2/5 ★ – Official_Struan's review of Dragon Quest XI: Echoes of an Elusive Age.

If you're ever looking for an introduction to overused, predictable JRPG stereotypes, I couldn't recommend a better starting point. It's actually pretty subtle about them compared to most games in the genre, but it's got them all. You start the game and you get this really nice intro. The little save menu music is charming and and the whole opening to the story is great. The world looks great and the monsters are so well-animated and charming. The story also progresses nicely as you meet new party members in different areas as you solve their respective problems. Overall, the devs were clearly skipping out on some of their square enix crack rations but it's a fun and simple game. The second half of the game is just great because someone could probably mod it out of the PC version and the only extra flaw you'd get is one underdeveloped character. It's an extra 30 hours that doesn't need to be there at all (probably - I did about 15 hours of bullshit and gave up playing the game, so I never reached the end). I can't say much without minor spoilers, but the game is not fun. Combat gets significantly worse for several hours, time you would've spent finding new monsters before is replaced with versions of old monsters with new eyes colours and the music keeps repeating like so much. There's like 1 theme for every type of thing in the game. The plot ends up moving so slowly that when the next bit of predictable anime garbage I've seen 100 billion times showed up I snapped and quit the game because however many hours of bullshit wasn't going to be worth it for this game's ending which is probably really easy to predict anyway. I bet no party members die and there's a big dragon that either saves them or more likely bestows some sort of weapon unto them that allows them to beat the bad guy. Maybe I'll come back to this in a while when I've quelled my seething gamer rage but for now I'll just quit games for 2 weeks again or something who fucking cares why are you still reading this why do you even ca