Dragon Quest XI

or, the best 90s JRPG since the 90s

I need you to play Dragon Quest XI.

Go ahead. I’ll wait.

Now that you’re back having spent literally 100 hours playing my new favorite game, let’s talk turkey.

I at least hope you’re watching that video at the top of this post. I know it’s long and about a game you maybe never heard about before, but it’s what convinced me to pick this up years after it came out.

You watched it, yeah?

In all seriousness, despite writing all these essays that lay out arguments, I’m really not trying to convince you of anything or to do anything. I’m just trying to lmao over here on my dang keyboard and hopefully get you to have a few laughs as well.

But I want you to play this game. Even if you’ve never played a Dragon Quest game. Even if you’ve never played a JRPG before. Even if spending dozens of hours playing a videogame sounds like a nightmare that you will never have time for, I still want you to play this game. Even if you’ve never played a videogame of any kind before, I need you to begin here.

The Problem with Prestige

I have often found myself bouncing off Good Games over the last fifteen years. I’ll see these games draped in hype and maybe awards, smothered in luxurious graphics where the characters almost look like real people and think to myself, yeah, I’d play that or even yeah, I wish I lived there.

Sometimes I even play these prestige games and fall in love with them for sometimes complicated reasons, but over the last few years, I’ve realized that all I really want out of games is for it to be 1997 again.

What I mean by that is this: I would rather play Super Mario World than The Last of Us or The Witcher 3 or whatever the current tentpole AAA game is that gamelikers and gametalkers are stickifying their graphic-slathered fingers with.

It’s why I’m replaying a game from 1997 while eyeing a game from 1992 and 1995 and a few other games made between 1992 and 1999, with one that came out in the year 2000, when I was still a child in an almost adult body.

Expect me to make that paragraph make sense sometime within the next year¹.

To me, there are three pillars to a game:

• Story

• Gameplay

• Graphics

Anyone who tells you the graphics don’t matter at all is a liar or a fool or maybe doesn’t understand the video in videogames refers to something that happens with your dang eyes in your dumb head. However, my view is that story and gameplay matter a whole lot more.

In the 90s, there was only so much you could do with graphics without dumping your whole budget there. And so game studios spent a lot of time working out the gameplay and story (though this might astound people who casually try to pick up a lot of older games). But I would still put Chrono Trigger up against just about any game. Same with the aforementioned Super Mario World (more on both of these at some future date).

I believe the problem with prestige is that the three pillars I’ve defined have had resources shifted to primarily focus on one above all else. Jason Schreier’s excellent book isn’t exactly about this but it reveals much about how games are made, and the process is out-of-this-world bananapants bizarre. Story comes in early and then the designers and artists go in and work on it for a few years, and then bring the writer back in to try to paper over the chasms left in the narrative due to various other logistical, practical, and technological issues.

It explains why so many games have stories that start strong but become obscure to terrible over the course of a game.

And, I mean, I got to say: Bioshock Infinite has no idea how to make a game where your primary action is shoot fools in the face fun. You could substitute many different games and actions into that sentence.

Like, I have tried to play The Witcher 3. Foolishly, I picked it up the day after beating Breath of the Wild. This was foolish only because action and movement in Zelda is always buttery-smooth and pleasant, whereas the Witcher 3 felt like shoving octahedrons into cylinders. Every movement felt so clunky and awkward that when I was forced to fight some shrieking banshee, I felt like my thumbs were made of brittle clay.

And I had gotten pretty good at killing Lynels in Breath of the Wild so my thumbs were very much not made out of brittle clay, fella.

So while I often find the gameplay less than ideal and the story borderline nonsense, what prestige games have really gotten good at is making digital people look almost real.

And, uh, I just don’t care about this. Not even a little bit.

haven, a Recreation

Dragon Quest XI is a thoroughly modern game in every way that matters to me. The graphics look great!

The gameplay is fun and simple and straightforward with all the modern conveniences that a young dad on the go requires.

But many of the criticisms of Dragon Quest have to do with the gameplay, in that the core of it has remained unchanged since 1986.

Would you call New Super Mario U outdated or lacking in creativity or innovation?

Well, you might, but I have nasty things to say about people like you.

These people are fools. Worse, they are incurious fools.

Now I may be a real dummy about most everything in life, but I can tell you that Dragon Quest XI does the trick of nostalgia better than almost every game I’ve ever played. Including a game like Final Fantasy XV, which was deliberately built on nostalgia.

Dragon Quest XI essentializes the demanded metaphor of nostalgia. Dragon Quest XI’s gameplay reminds us of games we played thirty years ago but it reminds us of them not as they actually are but as they are in our honeycoated memory of them. You don’t remember the frustrations of random battles or the inconvenience of save points or the fact that your dumb mom wanted to watch something on TV or that your Gameboy Color could run out of battery power.

What you remember is the way you fell into your TV screen or your tiny Gameboy screen. The way these digital people made up of eight or maybe sixteen pixels spoke words that still ring in your head like a gong in the dark for your whole stupid life.

Because let me tell you something about playing an RPG made in the 1980s: it sucks!

But, once upon a time, it was everything to you.

a baby with hands to hold

I don’t remember if I asked for this or borrowed it from my JRPG loving friend or if it was on sale at Target so my mom bought it for me for my birthday back when these games were called Dragon Warrior.

If you can believe it, I still have the poster that came with this. It looks great!

I loved these games, though my memory of them is hazy at best, because my memory of everything is hazy at best. But I remember spending hours holed up in my room or in front of the TV fighting an endless parade of monsters. I remember the sparse narrative of the first that gradually developed into something one might reasonably call a story by the second and especially third.

I played them all again once I was done. I had already played Pokemon a couple times and didn’t have any other games that quite did this same thing, except Super Mario RPG, which I’d already played so much that I could nearly recite it from memory, so it was the only thing to do. I can’t be sure, but I’m fairly certain I played these games about three times.

I was a baby longing for adventure. Longing for so much.

I remember the only book my mother ever recommended to me that wasn’t religious in nature: The Lord of the Rings. I’ll have more to say about this in a few weeks, but I had been seeking this or something like it for almost my whole life. I wanted different worlds. Wanted to escape my own world. Especially once we moved to a place where I knew no one.

I fell into books but was never able to access the kind of books I really wanted. But my mother’s complete ignorance of videogames allowed me, I suppose, to come across the kinds of games that she would not have allowed me to have had they been books.

I have no real explanation for why I was allowed to own a game called Dragon Warrior but not books with dragons on the cover, unless they were written by an old Catholic professor of Germanic languages.

Games like Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest and numerous others opened up worlds within me.

I mention these early Dragon Quest games because they were the only ones I played until Dragon Quest XI.

And I have now watched them begin to open worlds in my son.

I played most of Dragon Quest XI with him on the couch beside me. He delighted in watching me fight the neverending parade of monsters. He loved the catchphrases my characters triumphantly declared or desperately shouted during battle.

Every night, he’d ask me to tell him a story about Dragon Quest. We looked at artwork and listened to the scores of games nearly forgotten by me but taking root once more as an adult watching his child throw himself into the same worlds once so precious to me.

Time collapsed as I played this game. Hours melted by and decades slipped away.

I played a big chunk of this while I had covid and it was the only thing to really keep a spirited three year old occupied while I spent a few days on the couch.

Not my proudest parenting moment, but we do what we can to get through the days.

And I love the way it opened up worlds for my son. Loved the way the child I was connected to the adult I am and through me to the child that he is.

This specific experience is why this newsletter exists.

a Choir: a woven web

The reason I wanted you to watch the video way up above by Tim Rogers is because he explains why this game is so great: structure and characters.

I love these characters. I really want you to understand this. The game is 100 hours long. That is not an exaggeration. On top of that, the game’s tone is much more lighthearted and optimistic than, say Game of Thrones. So what I loved about this experience was the almost sitcom pleasantness of it.

The game is funny too! Sometimes funny enough that I laughed out loud and pumped my dang fist.

The characters are a delight and, like the cast of Community or Parks and Rec, part of the joy is just hanging out with them. Just listening to them banter or loudly proclaim their aspirations and dreams.

I know, this all sounds quite childish and maybe overly optimistic for a fantasy story at a time when fantasy stories are all trying to Red Wedding themselves into the public consciousness.

But this buoyant joy and funloving spirit is what makes the first forty hours of this just melt past you.

But there’s also so much incidental worldbuilding and characterization from tertiary characters that fill out the world in surprising ways.

I will never forget the mermaid I encountered, for example, who sends me on a simple quest as a way to get you, the player, to start exploring off the beaten path.

But what I found here surprised me. This simple quest to get some item that was temporarily important to the narrative gets filled out by the tragic story of lovers lost, of a love that died but never ended. The calamity of time and geography, of war and magic. This love, unlooked for, that failed long ago, becomes a hook dragging through your chest as you return to the mermaid to tell her that the man she waits for is so long gone that his story is almost only a folktale.

The game is just packed with little narratives like this. Some of them tragic. Some of them hilarious. Some of them just interesting, showing the grand web of relationships and rumors and folklore that binds this world together.

I will always remember how my band of lovable characters reach the final stage of their journey and encounter a newly born child. Our presence is deemed a blessing by the parents, by the town.

And then, nearly forty hours into this game, everything transforms.

I both want to spoil this to make you understand why you need to play this game, but to do so…well, what if you do play it and I’ve already told you what happens?

The game transforms in a way that is not dissimilar from Final Fantasy VI’s final act, but instead of the final act, you have dozens of hours ahead of you.

But the reason I’ll never forget this birth is because when you finally return to this town at the top of the world many hours later, you find those parents grieving.

A blessed child. A beautiful day.

A lost child.

A tortured presence.

All this pleasant joy and delightful bounty of bombastic characters who make you laugh and slowly fall in love with them - it’s all to make the bite of this dark turn tear through flesh and bone.

This transformation of the narrative and the world blew the top of my head clean off while I was covid-dazed, having to stop because the unexpected stress and terror was too much for my son. And so I spent the rest of the day with this brewing in my skull.

All this joy and pleasantness all leading to a moment of such exquisite failure, such devastating loss. It was like dipping my hand in a cookie jar and instead of finding cookies or something awful like a tarantula, I instead found a tunnel to the moment my heart broke in irreparable ways when I was 17.

The game I believed I was playing was not the game I am playing.

I love this. I love this massive transformation that sets the next forty hours in motion.

But what I love most about this transformation is that, much later, the game demands you make a choice that is both heartshatteringly cruel yet so openheartedly optimistic.

And it is a choice. A choice that some players may never even realize is being presented. Because it’s possible to quit playing the game at the ending and never see this otherside of the dodecahedron that is Dragon Quest XI.

It moved me. It moved me in ways that are difficult to explain without spoiling your own potential journey here. But it is the hand of a true author here, so trusting in the narrative they’ve constructed and with the confidence of either a genius or an amateur, Yuji Horii pushes you up to the very precipice of love and hate, of joy and spite, and asks you to make a choice that is impossible yet inevitable.

I am flabbergasted even still, nine months later, by this choice presented so tangentially. Like, you may play the entire game and simply not realize this final leg of the journey is waiting. Even if you find it, you may turn away. But if you make this horrifying choice, you will find even more beauty waiting for you, though achieved through much soulache.

Anyrate, what I want to leave you with is the greatest JRPG creation in decades: Sylvando².

1. You know, this whole newsletter was meant to be a place for me to talk about games I love but I’ve been very much not doing that the last nine months for no real good reason. Maybe it’s just that it’s easier for me to talk about books so I keep dipping down into that well.

2. Truly, I could write a whole essay about Sylvando (and maybe I will!), for the way he plays with gender expression, with sexuality, and how this could be used as a punchline, it’s instead used as a shout of cheer and beauty. He is one of the strongest and most flexible characters in the game, and he is a joy to have on screen.