A lot of cool new mechanics and jobs, bunch of fanservice for the series players, a whole new location. By all accounts this should be my personal 5 stars.
And yet, I kinda felt that some parts of the experience were underwhelming. My gripes are mostly with the story part being (once again) locked by a pretty bad grindwall, that you basically have to do, if you want to progress. This is the second time RGG studio does this, and if they wanted to be faithful to the dragon quest roots (I still remember the grind in XI), then I guess they succeeded, but the grinding dungeons are generally pretty bad in this one. At least in lad:7 you could just spam auto and let it grind by itself in the tower, but here you have to go through these cookie cutter dungeons that are really boring. I’d say that even Tartarus in P3P was more fun than this.
Kiryu is cool as always, Kasuga continues to be a perfect protagonist, the new characters and all the old ones are great. The cast is almost perfect, although that one character being voiced by Toru Furuya even in English is still a bit weird to me.
Ultimately I feel like it’s an almost perfect JRPG for me, if only they made the grind somewhat more fun.
Oh, and dodonko is fine I guess.

Reviewed on Feb 15, 2024


1 Comment


2 months ago

Oh and emotionally, they so fumbled everything that was set up in gaiden. Gaidens ending is still goat and makes me cry