Bro I am a yuge freaking Dragon Quest mark, bro. I bought Dragon Quest XI twice because the Amazon deliveryman was taking too long to deliver the physical version I preordered. Dragon Quest VIII helped me through not one, but two very rough times in my life. I actively have to fight back tears whenever I hear the Overture. I'm an apologist for pretty much everything people criticize about the series. I can't make apologies for a game that just straight up doesn't fucking work, though.

Dragon Quest Swords looks nice and has a charming enough premise, but the motion controls are so inaccurate and unreliable that it feels like the game is against you at all times. You can thrust all you want, you're getting a horizontal slash. Wanted a horizontal slash? You're getting a fucking thrust and you're going to like it. Simple vertical slashes? Never heard of them, you're getting a diagonal and the group of enemies you were trying to attack with them are going to run away and it'll affect your ranking. That a game with controls this bad has the gall to judge you on your performance is so infuriating it lacks a further expletive. I'll return the favor by judging this as a bad cash-in for the then-wildly popular Nintendo console and playing some fuckin' Boom Blox instead.

this is probably the most confused i've been about a game so far, about so many of it's aspects, what's its story tried to tell me? how I should even view it's story, it's narrative, how everything about it works?

On one hand i'm given a fantastic visual presentation and unique style that no other game ever had, really good music that just fits brilliantly in every scene. Writing that's so specific yet fascinating with how much it mirrors a real life form of speech a regular person might have with the amount of swears and slurs. And to top off this segment there's genuine peaks of stories like in the entirety of the Parade chapter.

On other i got such an uninteresting first half where I questioned if it's worth going through more of it, often wanting to drop the game for a while. placebo segments that are an absolute drag in their pacing and mindless repetition and every time I had to do them i felt discouraged to boot up the game. There's a lot of characters but it's so hard to keep track of them and remember every single one since you won't know if they will become a major part of the chapter's plot or if they'll be gone forever in the very next scene. It has plathera of moments where I could not understand a single bit of what is even happening as so much of it is presented to the player yet might mean absolutely nothing as you cannot tell if what you're seeing is meant to be a metaphor, forshadowing or just an artistic flair

I genuinely have no idea how I should view this game, this work, this art piece. It's so fascinating and confusing to the point where i'm trying to comprehend so much of it that isn't supposed to even make sense.

And just for that.

I have nothing else but tremendous respect.

It's weird to see a Initial D game released before the anime, so the official version of the game lacks the classic Eurobeat soundtrack. This may take away half of the fun, but thankfully there's a mod that fixes it, which turns the game into a an early 32-bit version of the Arcade Stages that people are more used too.

The driving is kinda weird but its between the Special Stage and the Extreme Stage games in terms of handling.

It's perfectly beatable if you put some effort on it and memorize the turns in each race.