Dragon Quest 7/11

I've been playing a lot of Dragon Quest recently.


Dragon Quest XI came out earlier this month and while I like it well enough, the last third of it or so is just a slog. Dragon Quest games have always had you go back and revisit towns and areas you've been already to see how they've changed as the plot has unfolded, and usually it's fine, but XI has you revisit the same areas two or three times, the last time being for reasons eerily similar to the second time you were there.


Let me explain (spoilers follow). Something bad happens about thirty hours into the game, and you spend the next twenty dealing with it. After you deal with it and see the credits, you have the opportunity to go back in time to that "bad" event at the thirty hour mark and change the outcome. You then spend the rest of the game dealing with remixed versions of the problems you had between hours thirty and fifty.


I promise it makes sense in-game.


The problem is, the third time you've been to these places, you're probably sick of them. They don't have too much interesting going on, and the problems you have to solve are only slightly different than the middle third of the game, but not different enough. I get why Enix set the game up this way - especially in the HD era, reusing assets as beautiful as the ones in DQXI is important, but frankly the game would have been much better had it ended at the fifty hour mark (and apparently, I play through these games much faster than most - people on a forum I go to spent about twenty more hours than I did getting to the point I was at). Again, it's not like the plot and hijinks you get up to at the end of the game are bad, they're just samey and hard to care about. For example, the town that in the middle third of the game was the home base for Sylvando and his dancing troupe that you had to help save a few people locked up in a dungeon nearby becomes a town whose residents can't stop dancing in the "rebooted" version, whom you save by killing a boss... in a nearby dungeon. Different, yet the same. Too similar enough, really, for me to care all that much about it. It's not bad! It just feels extremely padded.


The above got me thinking about a game that is accused of being the most padded in the series, Dragon Quest VII, which I finished playing through for the first time earlier this year on the 3DS. I can see why people think it's padded - you find the Shards/Fragments you need, go to the island, solve a problem, go back to the present, go to the island you were just at, and solve another, similar problem. Later in the game you might come back and solve a third problem. Sound familiar? The difference with VII, and why I think it does this particular thing much better than XI, is that the first two times you're visiting each island, they're back to back. You don't leave for ten+ hours between each visit, so the writers are forced to make subsequent visits either interesting enough to justify another long story sequence, or just have you quickly find a Shard/Fragment and move on. The vignettes in VII are more interesting than in XI (and are even well written enough, if a little clumsily worded, in the PSX version, which I'm playing through right now instead of finishing XI), and when you go back to certain areas at the end of the game, they're distinct enough from the other times you've been there that they feel new, and not weird retreads.


My favorite story thread in VII is genius. One of the early towns you visit involves a love triangle, which you think ends when one of the people in the triangle just up and leaves town, never to return. Without spoiling what happens, you revisit these people two or three more times at different points in their lives, and you see what happens. The genius part about this series of vignettes is each one seems self-contained, and if you never encountered these people again, you'd feel closure. But then you stumble across them again and find out a new wrinkle. It's not as moving as a certain infamous sequence in, say, Dragon Quest V, but it's very clever and memorable. It's the best example in a game brimming with good writing. The structure of the game is what makes this fun stuff possible.


Which is why XI is disappointing for me, at least at the end. It doesn't seem interested in telling cute little vignettes spanning multiple visits - it's stories really are self-contained. The second time you visited each town really has no bearing on the third other than giving you a feeling of deja-vu. It's a shame, because the quality of life improvements to the series in XI are great, and I really enjoy the crafting minigame, which blows VIII and IX out of the water. I just wish the story surrounding all of the good stuff was more affecting. It just feels like the structure is off to me - I don't think the series is doomed to feel this way each time, it's just XI that suffers.