Gameplay
Battles are pretty standard DQ quality but for the most part, normal encounters never feel threatening. While your characters have much more potential to diversify their skillset compared to VIII, there's never really any purpose in doing so, as every character has a pretty clear primary role which makes the other ability schools feel tacked on for flavour. You're never going to be in a situation where you need to give mages physical weapons to conserve MP due to the abundance of MP restoratives and ability to skip encounters at will.
The main game has its ups and downs but for the most part, it feels like you're just trying to get from A to B to advance the story. Despite the game giving you the option to go to a lot of different places at points, this is merely the illusion of freedom, because as soon as you go somewhere which doesn't advance the story, you're told that "You're not supposed to be here, try again." This is worsened when you go to new location 'X', are told to go to 'Y' first, only to be told to go right back to 'X', because speaking to some random NPC at 'Y' triggered the flag that made the McGuffin spawn at 'X'. Even without such extracurricular exploration, the game has a lot of backtracking throughout.
Post-game doesn't have that much to offer other than more backtracking. The "bonus" trials are the exact same dungeons from earlier in the game recycled with a different colour scheme.
It took me about 120 hours to do everything the game has to offer, so it's definitely not short of things to do. A lot of it does boil down to filler content like fetch quests/material farming/hunt quests but that's true of most JRPGs so it's more a case of how interested you are in that.
Visuals Nice environments, character designs and monster designs. However, there is a clear reduction in the effort that was put into animations. Most skills that were present in previous games are a lot less flashy/impressive here and you're forced to play as the Hero in the field, presumably because they didn't make animations for the other character models.
Story/Characters Not that DQ is especially known for its story, but this one barely feels a step above the first NES RPGs. You are the chosen one who must defeat the dark one and everybody and their mother seems to know this for no apparent reason. Your party members mostly join you for no reason other than "You are the chosen one, let me come with you" and as a result, none of them really have any synergy with each other. There are some decent individual character arcs, namely for Sylvando and Eight, but there aren't any great character interactions between party members like in VIII.
I normally don't have a problem with silent protagonists but the Hero is an expressionless, emotionless husk of a character. What's even stranger is that there is a flashback cutscene in which a childhood Hero talks, yet no reasoning is given for his muteness later in life.
Audio The soundtrack is easily the weakest aspect. The original tracks are low quality and very repetitive and the few good songs are actually recycled from previous DQ games. The voice acting, while not awful, is fairly average, and some of the accents leave a lot to be desired.
Overall Not a bad game by any means, but it doesn't have the charm of many older DQ games, nor does it bring anything new to the table to maintain engagement. A good time waster but I couldn't recommend it given the breadth of better JRPGs out there - both past and present.
The main game has its ups and downs but for the most part, it feels like you're just trying to get from A to B to advance the story. Despite the game giving you the option to go to a lot of different places at points, this is merely the illusion of freedom, because as soon as you go somewhere which doesn't advance the story, you're told that "You're not supposed to be here, try again." This is worsened when you go to new location 'X', are told to go to 'Y' first, only to be told to go right back to 'X', because speaking to some random NPC at 'Y' triggered the flag that made the McGuffin spawn at 'X'. Even without such extracurricular exploration, the game has a lot of backtracking throughout.
Post-game doesn't have that much to offer other than more backtracking. The "bonus" trials are the exact same dungeons from earlier in the game recycled with a different colour scheme.
It took me about 120 hours to do everything the game has to offer, so it's definitely not short of things to do. A lot of it does boil down to filler content like fetch quests/material farming/hunt quests but that's true of most JRPGs so it's more a case of how interested you are in that.
Visuals Nice environments, character designs and monster designs. However, there is a clear reduction in the effort that was put into animations. Most skills that were present in previous games are a lot less flashy/impressive here and you're forced to play as the Hero in the field, presumably because they didn't make animations for the other character models.
Story/Characters Not that DQ is especially known for its story, but this one barely feels a step above the first NES RPGs. You are the chosen one who must defeat the dark one and everybody and their mother seems to know this for no apparent reason. Your party members mostly join you for no reason other than "You are the chosen one, let me come with you" and as a result, none of them really have any synergy with each other. There are some decent individual character arcs, namely for Sylvando and Eight, but there aren't any great character interactions between party members like in VIII.
I normally don't have a problem with silent protagonists but the Hero is an expressionless, emotionless husk of a character. What's even stranger is that there is a flashback cutscene in which a childhood Hero talks, yet no reasoning is given for his muteness later in life.
Audio The soundtrack is easily the weakest aspect. The original tracks are low quality and very repetitive and the few good songs are actually recycled from previous DQ games. The voice acting, while not awful, is fairly average, and some of the accents leave a lot to be desired.
Overall Not a bad game by any means, but it doesn't have the charm of many older DQ games, nor does it bring anything new to the table to maintain engagement. A good time waster but I couldn't recommend it given the breadth of better JRPGs out there - both past and present.