I've just completed the demo of Dragon Quest XI on Switch. What a beast of a demo that was, with a play time of over 7 hours. It went quite a good bit into the game and thus gave a very good impression on what it's all about.
Well, what should I say... the demo actually worked on me and I'm now actually interested in getting the full version, which I didn't expect at all. Some of you may know that I've had a bit of a rough history with Dragon Quest games, as well as with other games that had gameplay similar to Dragon Quest (like Bravely Default). Most of my problems with those games came down to frustrations with the overall gameplay (mainly the random encounters and battle systems). While Dragon Quest XI is still a very traditional game that takes very few risks (often to a fault), I'm glad that the gameplay was changed just enough to remove most of my major frustrations. There are no longer random encounters (well, technically there haven't been random encounters in DQ games for a while), and character actions in the battle system are now carried out immediately (instead of you choosing actions for all characters at the beginning of a turn). The later change in particular allows me to finally somewhat enjoy battles instead of just being frustrated by them. It's difficult to express how much of a difference this minor change makes, but to make it short: when you now select any action in battle, you can be confident that it is carried out exactly as intended, whereas in previous games, a major luck factor was involved, because you never knew when your character's action would actually be performed.
While I feel like I can now definitely get into the game and enjoy it, there's still a few things I dislike. As I said, in a few areas, the game is traditional to a fault. There are a lot of dungeons without any safe points inside them, and while auto saves exist, they are only created during loading transitions, which some dungeons have few to none of. Case in point: I had the demo crash for me just after I had beaten a boss today, and because the last auto save had been quite a while ago, I had to replay a good chunk of the dungeon. Another thing I really dislike is the silent hero. While I suppose this archetype worked decently enough for past Dragon Quest games, this game's story is so extremely personal to the main character and so closely tied to him that it just feels out of place. Like, in Dragon Quest VIII, you could probably write the main character out of the game without it affecting the story too much, but in Dragon Quest XI, that wouldn't be possible, because the entire story so far, including all of the major conflicts, revolve entirely around him. It just feels weird when you have the worst possible stuff happen to the main character and he barely even shows any emotion, and it gets even weirder after certain events happen in the game (but I can't talk about that without spoilering stuff).
Overall, I am very excited for this game and hope I can get my hands on it (I don't know if I can afford it this month). It might turn out to become the most enjoyable Dragon Quest game for me so far, though I'm doubtful that I will enjoy it as much as games like Xenoblade Chronicles or Final Fantasy X. Currently, I definitely feel like its potential is hindered by being too traditional.
Feel free to visit my website/blog - it's updated rarely, but it looks pretty cool!