My question is where did those Aussies in Phnom Nonh come from? There’s no Aussie themed town, are they all just wandering nomad tourists, or is there some ‘downunder’ village deep underground?
Without any spoilers, what do y’all identify as the main themes of DQ11?
I’m in the middle of part 2 and I’ve noticed a weird throughline of: “It’s easy to commit atrocities when you think it protects your loved ones. These atrocities must be stopped with violence, but their perpetrators should be forgiven.”
Or, an alternative way of looking at it that seems to more accurately capture the examples I’m thinking of and encompass more of the game’s story beats might be: “It’s easy for good people to be manipulated into committing atrocities by bad actors. These atrocities must be stopped with violence. Those who have been manipulated into unjust violence should be forgiven, but those who do the manipulating should be killed.”
Trying to translate this moral schema into real life examples of historical atrocities is a bit of a queasy thing.
I really want this game to end with a Nuremberg Trial.
3 Likes
The bit that really threw me was the Sniflheim resolution. I can’t always tell when the game is playing in childhood logic of ‘make up and be friends’ and when the game is playing in ‘people hurt other people irretrievably’.
1 Like
So I’m getting little stories that illustrate sins of lies and cowardice and self-dealing and greed but I’m having similar trouble stitching it into a grand theme (I’m about to tackle the Act 2 end dungeon). Evil is almost always abstract and embodied in demons or monsters, but there’s usually a side-track of human failure. The monster story is often presented as an excuse for the human sins, though, which muddies it. Are we supposed to read the human apart from the monsters, as adults?
I’ve mentioned before that it feels like a game with very conservative, formulaic narrative stories but masterful formal construction. I’m constantly wowed by beats that are shifted around or held back and played in a way that maximizes their impact, but I’m not surprised by the content of them.
1 Like
i’m ok with that incomprehensible outcome because Witch Girlfriend
2 Likes
It’s probably not noticeable if you were always playing with the extra difficulty settings on, but the optional bosses in the post-game are all ridiculously hard, I’m around level 51 or so and they mop the floor with me. I almost got the Golden Guys in the Sylvando/Hendrik quest, but forgot that beating it requires Hendrick to get pepped up twice in one battle (?) fuuuck that! Then I got absolutely mauled by evil spider bro pt 2. The first time I got through the evil MMA guys relatively quickly, and then got spammed with spines/webs basically constantly until everyone was dead after that. The second time the MMA bros were way less of a pushover somehow, dunno what I did differently, but somehow after that did about the same against Spidey, maybe a little better even. I was finally able to regain some dignity by moving on to challenge the Evil Mermen, but was only able to kill them after using Rab’s put-everyone-to-sleep pep. I have been basically ignoring pep powers so far, guess I can’t do that anymore.
I wonder how much of this is because I haven’t done the thing where you go back to Zwaardsrust ruins yet? I was afraid that would put me on an unalterable path to the Final End and didn’t want to try it yet, but now it seems like there’s gotta be something else I can do other than just grind (and no I’m not some kind of maniac who’s going to do that elaborate trick to spontaneously generate King Metal Slimes but you need 3 party members pepped up to do it. not yet, at least). Because all the basic enemies are still not that difficult/lucrative, it’s just the bosses that suck. If I keep barely scraping by in these battles, though, only like 1 or 2 people on my team are gonna get any EXP off that!!
anyway i can’t believe i played this game as long as i have, but i think it’s finally starting to wear out its welcome
Yeah I am in the same boat, only with hard mode on. The bosses are all ridiculously hard and so far I seem to only be able to beat any if there is just one of them, rather than groups. Apparently the minimum recommended level for the first boss in the ruins is 65, so I guess there’s not much choice but to just use that trick you mentioned
you can get a bunch of the best gear from the ruins without fighting anything so do that
1 Like
yeah do the ruins, they don’t put you on a path to the end, it’s just a long endgame dungeon full of great equipment and the mobs give good experience
1 Like
Hilariously, the Pep power metal slime farming technique doesn’t work if you have No XP for Weak Monsters switched on because most of the slimes are too weak to give XP. I don’t have easy access to Pep Pips either so I wasted maybe 2 hours trying to get this to work today.
Wup Wup Wowowow
you gotta get into a fight with enemies that do give you xp, kill just one of them, and then summon the metals
Does killing one actually change the results? I thought the slimes were just randomly selected based on enemy or player levels or something
yeah as long as you kill one enemy that is high enough level to give you full xp then you get full xp for everything else you kill in that same battle
1 Like
Powet metal slimes?!
1 Like
A mysterious unannounced patch downloaded last night, and now the game crashes on startup for me. I wonder if it has to do with the orchestral mod I have installed. This is pretty bogus.
Edit: I was able to fix this by going to:
C:\Program Files\Steam\steamapps\common\DRAGON QUEST XI\Game\Binaries\Win64
and deleting dxgi.dll, which I guess was the orchestral mod tool. I hear they’ve got a new version of it that doesn’t use that .dll and does work with the patch, gonna investigate.
Further edit: I installed V2 of the orchestral mod and it works perfectly.
1 Like
One Monsters game coming for mobile and one for consoles! I wanna play both
EDIT: the above link doesn’t mention that it’s two titles. This one does. Sorry, journalism is hard
2 Likes
i like how often the spinoffs feature little kid versions of protagonists from the main games, it’s like Dragon Quest Babies
4 Likes
Finally completed act 3, after over 150 hours. I don’t think I have ever put so much time into a single playthrough of a game before, excluding things like Minecraft or Animal crossing
I one sticks out to me about the postgame story, which is how can Serena and veronica be the reincarnation of Serenica if her spirit was turned into the timekeeper the whole time
I’ve always had a strong aversion to the way Toriyama draws faces. Beyond that, I think the Dragon Quest art style in general was at its best with the limitations of the NES. I’m not fond of even the SNES-style reworkings. Part of this is probably nostalgia, considering how obsessed I was with the series when I was young.
I’ve started playing DQ11. The current discount was enough to lure me in, I guess. One of the first things I noticed is that the protagonist has chickens in his yard, but they are all roosters.
The music reminds me of The Adventures of Milo and Otis. I’m finding it kind of dull so far, and I may find myself turning it off (as I’ve already done the voices) and just playing some other music in the background using the PS4’s Media Player. Like the graphics, I think the music would be better if it used NES instruments. But the compositions themselves (at least so far) just aren’t as interesting to me.
Oh, look. Someone finally put the Dragon Quest 4 Electone organ album up on Youtube. I really like that one. Why couldn’t they have gone with that sound for the new game, as much of a tradition as it’s been for the series?
9 Likes
never played dragon quest before but i’ve always been meaning to - what’s the best starter point?