I'll admit it: I'm a hater. I want to love this game. I think it's legitimately charming, has funny dialogue, and is a great critique of the American culture. But boy, this game sucks to play! I've played a lot of good JRPGs, and this is not one of them. Item management is awful. While there are no random encounters it's still tough to avoid enemies, so it feels like there are random encounters. The rollback health system only works in the second half of the game.

While I think so much about this game is good, actually playing it is not.

This is my least favorite Dragon Quest I've played (IV, V, VI, VIII, IX, XI). However, a "not my favorite Dragon Quest" game is still a good video game. I played it every day at my university in Fall of 2017. I had found a quiet hallway where people mostly did homework. I didn't feel like a goof bringing out my 3ds, so I played it after working out and before going to my 9am class. However, in October, an woman who was probably in her 60s began coming to the hallway to talk to her (adult) daughter on Facetime without headphones. I don't like when people talk on the phone in public because I'm a scrooge, but I try not to let it bother me unless the other person is on speakerphone. This woman Facetimed her daughter every day without headphones. I couldn't even ask her to please wear headphones or go to an area where people weren't doing homework because I was very obviously playing Dragon Quest VIII on my 3ds instead of doing homework. I changed hallways, but that woman still haunts me. I love my mom, but I don't want to Facetime her from 8:15-8:45 am every day.

I played through half of this game the way you're supposed to—exploring, fighting, scavenging, crafting, etc. I got burned out on the open-world aspect (seriously, if you want to hate open-world games play Morrowind! It's so good it'll ruin the genre forever). However, this is my wife's favorite game. I wanted to be able to talk to her about it. So I committed what some would consider a gamer sin, but I would consider a life hack: I changed the game to easy, ran from objective to objective, and upon arriving at the objective changing the difficulty to normal and playing normally. This made it play like an Uncharted game but in a good way, not in a bad way. Seriously, the combat in this game is real good, it feels like driving a stick shift while eating a good burrito.

When I beat Persona 5 I had a hole in my heart. It seemed unfillable by any game—Wolfenstein, Monster Hunter World, Pokemon, nothing worked. Persona 4 Golden was the only thing that felt right, but only for a bit. The dungeon traversal and combat in this game are awful. Combat comprises a large part of what I love about Persona 5/SMT games. By removing the demons and making the party fight generic enemies that have pallet swaps in later dungeons. The characters are all annoying and immature in a way that didn't bother me in Persona 5. And finally, this game has some funky gender politics that just do not vibe with me at all.

The only reason this game is getting 2 stars instead of 1 is because, for one brief instant in the first 10 hours of the game, I thought it was as good as Persona 5. Boy was I wrong.