izigame.me

This is from the viewpoint of someone who grew up with the original AND all of its many remakes over the years.
PROS:
The art is beautiful. The redesign of the towns is gorgeous, the 2d/3d style really fits DQ like a glove (I hate calling it hd-2d, let's call it what it is Octopath-style or Octo-vision for short!) The new class has its fun parts, but also one huge drawback i'll discuss further in CONS. The music is awesome, Koichi Sugiyama must be smiling in heaven, what they did to his tunes definitely elevates the game. However, for the most part, the aesthetic changes are not enough new content to warrant a 60 dollar pricetag, honestly.
CONS:
Hooboy. Where do I start? RANDOM ENCOUNTER so I RANDOM ENCOUNTER tried to RANDOM ENCOUNTER go looking
RANDOM ENCOUNTER for monsters RANDOM ENCOUNTER RANDOM ENCOUNTER ok enough of that gag I guess, but you get the point. For crying out loud, it feels like the lich cave in Final Fantasy 1 out there. I can't even get a good feel for where I am on the map half the time because the encounter rate gives me so little breathing space. Worse, there's no way to lower it (that I've found yet, at least in 7 hours of gameplay)
Character creation. You get 4 options for each job. That's it. Now compare it to a 2015 game made by ONE GUY, Stardew Valley, where you get hundreds of hair, shirt, hat and pants comboes to truly make your guy into YOUR GUY. Square, you have a multimillion dollar team of folks who could easily have given us mix and match options in virtual perpetuity! Instead,
you gave us... four options. Not even portraits to match those options, either. And no mixing and matching faces to hair to garb, just pick one of these four and give them some stat seeds and you're done!
Speaking of stat seeds... they are a dime a dozen now. In previous Dragon Quests, getting
a stat up seed was a rare thing, so it felt like something you really had to either farm extensively to get, which added to the value and mystique of the item, you wanted to make sure you didn't waste the valuable stat increase! Now every 3rd or 4th monster drop just makes it rain seeds on you, at a ridiculous pace. It's no longer a rare drop, it's so easy to get that it seems almost insultingly easy. Guess it's just as fine that the encounter rate makes it ridiculously easy to obtain a mountain of stat seeds, which in turn make the game ridiculously easy. Oh, did you preorder the game? Good, now you get another basket of seeds to stuff into your worthless character's mouth and turn them into roided up beasts. No one wants to feel that slow sense of growth, just drug your team up and turn them into gods at level one!
Map. Ok so you kept the most useless feature of DQ3, the 'remember' feature which has a total of ZERO uses, and you assigned a whole SELECT button to it...
And you assigned it to a double X function? Nevermind that X should have been reserved for
equipment or status checking purposes. Not a good control option. I'd have preferred to replace the 'remember dialogue' option with the more useful 'pull up map' with select.
Dawn lasts about 2 seconds of game time before it's night time, good luck timing it so you can find the FIXED LOCATION monsters to collect for your monster wrangler... give me more dawn time, game. Worse, you're looking in one spot and RANDOM ENCOUNTER cant find this damn RANDOM ENCOUNTER monster RANDOM ENCOUNTER where the heck is RANDOM ENCOUNTER and oh to hell with it I give RANDOM ENOUNTER up. Oh look, it's night now and I missed my chance to find this one hard to find monster that SHOULD Have been done like DQM... just let me capture the monsters I WANT and let me NAME them what I want! WHY would you give me a 'monster wrangler' that doesnt train monsters???!?!
Oh but what did you give me in RETURN for this rather useless new class with very little variation? OH YOU REMOVED PACHISI tracks. One of my favorite ways to build an OP team in past versions of DQ3 is now completely gone so you can go looking for ridiculously hard to find monsters that have zero application for your Wrangler except to give him/her more abilities the more of them you happen to find. Gee, thanks. I'd rather have Pachisi back and you can keep your "Wrangler".
You removed the monster gambling option in favor of 'go find better monsters so you can win a couple of measly prizes'.
Used to be I could stay and gamble on the monsters until I had 999999 gold and then I was set for the rest of the adventure, lol. Now I get 3 strength seeds and some other sellable junk and am sent on my merry way. And ONLY if I managed to find good enough monsters by some miracle because I lucked out and it was the right time of day... yikes.
OH I can't call my people HIM/HER anymore, now instead of 'women' we call them APPEARANCE B.... so MALES are an A and FEMALES get to be a B in your book, Square Enix? Isnt that actually MORE insulting to women? You're suggesting that female type bodies are a B and male type bodies are an A. Holy crap and us older folks are supposed to be the 'intolerant people'?!?!?! absolute garbage.
I like that there's 4 models for each job, although the variety is still not enough. I believe DQ9 had more hair, color and face options (a game from what, 2010 or so?) and we're in 2024 and you still can only give me 4 models per job? Alright.
So far, it seems like a huge case of looks over quality. Making things LOOK pretty, but play terribly. I wish you would focus on making the games FUN and ENGAGING again rather than trying to make it look pretty and not much else improved.
I hate that I have to give one of my favorite Dragon Quest entries, the only one of THREE that enables me to fully customize my team, a not recommended review. You took away options, neglected to fix some easy quality of life improvements and instead gave me watered down versions of stuff that worked better in previous versions... AND you took away my Pachisi. WHY DID YOU TAKE AWAY MY PACHISI! I used to be able to spend hours in there!
Stick to the Game Boy Color version, it's still the best. Also, GADABOUT??? THe hell did you call them GADABOUTS?
Jester was PERFECT, why ruin what was already a great name? Even calling them GOOF OFFS like in the original NES
version is better than GADABOUT. Your translators need to stop huffing their own farts and leaving perfection be. Your changes are stupid and pointless and only serve to alienate old fans, while not doing a particularly good job of gaining new ones.
Skip this unless you see if for under 20 bucks.
EDIT: WAKEY DUST? Ok, so the queen of the fairies just lost her daughter, who DROWNED herself because she couldn't be with the one she loves.... and immediately after, the actress is forced to say the line "Here, take this wakey dust to the village and wake the villagers up!"
Wakey dust. I wish I was kidding. This is the level of intelligence you're getting from your writers these days, folks.