 Hey welcome back everyone, I'm here with a video on the newest release of Dragon Quest XI. Today we're talking about the new version of Dragon Quest XI-S out on PS4, Xbox One, and PC. And whether or not I think it's worth buying based on my impressions with the game. I'd like to thank Square Enix, the publisher of this title for providing me with a copy of the PC version for a review. This is my review of Dragon Quest XI-S, Echoes of an Elusive Age Definitive Edition. Now if you're watching this video, you likely fall into one of three categories. You either have never played Dragon Quest XI before, you played the original Dragon Quest XI on PS4 or PC, or you played the updated version last year on Switch, Dragon Quest XI-S. In any case, this video is for you. I think this will be a good opportunity to tell every person what they're getting out of this new release of the game. We'll be going over things like the graphics, the gameplay, and the story, so stay tuned. Now let's begin. What is this game? Well, it's Dragon Quest XI. A game I think is the best RPG of the entire generation. It's a game that embraces its roots as a turn-based RPG with modern quality of life features. Like in classic games, it doesn't waste your time with long tutorials or holds your hand. You're literally fighting monsters minutes into the game. It's a game about exploration and adventure that lets players go off on their own to figure things out by themselves. The journey is started and you really feel like the game is running at an excellent pace. The biggest problems with RPGs that bog down the experience to me these days is that you'll find yourself playing for a long time and feeling like you don't accomplish much. While in Dragon Quest XI, you can play for a short period of time and accomplish a whole lot while also propelling the story forward a significant amount. I rarely play Dragon Quest XI and feel like I waste it any time. It's the kind of game that is perfect for long-play sessions and for picking up for just a few minutes at a time. It's essentially the culmination of what RPGs have been working towards for years, a near perfection of the genre. Now this game takes place in the world of Urdrea and you play as the Luminary, a young man from a ruined kingdom born with a destiny to vanquish evil. You probably know all of this by now. The world of Urdrea is so full of life and so are its inhabitants. The NPCs populating the world often add to the atmosphere of the game world with their witty dialogue that more often than not contains hints or foreshadowing throughout the story. Nothing feels randomly placed in this game. It's like everything has a purpose throughout. This world is essentially your playground for exploring and grinding. The party characters you meet are also extremely likable. They all have unique aspects to them that help them stand apart from each other. In the demo you meet Erika Veronica in Serena. Erika is a thief who's been around the block and acts as the Luminary's guiding force. Since the Luminary is a silent protagonist who acts as sort of a shell for the player, Erika talks for him in a way and is a major character for the first few hours of the game. She knows where everything is and explains things about the world to the player in a very non-condescending manner. You know, games often have a problem with annoying sidekick characters that insult the player's intelligence and repeat stuff you know over and over again, but Erika is not one of these characters. He feels like a wise traveling companion. There's quite a bit of brotherhood between him and the silent protagonist as they journey on their travels, find new places and interact with each other. In fact, all of the heroes in this game who you meet play a similar role. Serena and Veronica are also in the demo. However, for most of the game, Veronica is the only one with an interesting personality. Serena is just there. So it turns out you are capable of having ideas that aren't completely stupid after all. Veronica is this sassy character who speaks her mind very often and is one of the more memorable characters in the game. While Serena is very soft-spoken, but kind and she serves as the healer to Veronica's battle mage. The full game unlock features Silvanda who is a real interesting character. She's something like a traveling gesture, but with the abilities of a warrior mixed in. The other two characters making up the band of heroes are Arab and Jade, these two mysterious figures who are on a journey of their own. Jade is badass and one of the most powerful fighters on the team with some killer moves. And Arab is a wise and very funny character. He reminds me a lot of Master Roshi from Dragon Ball in many ways. The story of the game is character driven. It's like I said earlier. It's not your typical JRPG with a long confusing intro and loads of cutscenes. The story is super simple and easy for anyone to understand, but it leaves questions and little gaps in the lore for dedicated fans to speculate over when the game is done. Honestly, this is the best way for games to tell stories non-intrusively. For a huge chunk of the game's intro, you don't even know why you're traveling with these people. I mean seriously, at first you're just going from town to town looking for answers as to why the King of Heliodors after you. There's not a whole lot of exposition in the game or reasoning for what you're doing. Although the main villain of the game is for probably the first 20 hours of the game I'd say, the experience is oddly self-aware as a video game. You're just here for the adventure and for solving problems for characters in the different towns you find yourself in. The cutscenes that are here are always interesting and never bloated, getting right to the point and still delivering a very emotional story. The game never feels like it's telling the whole story through its cutscenes. Instead, it's a guided experience by the characters and what's going on in the moment to guide you across the land of Andrea, through deserts, jungles, large fields, snowy mountains, and across the seas. You stop by at campsites to let everyone rest and you can talk to all of your companions to see how they're doing and get clues about your journey. This is exactly how an adventure game should feel. You know, an adventure where you don't feel like you're on rails but you kind of are to keep the story going. All while stopping in as many towns to help people pick up a few sidequests on the way and maybe even progress your characters by collecting items and crafting new materials. It's a surprisingly deep, organic experience and Dragon Quest certainly has more to it than your average reviewer lets on about this title. As you venture on your journey, the gameplay presents itself with fast, strategic, and fun turn-based combat and a character building system that is simple on the surface but requires a lot of planning and thinking for certain situations. The combat allows for characters to fight using different weapons, abilities, skills, and spells, and there's even a Chrono Trigger-esque power system that lets multiple characters perform special skills under the right circumstances and these can prove to turn around a losing fight by doing things such as healing the entire party, increasing everyone's defense, or hitting the enemy with a strong attack. Battles are won and characters level up at a moderate speed, gaining them skill points and you utilize these skill points on skill trees that unlock some very useful moves, abilities, and situations. For example, you can unlock the dual wielding ability for Eric if you put enough skill points into his knives tree and then you can use that ability to dual wield other weapons like long swords. It's this kind of planning and mixing and matching of different skill trees that is where Dragon Quest XI shines in its simple complexity as you may find that many players won't play the same way and if you don't like the way your characters are built no worries, you can always retract your skill points at a church and reallocate them for a fee, no need to start the game all over again like other RPGs. It's this kind of accessibility and flexibility of the systems where Dragon Quest XI excels beyond its competition. There's not a whole lot of game breaking consequences. Any player of any skill level can probably beat this game, some faster than others for sure, but it's a game that prides itself on being for everyone essentially, with all its options for traversal, write-downs of the game options letting the game flow at the pace of the player. You can run past every enemy on the overworld if you want to avoid as many fights as you want only to face bosses underleveled, requiring an emphasis on strategy rather than powering through a boss and players are rewarded for this bravery with getting to the next point faster. Get knocked out by a boss and you have the option of starting the dungeon over with your levels kept and half of your gold gone, no harm, no foul, or you can use the autosave feature and it's like you were never there. It's these choices that make the game as hard as you want it to be based on how much work you put into Dragon Quest XI that highlights its extremely well-balanced gameplay, world, and progression system. That's a lot to say that I like this game and I highly recommend it to any person who likes video games and even some people who don't. It was a perfect game back in 2018 and somehow even more perfect now with the release of Dragon Quest XI S. Now I have a lot of experience with Dragon Quest XI. I played it two years ago on PC and I played it quite a bit last year on the Switch with a definitive edition. I've done mostly everything you can do in both games and have a total of about 200 or so hours clocked in across all versions of the game with my characters nearly maxed out on their levels. The game itself is nothing short of an incredible experience every time and DQ11S is just more of a perfect thing. Almost every major issue I had with the original release was ironed out in the definitive edition showing that the developers really do listen to their fans. However I've seen a common concern about this game and I figured I should address this because I know people will ask. I've seen it going around as some people seem to be confused or think that this is the same exact game as the Switch version that released last year except for modern consoles and this is partly true and partly false. The game utilizes assets from the Switch version and includes every little bit of extra content the Switch version added. It has orchestral music which was a big fan request especially when the original PS4 version came out and had a midi soundtrack. The definitive soundtrack truly does this game the justice it deserves honestly and is on its own enough of a reason to justify getting this game if you ask me. There's some really great tracks here although a lot are used from previous games this could be either a plus or a minus depending on what you're expecting in your nostalgia levels with the series. Among the orchestral soundtrack there's a 2D mode that looks like an SNES game and it runs in a very smooth 60 FPS. It's styled like Dragon Quest 3 on the Super Famicom and it is just a huge retro throwback. The combat even changes to be a little more difficult as you have to choose everyone's moves all at once while in the 3D mode you have your parties move one at a time. Additionally there's no more enemies out on the field that you can see it's all random encounters from here. It's a very authentic retro experience that very well could have released 25 years ago and you could play the entire game from beginning to end in this mode. It's a seriously crazy way to do a new game plus run and the devs must have put in a ton of work for this to happen. I mean a retro style demake of the entire game loaded in who does that? It's crazy the lengths they went through to deliver on this being a 30th anniversary game in the culmination of the series history and they bring that concept home with Tickington the new area in the game which lets you go back in time to revisit old Dragon Quest time periods using passwords you collect around the world. With these past words you can travel the 16 bit versions of prior Dragon Quest worlds. There's so many inside jokes that poke fun at the different events long time Dragon Quest fans might recognize like the Prince of Kanak from Dragon Quest 2 leading you on a wild goose chase and the Masayuki map being in Dragon Quest 9's world. I think this is just so great for Dragon Quest fans being able to talk to all these different characters from previous games and exploring worlds we still venture in. No matter where you started in Dragon Quest there's something nostalgic for you here and it is just a great tribute to the series long history. Honestly just a great feature and it features challenging bosses with unique rewards. Among these other big changes in the definitive version there's tons of new outfits and armors to wear. There's like a Ninja outfit for Eric and a Boracashian Veronica among others. New story chapters which admittedly feel a little bit tacked on and my favorite feature of all being able to switch to battle speed to be super fast so you can rip through the battles twice as fast. After getting this feature I just cannot go back to the original Dragon Quest 11. I'm sorry but that version runs in a snail space compared to this one. Honestly one of the best new changes in this version and I can't live without some of these outfits either. Now these additions are all great but I've heard people concerned about the graphics since this is a port of the Switch version of the game which is rebuilt from the ground up to be able to work on Switch. Here's the thing when DQ11S came out on the Switch I considered it to be the definitive version of the game because of all the additions. Sure the graphics weren't nearly on the level of the PC version but the content made it superior if you ask me. Now this new release of DQ11S for PS4, Xbox One and PC it's a high definition master of the same Switch version though there's a ton of misinformation regarding the graphics and I'd like to clear things up. So the game is nearly identical to the Switch version in terms of content. It has all the goodies that DQ11S added and not much more. What makes it different is that the graphics and framerate are much higher than the Switch version. See DQ11S on Switch cut a lot of corners to get such a good looking game to work on a tiny handheld and it did it remarkably. The game performed well on Switch and was one of the best looking games on the handheld. It actually had to be rebuilt from the ground up on the Switch so the developers conserved space by grouping together textures which made the game have a slightly different look not quite as detailed but not terrible either. Just different. And the new version is using the same type of assets so it will look similar to the Switch version in terms of color balance and lighting. Now this game is not bad looking and it is not a straight up port of the Switch version like people are saying. First of all it runs at a very solid and consistent 60 frames per second. This video is demonstrating the framerate. The original 11 had options for 60 FPS but it was rarely consistent and does not look nearly as smooth as this. Additionally the framerate can be unlocked to higher levels on PC. You can even have an unlimited framerate if your monitor can handle it. The original 11 on PC can't do that. While the original 11 on PC supports up to 4k unfortunately this release only goes up to 1080p but it still looks fantastic and you never know if an update might be able to bump it up. The textures aren't just ripped from the Switch port either they are clearly more detailed. They're actually nearly the same size and level of detail as the original version aside from character models which are nearly the same. So this game actually deserves more credit. What's also interesting to note is that even though the outside environments take a bit of a hit graphically 11s's interiors actually look much better than the original. The lighting has far more contrast and looks better overall aesthetically. Look here at Heliodor Castle. The floor is so shiny you can see the reflections of everything in it. 11s actually looks like an improvement over the original graphically especially in interior dungeons and buildings. Now if you haven't been following along so far the game looks very good and the framerate blows the original out of the water and makes this one look far better if you ask me. People who are worried about this game being a switch port not looking good I don't think you should be. Now I think I gave a good rundown on why I think this game is extremely good. Now the question is Dragon Quest 11s worth it? Well if this is your first time playing Dragon Quest 11 yes it absolutely is this this is the version you want. I've heard people say they want to start with the vanilla version because of the graphics or the price being cheaper but you're not getting the best experience unless you get this one. This game has a super speedy battle system that I honestly can't live without. It has so many cool costumes with characters that aren't in the original. Among tons of accessibility features that streamline the experience like being able to summon a horse from anywhere. Being able to craft on the road without having to go to a campsite and being able to buy all the crafting ingredients you want at once it's like the thought of everything they could do to improve the original experience. For newcomers definitely get this version. Now if you played through the original 11 without all the 11 as bonus stuff I'd still say it's worth playing. There's enough extra content that makes it a different type of experience. You'll find this to be your favorite version of the game I guarantee it. The toggle quest alone make it worth it to me and there's even extra bosses for an added challenge so definitely go for it. Now if you play this on Switch you're not really getting anything new. It's the same game except it looks better. If that's really important to you then absolutely get the game but if it isn't I'm not so sure this is a definitive sale. Also keep in mind this is the third version of DQ11 the West has gotten technically. We got 11 in 2018, 11s for Switch in 2019 and now we're getting 11s for HD consoles this year making this a third release of DQ11 in a row. I'm not sure if Nintendo had a timed exclusive deal or something for the game but playing it a third time I can see it being tiring especially among hardcore Dragon Quest fans. I'm just glad the game doesn't cost 60 dollars instead it's 40. Still a lot but not nearly as much as I expected. Now if you're on the fence I'd like to mention that the game has a free demo on all available consoles that is about 10 hours long maybe even more. It's one of the longest and most extensive game demos I've ever seen. You can even save in it and transfer your progress to the final game. It covers a chunk of the final game and it's worth trying. As far as I'm concerned everyone with the hard drive space should download this at least. There's no reason not to. If the game interests you you can literally play the first 10 hours for free and see if you like it. Why not download it and see it for yourself? It could be your favorite game one day. As for me I'm happy with the game and I will be playing it on PC to take advantage of the best visual quality possible. So I hope you all enjoy this review of Dragon Quest 11s. It's been a long time request so I hope I delivered. I also want to thank everyone so much for helping me get to 11,000 subscribers. It really means a lot to me that so many people enjoyed the channel and I hope to keep bringing you all more content. We'll be covering more on Dragon Quest 11 as soon so stay tuned. So once again thank you all for watching and I'll see you all next time.