Recent reviews by Syntax_1

Introduction
Disclaimer: 120 hours played (probably about 40 of which is story/cut scenes :D), all steam achievements, all in game monsters killed.

What I liked

• Good looking art style, animations, voice acting
  
• Characters are personable and unique
  
• Combat is decent
  
• A lot of content

What I didn't like

• The main story is good but there was a lot of extraneous conversation and text that was boring and just wastes time
  
• Base game is way too easy, both combat and hand holding
  
• Game is way too long

To explain my negative points.
Unnecessary story
The main story was good and for the most part was focused, but there was a lot of cut scenes and text that really did not add to the story and just felt unnecessary. The cut scenes are not able to be skipped the first time you see them so this gives me nightmares even thinking about playing through a second time. For example, walking into a new area you almost always get a 15-30 second cut scene that introduces an area and has some of the characters say something you already know or is obvious like "let's head over to the inn and talk to x guy you are looking for." I really wish the game would not waste your time with these cut scenes and let you figure somethings out on your own. Sometimes there are cut scenes for a boss and they will go through one sentence of dialogue for each character like "let's do this!" I'm pretty sure I spent just as much time waiting through cut scenes as I did actually playing. Also there tends to be sections where you move to a spot to start a cut scene then it ends and tells you to move click something else then another cut scene starts. Why can't this all be combined into one longer cut scene. There is really no need to do the 5 second play in between each mini cut scene.

I came into this game from the last Dragon "Warrior" I played being Dragon Warrior 1 for the NES, and I was really expecting a much more difficult game. The difficulty between that game and this was extraoidinary. DQ11 holds your hand and plays MMO style, with markers where it wants you to go next and highlights each person to talk to on the map. So you are basically following a linear story the whole time. The game advertises as open-world but is not really open-world until way later. You are forced to collect an item from someone before being allowed to even enter the next area. The story triggers need to be hit before you can even collect quest items or do things that you eventually have to do anyway.

So this game is long.
And I really feel like it was way too long. There's even plenty of gameplay after the "credits". I felt like the story behind the credits is necessary to the game and they really shouldn't have played the credits there. It also felt like repeating the first 40 hours of the game twice as the game play was too similar. They could do with tightening up the game play, reducing the time and cleaning up frivolous and unnecessary cut scenes to knock about 20 hours or so off the game.

To explain the positive points.
Interesting characters and high quality art and voice acting.
All of the characters are unique and really add to the story and feeling of the game. Voices are great. Sylvando is super annoying and could have been toned down but besides that I enjoyed it.

Combat was above average
Combat is too easy but the look and feel was good. Camera was too close at times to see some things and could have been more zoomed out. Seemed like there was way too many abilities and "luminary powers" as I don't even think I used half of them. Also it's really hard to tell what abilities are going to do more damage than others, because there's no numbers just text like "a giant explosion", "a big explosion", etc. Which makes it hard to min/max and be strategic in combat.

A lot of well done content and side things
There's tons to do in this game and the side quest tracking system is a good improvement over other games I've played that don't track those things. Casino is well made and engaging. Slime Quest slot machine was fun.

Overall
I feel kind of neutral about this game. If I had the chance I probably wouldn't play it over again as I like completing everything in games and this one just seemed to keep dragging on and the scenes and text were just too much for me.

To sum it up. If you don't mind a really long game and don't mind sitting through a lot of non-skippable dialogue and story that you have to button press through, the art, voices and combat and content makes it worth playing.