they go kind of on and off the roguelike stuff. 2 has a mix of both
the games have their charm (i would recommend 1 in particular) but they tend to feel like budget productions in an unpleasant way imo
the new one had the most fun dragon questy plot of any of them but it was unbelievably braindead mechanically. kind of a nightmare
i admit i wrote this off a little when it was first announced but now that it’s setting in that that was three and a half years ago (!!) i am now becoming suspicious that this might actually be a Significant Work
also btw i guess it’s been sort-of confirmed there’s a dqxi-style hard mode… very interesting…
Picked this up today and like an hour in, and it’s a good time. Nice comfort food.
I feel kinda bad that I never finished (or, to be more accurate, really even started) the kinda ugly Switch version of 3, but given this is the longest of the three and life is short, I reckon I’ll just play the newest version.
I mean, I’ll probably replay the 1 and 2 remakes when they hit (god I love 2…), so who knows. Maybe I’ll play that 2D one down the road.
loving it so far
you best believe i turned those objective marker and notification things off as quick as i could though
also it’s now clear to me that old DQ dungeons, many of which i find quite lovely structurally!, are really defanged when you have an instant and complete map of every floor as soon as you step onto it. it’s made me curious what DQXI’s dungeons would feel like if i never looked at the map, actually. i personally believe in the virtues of getting to a three-way intersection and deciding which way to go and bookmarking it in your head to come back to. whoever decided that you should see which paths are dead ends before you even get to the intersection does not
also, while it’s fine in DQXI hardtype, characters full healing on level-up does… i want to stop short of saying “break the game” but it’s almost there. one of the few mechanical missteps dragon quest has made repeatedly with remakes imo, sad to see it back again here. maybe it will sting less when the level-ups slow down
but otherwise i do really like it though i swear lol. the orchestral soundtrack (a new recording?) is really beating my ass. i love the rewiring of the world map as a place that you’re searching out little road events and treasure caches (without resorting to cooldown gathering points or anything!) between major points of interest. the game-length monster sidequest is actually in a new flavor that i’m finding quite charming. there’s a designated audio track for environmental sounds with its own volume slider and everything-- fires crackling, birds chirping, waterfalls crashing, etc-- which is weirdly compelling
deeply curious how the late- and postgame will look. i wonder if the postgame SNES shuffle-dungeon will be included. my guess is there will be lots of new stuff…
(DQXI ending spoilers) (real post starts here) (do not read if you don’t want to see me go off the deep end)
i have of course been obsessed with DQXI’s true ending and its recontextualization of I-III as taking place post-XI since i first saw it. we all know that after the already-shocking glimpse of DQI’s hero there’s also a post-credits surprise cut to the beginning of DQIII, the mom waking up the protagonist (erdrick, as we all know) at the beginning of the game. right before she wakes him up she of course closes a red book, seemingly containing the story of DQXI which she has been reading, and slides it onto the shelf, next to a green book that is clearly its sibling
(please note that questions regarding potential correlations between the colors of the other books on the shelf and the color schemes of the protagonists of various other DQs are outside the scope of this talk)
like all of us, i’ve been thinking about that green book since september 2018. it’s got the symbol of the luminary on it, so it’s probably erdwin’s story, which is discussed in and predates DQXI (i’ve often wondered… DQXII? DQXI-2? and then i’d think, well, how many more of these could these guys make? whatever that green book is, it could be the last one… and now 2/3 of those guys are dead!)
DQIII reremake now opens with the mother putting the red book on the shelf next to the green one, which i guess clears up any doubt that that was DQIII in the DQXI scene (which i always thought was silly anyway)
anyway: now there’s this fuckin loading icon haunting me after every battle
the icon is animated, the red book floats up and down. why would the loading icon in DQIII be of the DQXI book? more importantly, you’d think that green book on the top of the stack would be the green book from the shelf, BUT…
the cover doesn’t match. now what the fuck is that supposed to mean. and the two books on the bottom of the stack are, jesus fucking christ, the two books to the left of the green one on the shelf. who the hell was even thinking about those???
i was frothed out for next year’s DQI/II remake already but now they’re gonna be hanging over me like they’re next week’s episode of twin peaks the return
feel extremely targeted now my saturday plans are “finish romancing saga 2 remake, begin dragon quest 3 remake”
pleased to report i’m getting the shit beat outta my ass in the pyramid 
Seriously, I am not even playing on hard and it is beating my ass. I did kinda skip the faerie town though, whoops.
This really is a sicko season and I love it.
game’s incredible. it looks fantastic and most of the additions have been for the better. full-heal on level up does make it a bit too easy, in my opinion. im playing on hard mode (“draconian quest”) and at the point im at i only really struggled doing the fairy village / wakey dust quest.
currently in asham, headed for the pyramid.
my party right now (+ the path i want to gear them towards as soon as each member reaches lvl 20) is:
hero
thief → martial artist
merchant → monster wrangler
priest → sage
i do hope that the little monster buddies im collecting right now will give their benefits later, once i get a wrangler on the party. if it requires the wrangler to be actively in the party when you meet them, i might be in trouble
ah ok i get it now
Messing with this a little and even in the first town/opening scenes the Switch is kinda struggling with this.
Also seems like if I wanted to play the old Switch version down the line, this new one is different enough that it might be fun in a sorta “simpler” kinda way.
Anyway I have got choice paralysis right now…yeah I could go with the party they want me to, but all these other cool classes…dang.
it’s great, has raised my hype values considerably
everyone pretend i went to the trouble of making a look how they massacred my boy image but instead it says “look how they qol my boy” and brando is looking at a chimera wing (you can just use them inside anywhere now wtf)
That’s not right…not right at all. They should’ve made it so you got hurt from banging your head against the ceiling.
i forgot to screenshot it but theres a NPC in one of the first villages that mentions this, like “ive heard that in the olden days you couldn’t even use them indoors. such are the wonders of modern technology!”
still not sure how i feel about the change, balance-wise. the evac spell is pretty easy to get + rather cheap so its kind of whatever i guess
damn i already almost posted about their pun game reaching new heights when i met the cannibox named lecter but just now i met the vampire cat named alutac god damn
im not agin “Dragon Quest rebalanced away from attritional dungeon crawl pacing in favor of more demanding combat skill checks” but chimera wings not crashing you into ceilings anymore is making me irrationally annoyed lol. that’s just flavor!! that’s like removing spices from the recipe to get more people to eat it man
i guess if im being rational it’s more like… the player won’t have to open the menu twice to warp from a dungeon to town. but come on, friction can be delicious
