Dragon Quest XI: Echoes of an Elusive Age

There's a lot of game in this game, but much of it is good!

It did a great delivering the tried-and-true JRPG formula: lots of gear / stats / abilities, repetitive turn-based battles, and rewarding you for going the extra mile. It felt good to be back in the saddle, since I don't always have patience for these. The crafting system was pretty good, adding a level of skill to a system that's usually just a menu. The pace of the battles reminded me a lot of FFX, which is always good. I really liked that you could set your whole party to CPU controlled, so battles would fight themselves. That let me grind as much (or as little) as I wanted, which was huge when the game was so long. The world is large and well-realized. There's plenty of things to do. The series' cheeky humor is on full display, which leant a lighter air to some more serious goings-on.

The worst part is probably the pacing- there are too many endings in this game. Being a legendary hero was fun, but they needed to know when to quit. The difficulty was also on the easy side (maybe because of the aforementioned auto-grinding), but there's a setting for that if you want a hard mode. It's also a little silly to complain about, but there's maybe too much of everything? In addition to the whole main quest, there's a whole separate series of 2D sidequests I basically never touched. They act as a love letter to the rest of the series, which is cool. But at some point, there's just too much if I'm going to play anything else this year.

That said, nobody is doing very traditional JRPGs better, so if that's what you're in the mood for, DQXI acts as potent comfort food.