4/5 ★ – ElementaryGaming's review of Dragon Quest XI: Echoes of an Elusive Age.

A JRPG which sticks to classical game design and is better for it. The game refreshingly revels in tradition, offering almost no "new" ideas to the JRPG genre, but it doesn't need to. Given the 100-hour experience, I have a lot of thoughts! + Its world is colorful and vast, which makes it a joy to explore. An enjoyable world is one of the main draws of an RPG, and it makes this game especially enjoyable. + Playing this with voice acting turned off was a true patrician experience. It didn't feel like voice acting was necessary at all. + Toriyama's character designs are continuously fun and fascinating, may he rest in peace. Like the gameplay, the environments won't necessarily show you things you've never seen before in an RPG, but it will show you a high-quality, beautiful world to explore. It welcomes you in and feels intuitive with regards to what you should do next. + The game is structured like an old Super NES RPG, but with 3 acts, all roughly the length of a single 30-40 hour game. Instead of having to use your imagination for the 2D game world, it's all fully realized in 3D as one of the most visually sunning games ever made. Not just in graphical fidelity, but in its incredible rendering of Toriyama's art style. It also features the most beautiful grass and flowers I've ever seen in a game. + All of the mechanics feel intuitive and work very well. There is basically no learning curve when it comes to the battles or upgrading your characters, as many other RPGs have. The forge item-crafting minigame offers a great mix of skill and luck, and made the crafting process more fun than simply selecting an item from a menu, as most RPGs would do. + One of the game's greatest strengths is that its world is relatively small, but full of detail. It doesn't feel overwhelming, and after playing it for a while, you start to get a sense of familiarity with it, instead of it feeling like a random group of places. + The story flows with an episodic-yet-interconnected nature, making it feel lighthearted and simple yet deep at the same time. It feels like an adventure, which is exactly what a good game like this should do. It follows a consistent structure of exploration of the overworld and discovery of new towns. All of the towns feel distinct and unique, in spite of their often-similar music. Unlike many RPGs, towns remain interesting to explore thanks to the design of each one being different from the last one, both in terms of its visuals and its layout. + The auto-heal option makes healing your party easy after battles. There is also a default setting for the party members to control themselves, rather than have the player control them, which also helps the many battles pass by more quickly. + The economy is balanced well, too. Money always has value, and I did not often feel like I had far too much or far too little gold. The economy of money is a feature many RPGs don't seem to get right, and it's nice that gold remained continuously valuable throughout the game. - BUT THOSE HORNS. One of the main appeals of any JRPG is its soundtrack. It matters here perhaps more than any other genre, because it needs to carry you through a lengthy and sometimes grindy adventure. This is the only game I've ever played where I repeatedly turned down, or turned off, the music. The MIDI horns on this soundtrack are brutal on the ears. I wasn't made aware of the "S" rerelease featuring a live orchestra until I was multiple hours into the game. It's not necessarily the fact that it's MIDI (most Zelda soundtracks use this, and they're fantastic). It's that the MIDI sound quality used for the instruments, specifically the horns, that are bad. While this was rectified in the S edition, it's absurd that the game was released with this low quality sound at all. Playing the original version of this game, rather than a rerelease which came out just a few years later, shouldn't be this big of a step down in the audio department, but it is. - While there's nothing necessarily wrong with the overworld theme itself, it repeats far too often. Hearing it isn't bothersome at first, but at a certain point it just kind of makes you want to die. I always turned off the music when wandering the overworld. When I had the music turned on elsewhere, it was kept on a lower setting, because there is still often a grating quality to the MIDI on other songs as well. The presence of these awful programmed instrument sounds do seriously detract from the experience. - There is also a distinct lack of variety in the music. The overworld theme and the standard town theme do not change very often. Giving more towns and areas more unique themes would have added a huge amount of atmosphere. When the overworld theme changes to a different, classic Dragon Quest tune in Act 3, it is a blessing on the ears. As for the rest of the soundtrack, it's good, but not among JRPG greats. There is nothing wrong with the compositions themselves, and they fit the mood of the adventure well. Some areas are given their own unique music, and they offer a nice break from the repetition of the usual score. When you're not in the overworld, it does feature a number of nice tracks. The camping theme is especially pleasant. Playing without music and only listening to the environmental sounds does have an oddly meditative quality to it, even if it would have been nice to have music to listen to instead. - I do wonder if a game needs to be this long. The answer is "probably not". It's impressively ambitious, but games do not need to be anywhere close to 100 hours long, and its "true ending" lacks the emotional impact of Act 2's ending. If a game is going to have three acts, hopefully the true ending would also be the best, but that isn't the case here. - The game reuses many game areas and bosses during Act 3, leading it to feel like a retread of old ideas in many places. - The nonlinear structure of Act 3 is more difficult to follow than the linear structure of Acts 1 and 2. The idea is to allow the player to freely roam and complete various tasks as they wish during this final portion of the game, but it's difficult to keep track of the many things you can do without a guide. - Act 3 requires a lengthy level grind in order to take down the final boss. The "Electro Light" move is helpful for grinding, because it spawns enemies which give high EXP, but it still takes unnecessarily long to wait for the needed characters to become "pepped up", which allows them to use this ability. Most of the game doesn't require grinding sessions, and it's disappointing that it breaks this good streak during its final portion. In conclusion: At first, I wasn't sure about the extremely high levels of praise this game received. But after about 5 hours in, I started to understand as I enjoyed playing the game more and more. It does almost everything a good RPG should. Its classic design reminds the player why they like RPGs in the first place. I just wish the soundtrack was as high quality as the rest of the game, and that there wasn't so much reused and grindy content in Act 3. Acts one and two are excellent, while act three is just alright. I especially wish the ending was as strong as its original, "fake-out" ending. All in all, it's a great, if unnecessary lengthy, game.