Beginning of the Third Act:
Remembrance service in Arboria, and The Tower of Lost Time.

A gigantic number of people worked on Dragon Quest XI, and if you play it enough you’ll see where all the effort went – into creating arguably the best JRPG of all-time. Square Enix not only managed to keep the feel of the Dragon Quest universe true to itself, but also managed to innovate in many areas, to enhance the play experience.

The first thing to praise is the presentation. Dragon Quest XI looks and feels like nothing else around. It uses Unreal Engine 4, and the slightly cel-shaded graphics are wonderfully detailed and vibrant.

I would say that this is Character Designer Akira Toriyama‘s best work, in terms of the sheer variety of monsters and bosses. It encapsulates everything that went before in the series, and expands upon it. The modelling and animation of all the characters is first-rate too. The humour of the late Toriyama san shines through…

Dragon Quest XI also has an amazing UI (User Interface), with an exceptionally good look and feel to it. It might take a little while to familiarise yourself with everything, due to the depth, but it ultimately works really well.

One feature that really impressed me were all the different outfits for characters to wear. Finding and using special costumes to change the appearance of your characters – without changing their armour or stats – is a genius touch. This means that you can experiment with dress combinations without upsetting the character attribute apple cart… Each character has their own line of clothing to find, plus an achievement for completing them.

A huge voice cast has been used for translations into multiple languages. The English version (that I played) has great voice acting, but I did find the dialogue and delivery to be a little bit ‘twee’ at times. It didn’t really bother me, but Dragon Quest XI‘s voice acting is not particularly realistic, like the voice acting is in The Witcher 3. Which is tougher and gruffer, in terms of tone.

The music in Dragon Quest XI can either be the electronic version of the score, or a special symphonic version. My preference was to turn the music off and just have voices and sound effects. While there’s nothing wrong with the music, I just felt that the symphonic score was a little too bombastic for my tastes. I played about three quarters of the game with the music off.

Dragon Quest XI sold over two million physical copies in its first two days of sale in Japan… Which is incredible. By December 2021, the game had shipped over six million copies worldwide. The game is not currently available on GOG.com, but it should be! It’s currently on Steam only.

End of the Third Act:
Defeating Mordegon at Helidor Castle.

Next: Part 4 – Post Game

More: Dragon Quest XI on Wikipedia
Steam: Dragon Quest XI on Steam