borderlands and Divinity II, games that have absolutely nothing to say, just time to kill. Buried deeper, still, by ports and remasters of those old favourites of mine that just feel wrong now. Ocarina of time doesn’t feel good without the N64 controller, and Link’s weight is all wrong in the 3DS remake; FFX characters lose their expressive eyes in the HD remaster; Jill Valentine has impossibly jiggly boob-physics in the HD remaster of Resident Evil (GC) (Maybe it was always there, and I couldn’t tell back on the CRT) and there are new ‘loading’ message screens that pop up during startup, made without any effort to mesh with the aesthetics of the game, as well as an analogue control system that doesn't work with the fixed cameras; did you play Pokémon Let’s go? I could write all day about those games and how they hollowed out the originals. My favourite video game is probably FF7 on the PS1, for the strides it made but also the way it wears its faults on its sleeves, for its whimsy and strangeness and beauty (and music). The HD port, though, is full of weird audio bugs, and has these features that might well make the game more palatable, like speed up, but which end up ruining the immersion of the game. And as for the remake…! I spent about fifteen hours on it before I couldn’t freaking take it anymore and I just had to—

…Well, Dragon Quest XI is a vital reminder that big budget games can, and do, still have souls.

It is a wake-up call that, likely, will go unheeded, even by its own publisher—in interviews, developers have spoken about making the next game in the series more mature. Well, we know what mature means in gaming. Edgy humour, swearing, dark colour palettes, violence... It means, potentially, more sales. It means, certainly, creative hamstringing in a rush to make money out of what sells right now.

This is supposed to be a review, isn’t it? Well, I feel strangely unprepared to talk about Dragon Quest XI, even after 80+ hours of gameplay. Maybe that’s why I’m dragging my feet about it.

Dragon Quest XI is bursting at the seams with excellence and elegance. The simple story is bolstered by incredible dialogue and voice acting. The characters are wonderful and whimsical. The stakes are high, the pacing is on-point, the politics are navigable and entertaining, the skits are hilarious, the tragedies awful. The battles, similarly, are simple yet effective. Turn-based, slow-burn affairs where your team works together to pull off fantastic moves and spells and combos, where buffs and de-buffs become increasingly vital as you move forward in the adventure (or, if you’re starting on Harder Monsters, vital from the get-go). The character development is slow and steady, rarely overwhelming, giving you hours to think about how you’re going to develop your characters while you traverse the world map, what skills and spells you’re going to have them learn, and then which team strategies and loadouts you’re going to employ. The side quests are good. The hero’s haircut and outfit are awful to the point of hilarity. The art direction is out of this world.

…

I should feel happier about it. I have a new game to add to my list of favourites, and it is a generous one, filled with extra difficulty modes that make it extremely replayable. But it is like being in the height of summer, knowing the trees will turn soon, and then… I don’t know. Play this game at your own risk, I guess. It’s an eye-opener. It takes you by the hand and makes you stop and smell the roses, and you think, I love the smell of roses. Shouldn’t there be fields of them everywhere? Well, why aren’t there? And why is everything farmland without hedgerows or ponds or other important fixtures of local habitats? Why is all the topsoil damaged? What’s happened to the climate? Why did humans wipe out 60% of the world's populations of wild vertebrates over the last fifty years? Profits? Well, aren’t roses profitable? They’re not? But they’re so nice! What will Dragon Quest XII be? Will it also be nice? Or will it only be...?

…

(This is the worst review anybody has ever written. I’m sorry. Basically, I hugely recommend this game to anybody looking for a good, relaxing, wholesome experience. I should probably just copy+paste this at the top so you can know my opinion straight up and skip the rest of this nonsense.)