Dragon Quest XI is a return to form for the long running RPG series. The DQVII and VIII remakes on 3DS were traditional Dragon Quest games, but DQIX and X were very experimental, to say the least. DQIX had a big focus on DLC, quests, and multiplayer, and DQX was a full-fledged MMO. DQXI feels more like a followup to the recent DQVIII 3DS remake than a followup to DQIX. I, like many other people who don’t live in Japan, have never played DQX, so I can’t compare it to that, but DQXI feels like a game that’s putting all the lessons learned from DQVIII, IX, and the 3DS remakes to use, while still making a very traditional, old-school RPG.
The main story of DQXI starts out a bit generic, but it gets a lot better in the second and third acts. Act 1 is kind of a mishmash of sword and sorcery cliches and Dragon Quest traditions. A lot of it will probably sound very familiar to anyone who has played previous games or watched stuff like Game of Thrones. That’s not to say it’s bad, it’s well done, but it’s just predictable. Things start to pick up as more characters join your party and you get closer to act 2, though. There's some interesting twists and a lot of references to ancient Dragon Quest lore that really spice things up. Those who have played DQIII will probably get a lot more out of it than I did, but even with my limited knowledge of it, I picked up on a lot of the references and was able to understand what the game was going for.
Where Dragon Quest XI's story really shines is in the individual town scenarios. Every town has its own story which ties into the overarching one in some way. It’s a lot like an anime in which traveling heroes get into new adventures in every town they visit. The scenarios in each town are mostly inspired by classic stories and have a moral or lesson to be learned from them. A lot of them might sound familiar, but the way they are integrated into this world is always interesting, and the characters are memorable. For example, there's a weird take on Romeo and Juliet involving a mermaid and a fisherman, which seems to have touched a lot of people. They don't all have happy endings. The voice acting of the minor characters is usually pretty good, and the quests you get in each town make sense within the context of where the town is and what is going on in it.
All of your party members also have great introductions and origin stories. This isn't one of those RPGs in which people join you and then go hang out at the base and you never see them unless you put them in your party. All the characters are with you at all times and show up in the cutscenes and chime in whenever they need to. Every character has a big introduction quest and then a follow up origin story or quest that reveals more about their motivations later on in the game. There isn't a single lame character here. They all feel like they matter.
What makes this DQ stand out to me is how modern it feels. Dragon Quest XI is the most accessible the series has ever been. This isn’t the old-fashioned, clunky UI, grindy, NES DQ some people still think of when they hear the name. A lot of the things the game does for the sake of playability are things that have been in the series for a long time or started being put into the series with VIII, IX, and the 3DS remakes, but they are worth mentioning, because they add up, and make the game easy and intuitive to play.
Outside of when sailing on the ship, there are no random encounters in DQXI. Like in DQVIII on 3DS, you can see monsters in the field. They will agro and run after you if you’re at around their level or lower, and run away from you if you out-level them. You can also get a preemptive attack on them in the field, a la Paper Mario. Making your way through a dungeon doesn’t feel like an endless gauntlet of battles, because you can avoid most enemies. Fighting regular monsters almost feels optional. I made it through most dungeons only fighting a handful of battles, including the boss. You still need to battle, because you need to level up, and you need money to buy new gear, but the game doesn't feel grindy. I never had to stop playing the story to level up. At least not until the very end of the game. Those late game bosses will wipe your party in 1 turn if you are not prepared.
The game is really good about telling you what you should be doing to progress in the story, without nagging you like Navi, or funneling you down a path like Pokemon. Every zone has a full map with quest givers and story-related NPCs marked on it. These NPCs also have purple or pink chat bubbles over their head, and they're also marked on the minimap, so you can't miss them. There’s also always a little blurb on the map screen reminding you of where you should be going to progress the story. You still have the option to explore, but you should never feel lost.
The UI is also easier to understand and faster to navigate than in previous games. I don’t have to go from the menu to “Misc” and then click on “Heal All” anymore. I can just pull up my menu and press a button to automatically revive, remove status effects, and heal everyone while only using the minimal amount of MP. I don't have to have gear in a specific character's inventory to equip it on them either.
The battle system is more responsive and intuitive than ever. You no longer choose a bunch of commands for your party, watch them attack, then watch the enemy attack, and repeat. Your stats determine when and how often you attack now. Your characters also perform their attacks as soon as you input them. You’re no longer choosing your whole party’s actions at once and then sitting back to watch what happens. This makes battling a lot more fun and exciting. You can also switch characters in and out of your main party right before a battle, and even during a battle, with a 1 action penalty. Your party is also automatically replaced by your benched characters if you wipe, which is kind of like having 2 lives.
DQXI also introduces Pep abilities. They’re kind of like a cross between Chrono Trigger’s Techs and Final Fantasy VII’s Limit Breaks. Each character has a hidden meter that fills as battles go on, and when they fill up, they “Pep up”. While Pepped up, their stats get a temporary boost and they can do a variety of special moves. You can keep battling normally and just take advantage of the stat boost or do the special move. If you have 2-4 characters Pepped up at the same time, you can use team Pep abilities using up to all 4 of the active characters. There’s attack Pep abilities, heals, stat boosts, and even weird moves that increase loot and experience points, or even replace all the monsters with Metal Slimes. Every Pep ability gets a unique animation, and they get more and more elaborate depending on how many characters are involved in the move.
There’s a lot of strategy involved in DQXI boss battles. The first few are just DPS and healing checks, but they get a lot more complex as the game goes on. A lot of boss battles are designed around specific status effects, so you’ll have to prepare with the right accessories, consumable items, and team makeups to beat them. Leveling up isn’t the answer to everything.
Dragon Quest XI has a gigantic, 100+ hour, 3 part main quest. It’s basically a trilogy onto itself. And if that's not enough for you, it also has a bunch sidequests and minigames. Every town has a handful of quests for you. None of them are as annoying as some of the ones in DQIX, but they’re in that sort of MMO style. Some will have you killing a specific monster for a drop, some have you exploring to find an item, and some are more closely tied to the story of the town. The casino is also back for this game, with roulette, poker, and slot machines. There’s also a sort of F-Zero-like horse racing game with 5 tracks, which was a lot more fun than I was expecting. And of course, the game is full of Mini Medals to hunt, so you’ll want to smash every pot and explore every nook and cranny in every area. All these quests and minigames offer a bunch of nice rewards including gold, Mini Medals, weapons, items, and crafting recipes.
Yes, there’s crafting in this game, too. Some of the best gear and coolest costumes are only available through crafting. You forge everything in a blacksmithing minigame called the Fun-Sized Forge. It’s pretty unpredictable, unfair, and not a lot of fun, but it’s not very punishing. You can completely fail at it and still get a perfectly usable, normal item. Doing well in the minigame just gives the items a +1, +2, or +3 stat boost.
I love pretty much everything about the graphics in this game. The monster battle animations are great, as usual for DQ. Every town has its own unique architecture and color scheme inspired by fictional and real-world locations. There’s a little Hawaiian style village on an island, the Puerto Vallarta inspired beachside town of Puerto Valor, the Venice inspired Gondola, and an Ironforge/Erebor-like city built on the side of a mountain where there are no Dwarves, among others. There's even a place that will look very familiar to DBZ fans. No two towns are alike. Pretty much every kind of environment imaginable is in the game. Deserts, rain forests, swamps, snow covered forests, the inside of a volcano, you name it. The textures in the game are incredibly detailed. You can see the fibers in the cloth textures on all the characters. It’s a bit like seeing the stitches in the denim on Mario's clothes in newer games. You don’t expect to see detail like that on Akira Toriyama style characters. That’s the weird thing about the graphics. The characters have a black toon outline and are modeled like Toriyama characters (like in Dragon Ball Z), but besides that, the game is not very cartoony at all. It's not cel shaded. Everything is textured and lit in a realistic style. It doesn’t look like an Akira Toriyama anime, like Dragon Ball FighterZ. It doesn’t look like the old Famicom Dragon Quest covers, or a current gen DQVIII. It’s a great looking game, but this is not the style I would have chosen for the graphics.
One disappointing aspect of this game is the music. There are only a few orchestrated tracks in the game, and they’re in the intro and endings. The audio quality of the rest of the soundtrack is fine. It sounds like MIDI music in any other game. People expect more from a big AAA Square-Enix RPG, though. It turns out that the composer, Koichi Sugiyama, didn’t want to put orchestrated music in the game, because he wants fans to buy albums and concert tickets. The actual composition of the music isn’t anything special either. A lot of the soundtrack is music from old games, and the new stuff sounds like music trying to sound like music from the old games. The classic songs are good, and there’s some good tracks among the new ones, but a lot of it just feels phoned in. It's like they think they can play anything with this instrumentation and fans will think it's great.
I don’t have much nostalgia for NES Dragon Quest. I remember seeing the DQIII Famicom boxart with the Toriyama artwork in Nintendo Power and falling in love with the character designs, but the first DQ game I ever played was the remake of DQVI on DS. Before DQXI, I had only played through 4-6 and 9 on DS, and I liked them, but I didn’t love them. I love DQXI. This game made me a much bigger DQ fan. It’s not a groundbreaking game, but all the little things add up. The quality of life improvements, voice acting, great story, endearing characters, exciting battle system, fun costumes, and amazing graphics make this one of the best RPGs I’ve ever played. It's right up there with Chrono Trigger and Skies of Arcadia for me. I can’t wait to see what’s next for the series.
Monster Hunter World isn't called Monster Hunter 5, but it's totally Monster Hunter 5. It's also kind of a reboot for the series. MHW feels like a game that takes into account the things most people ask themselves when they first play MH, such as “Why is the map an item taking space in my bag?” and “Why is the quest rewards window on a timer?”. MHW gets rid of a lot of the stupid stuff that has carried over from game to game for no good reason besides it being how it has always been done. A lot of things have changed, but at its core, this is still very much the same style of game.
For the uninitiated, Monster Hunter is a game about hunting monsters, of course. But seriously, Monster Hunter is a game about boss fights and loot. It’s about learning bosses’ attack patterns, preparing for fights, and reaping the rewards when you beat the bosses. Bosses don’t drop weapons and pieces of armor, like in Diablo or WoW, though. You get monster parts from carving their corpses, and then you craft your gear from those parts. This might sound gruesome, but there is very little gore in the game. The game has a light-hearted comedic style to it, and is no more violent than something like Zelda. There is a story tying everything together, but it is not much more than an excuse to lead you into new areas and introduce new monsters to kill.
Compared to Monster Hunter Generations, Monster Hunter World controls much more fluidly, but if you’re looking for a Monster Hunter game that controls as smoothly as Devil May Cry, you’ll be sorely disappointed. This is still that kind of clunky, complex, animation priority heavy Monster Hunter. There have been a few key improvements that make the game feel much better to play, though. The biggest ones being the weapon sheathing and item using systems. You automatically sheathe your weapon when you start running now, so you can get away from a monster more quickly. You also don’t have to stop running to use an item anymore, so you don’t have to stand there and go through a long drinking animation and risk getting hit again. These might sound like small things, but they’re huge improvements and make the game play much better.
The biggest change to the game is in the hunting itself, though. In previous games, you had to carry paintballs around, run around an area to find the monsters, and throw the paintballs at the monsters to track them. Every zone was also separated by a loading screen, which could slow the game down a lot, depending on the system you were playing on. These were things some people defended as if the game wouldn’t be Monster Hunter if they changed them, but they’ve changed them, and the game is better for it. There are no paintballs in MHW. You don’t have to carry anything, craft anything, or throw anything at the monsters to track them. In MHW, you find monster footprints, hair, and scales, and track monsters by scent, like a dog. Their scents are visually represented by the scoutflies. The scoutflies are swarms of firefly looking bugs that lead you in the right direction, and even highlight gatherable items, like mushrooms, herbs, and more monster tracks. You gain experience tracking each monster as you collect more of their tracks, and eventually, you’ll automatically start tracking a monster without having to find their tracks. You can also put a pin on anything on the map, and have the scoutlies guide you to it. It doesn’t even have to be a monster. You can have them guide you to a mining node if you want.
Zone loading screens are completely gone in MHW. Monsters still run away into other zones, each zone is still numbered on the map, and monsters are still kind of tethered to one zone at a time, there just aren’t loading screens. Each level feels like a big open world, but it's really not much different from how it was in the old games, it's just bigger and faster. The core monster tracking and chasing game is still the same.
Monster Hunter World is also really good at slowly introducing you to the game's mechanics and explaining things through tutorials and tooltips. The amount of info thrown at you in the beginning of the game is pretty overwhelming, even for a MH veteran, but you can always go back and read all of these tutorials again, because the game saves them all for you. The game also keeps a detailed notebook full of monster weaknesses, weak points, and even loot tables. You can pull all of this stuff up any time you want, too. Tooltips on rare monster parts even tell you what you have to do to get them. There's a small Wiki's worth of information built right into the game.
Monster Hunter World introduces a ton of other improvements as well. You can now go to any area and freely explore, hunt, or farm herbs and mushrooms without taking some useless voucher turn-in quest. Crafting has been greatly simplified. You don't need recipe books, required materials have been reduced, and the game even gives you the option to automatically craft any item when you get the required materials. You only get one Palico and they don't have talent trees anymore. All you need to worry about is their gear. You have access to food and your bank at the starting camp in every map, so you can rebuff if you die, change your armor and weapon, and even store and restock items in the middle of a quest. You don't need to carry honey to make more Mega Potions anymore, just fast travel back to camp and restock. Did I mention you can fast travel? You can open up your map and travel to any campsite you've discovered. Items like the whetstone, bug net, BBQ spit, and fishing pole get their own dedicated inventory slots, and the whetstone has infinite uses. There are no mining picks, and you never put anything you carve from a monster in your bags, so you have a lot more free bag space now. It also makes it so you never have to discard an item to loot a monster part again. There's too many things for me to list here, but they all add up and make the game much more intuitive.
Multiplayer on PC has been pretty iffy so far. A patch that fixes some of the network issues has been released now, but online was a mess during the first week and a half after launch. It wasn’t just when playing multiplayer either. Since you have to make online sessions when you start a game, I would get huge lag spikes and disconnect messages, even when playing alone. It got to the point where I would just start the game in Steam’s offline mode to avoid these issues. There are still some problems, especially during peak hours, but the online is working much better now.
Monster Hunter World has some beautiful graphics, but it's the art direction that really makes them shine. Environments in MHW look natural and tell a story of their own. The way each zone blends into the next is seamless and makes sense. For example, the desert area has a river going through the Western part of the map. The river starts at a waterfall in the North, and ends in a muddy lake in the Southernmost section of the map, where the mudskipper monster, Yuratodus, hangs out. There's tall grass around the river, and cacti deep in the desert. The trails going from the river to the desert look like they were eroded by streams flowing down to the river, like maybe this area floods sometime during the year, or maybe the swamp covered more of the desert at one point.
The game looks great, but technically, it’s kind of a mess. Some issues have been alleviated with a recent patch, but others remain. The most noticeable issue is the low resolution textures. For whatever reason, the game doesn't load the high res textures, even though they are installed on your computer. Modders have gotten them to load with mods, so we know they’re there. There are also major issues with one of the Elder Dragons, Teostra, and the last map, Elder’s Recess. This map has a bunch of lava, smoke, heat wave effects, and a ton of shiny rocks all over the place. The game constantly stutters and hitches on this map. And to make matters worse, Teostra’s campaign fight takes place here, and it has a bunch of flamethrower and explosion attacks that make the framerate stutter even more. It’s literally a slideshow when it does its explosion attacks. There are no options to use less demanding particle effects, turn off depth of field, motion blur, or to the distracting vignetting effects, so you just have to deal with it, or start messing with mods.
Monster Hunter World has a wonderful orchestrated soundtrack full of new and remade songs. The new version of the main theme,”Proof of a Hero”, is especially awesome. I also really like the music in Rotten Vale as well, which strangely reminds me of Phoenix Wright music. MHW doesn't constantly play music, though. Outside of towns and cutscenes, music mostly plays during battles. The rest of the time, you hear the soundtrack of nature, and it sounds just as good as it looks. The sounds of footsteps on different types of surfaces, the howl of the wind blowing through different environments, buzzing insects, and flowing water all come together to create a beautiful ambient soundtrack. You can tell that a lot of attention has gone into making each environment sound as realistic as possible.
I was one of those worried about this game when it was first shown at E3 2017. I thought it looked like it was catering to people who wouldn't be interested in playing MH anyway, and long-time fans would turn on the game. Some of that did turn out to be true, but now that I have played the game, I wish they would have gone further. This game is still carrying a lot of useless baggage from the old games. My biggest issue is still the controls. Would it be so bad if MH controlled a bit more fluidly? There's still an overwhelming amount of items for crafting, items that do very similar things as others, and items with vague tooltips. You still end up looking ridiculous when mixing pieces of armor. There's still horrible Elder Dragon battles that are more about using cannons and turrets than they are about fighting like you do in the rest of the game, and there's still stupid egg carrying quests! There's still a lot of room for improvement.
There’s also the issue of the game serving up the same content over and over. For all the talk of the “New World”, there sure are a lot old monsters in MHW. Half of the new monsters don’t even feel new. The Great Jagras is very similar to a Royal Ludroth, Jyuratodus is just a muddy Plesioth, Radobaan is a bone covered Uragaan, and there’s still 4 versions of Rathalos/Rathian. The game gives you like 5 ways to get quests, but they’re all basically the same thing with different names. Halfway through the single player campaign, you start getting harder versions of the monsters you already killed, and your reward for beating the game is, you guessed it, even harder versions of the same monsters. There’s DLC monsters coming, but I’ve been following the PS4 version’s DLC releases, and they’ve been few and far between. This game needs an old world monster invasion expansion ASAP.
This game is far from perfect, but it is a lot of fun. I think it's the best MH game by far. All the improvements really add up to make a much better game. I don't want to play old MH anymore. I want MHW to be the template for the series going forward. A must play for all MH fans.
Mega Man X4 was originally released by Capcom in 1997 on the PlayStation and Saturn, 2 years after MMX3, and 1 year after MM8. Like Mega Man 3 and 7 were to the original series, Mega Man X4 was a big turning point for the X series. Most notably, it featured a completely new graphical style and it was the first game in the series to let you play through the whole game as two different characters. Mega Man X4 is available on PS3, PSP, and Vita as a PSOne Classic, and it's one of the games included in Mega Man X Legacy Collection 1.
In Mega Man X4, Sigma persuades the robot army known as Repliforce to turn against humans and then drops a floating city on another city below, killing millions. X and Zero then set off to find answers, because they're basically robo cops. They play up the Maverick Hunters being the police angle a little more in this game. The story is not great, but the presentation is pretty awesome. Like in Mega Man 8, fully voiced anime cutscenes play at key points during the game. There's even different cutscenes for X and Zero’s games. There's also different dialogue between you and all the Mavericks that will play before boss fights. They really try to keep the story in the mind of the player throughout the game, and that's cool, but it's just not an interesting story, and the new characters feel pretty throwaway, like Duo in MM8.
There a much more interesting subplot going on in the game, though. It’s vague, but it reveals some of Zero's origins and hints at what happened to the original Mega Man. X’s ending also hints at the events that could potentially set up the Mega Man Zero series. These mysteries might never be fully explained, though, since that would probably mean putting a real end to the 2 series.
My favorite thing about MMX4 is being able to play as either X or Zero. It’s almost like getting 2 Mega Man games in 1. They have the same basic moves, like jumping, dashing, and wall jumping, but their weapons and upgrades are completely different. X plays like classic Mega Man X. He has his arm cannon, the weapons he gets from bosses are mostly long range shots, and he can get armor upgrades from Dr. Light’s capsules, which give him new abilities, like the air dash. He gets a few new tricks, like the air hover ability, but he's still the same X we know and love.
Zero brings a completely new gameplay style to the series. Zero is a melee character, and all the weapons he gets from bosses are more like moves you’d get in a Metroidvania than the usual Mega Man weapons. When Zero beats a boss, he gets new sword moves he can use with different button combinations, such as a shoryuken-like rising flame sword move, and a downwards thrust that turns his sword into an icicle. Instead of getting abilities from Dr. Light's capsules, Zero gets new traversal abilities with some of the boss weapons, like the double jump and air dash. Zero was made by Dr. Wily, so Dr. Light wouldn't have made anything for him. Zero also has access to all his moves at all times, unlike X, who has to switch between weapons.
What set the level design in MMX1-3 apart from the original series was the emphasis on replayability and exploration. MMX3 went a bit overboard with this aspect. MMX4 really dials back the amount of hidden items and exploration, though. There's still hidden E-tanks and heart tanks, and you still have to use boss weapons to get to some of them, but a few of them are in plain view or don't require any special ability to get. The level design feels a little closer to the original series’ as a result. There's less exploration than in any previous MMX in this game.
I think the Maverick bosses in MMX4 are some of the best in the series, especially when playing as Zero. Mega Man bosses usually feel like pushovers when you use the right weapon, but I actually had to pay attention and learn patterns here. The final Sigma fight was definitely the most challenging fight in the X series up to this point, and probably harder than any Wily fight, too. It's a 3 phase fight with 2 things to kill in the final phase. The final one is pretty demanding in terms of memorization and execution, too. Since X and Zero play so differently, most fights require very different strategies for each character.
Both the art style and in-game graphics got a pretty big overhaul for this game. It looks like they were influenced by MM8’s style. The character designs are a little more anatomically correct, with longer legs and smaller heads, and the levels have that same camera angle that shows the floor and gives the environments a more 3D perspective. All characters and enemies have a lot more frames of animation than in the SNES games. Zero looks especially impressive with his luxurious ponytail flowing in the wind as he jumps around. The environments all have very detailed sprites with lots of animations, like flowing water, ships flying in the background, and pulsing lights on the machines the artificial nature has been built on top of.
I love this game’s soundtrack. It's a huge improvement over MM8’s. It sounds like Mega Man music with a hint of 80s synth pop. The instrumentation used in the Maverick level’s themes are all very fitting and instantly invoke images of each environment. The voice acting is very bad, but it has become retroactively great, thanks to such ridiculously bad lines as Zero’s “What am I fighting for!?”. Sadly, the volume is all messed up in the MMXLC version and the VO in the cutscenes is way too quiet.
Mega Man X4 is one of the best games in the X series. It’s right up there with X1 and X2. I think it’s pretty amazing how the level and boss designs works so well for both X and Zero with almost no changes. I love the music, graphics, and animated cutscenes, even with the bad story, and how it finally gave us the playable Zero we had been waiting for since X1, without the limitations of X3, and that it made multiple characters a standard feature in the series. Mega Man X4 is a must play for all Mega Man fans.
