Don’t get me wrong, it’s still a good game. But I’m not sure it deserves all the hype it got last year.
It does some very clever stuff in terms of gameplay, with each character having their own unique battle system that synergise with the others.
And yes, the soundtrack is incredible.
In terms of the story, whilst it was interesting, the way the game drip-feeds you knowledge in the first two acts quickly became frustrating. There were multiple cutscenes where characters speak in such a vague, superficially poetic way. In reality it just felt pretentious.
Major story spoilers:
spoiler
The overall metaphor for grief is unique. I liked the concept of the characters being creations in this painting, and how that layer of reality feeds into the one you begin the game in. But it felt like everything was revealed all at once in Act 3. The game gives you very little up to that point, so it’s hard to emphasize with many of the characters. Perhaps replaying the game knowing what you know changes the perspective of it, but for a new player I’m not sure it’s the best way to tell a story.
Perhaps this is an unpopular opinion but I found the game aesthetically quite ugly. Many landscapes had a feeling of copy pasted Unreal assets that looked so same-y at points they became confusing to navigate (especially given the lack of a mini-map). The characters had these blank, uncanny stares half the time and the designs for some of them (Esquie in particular) just didn’t look good to me.
Oh and I’m really not sure why the devs decided to add entirely unnecessary platforming elements!
I found certain enemy attacks to be inconsistent and not well telegraphed, leading to some frustrating encounters were you had to memorise the parry timings rather than learn them from a valid cue.
I think the game deserves good reviews, but I’m not quite sure how it won so many GOTY awards. Perhaps it just wasn’t the game for me.
It broke inertia in a genre that had been struggling for a long time. A lot of folks have mentioned games like Super Mario RPG which was (one of) the last SNES Squaresoft game(s).
With the Square-Enix merger the franchises of the companies kinda merged together alongside adopting the innovations of MMORPGs.
And so the turn based RPG fell along the wayside, much like the RTS, until E33 renewed interest. So I think E33 is important for what it represents: the viability of a once popular genre ignored by major studios. There’d been smaller time pixel art games, but that was the sort od timecapsule realm it was stuck in.
Absolutely, it’s great to see smaller studios trying something new with a traditional format; an F-you to the AAA studios that have grown lazy. And I hope it kickstarts more innovation in similar games going forward.
Maybe in the US. I’m pretty sure they still have a literal holiday in Japan whenever a Dragon Quest game is released
That is true. We never got much Dragon Quest at all in the US. (I’ll just keep my Startropics and cope.)
But nonetheless, if it is just Dragon Quest left in Japan, I think it still was a stagnant genre.