Conclusion

Dragon Quest has the fighting/grinding part of Final Fantasy and the adventure/quest styling of Zelda, so if you love oldschool Japanese role-playing games, you'll feel right at home. While there is a slight learning curve, we've all seen similar concepts in RPGs before. I remember playing these JRPG games as a kid (and still love them). Playing Dragon Quest XI brought back wonderful memories and made me feel years younger... and lose track of (work) time. New players should also have no problems learning the mechanics as the game slowly adds more and more complexity while the story progresses, but doesn't really surprise with new ideas for these concepts, which might be a good thing for older players, but probably can't reel in the younger generation as much.

The storyline is similar to other JRPGs, with nice character development, tons of gear, and spells to choose from, a simple crafting system, and great translation of the Japanese dialogues, without these losing their wit. Voice acting is decent, too, even though some players complain that the devs went overboard with some English accents.

Graphics are poor if you look at them from a hardcore PC gamer perspective, but the unique art style does have something to it and you get used to it quickly. While character models are reasonably well detailed and animated, the textures for both the world and characters are way too low resolution; the monsters are somewhat cute though, which, again, is due to the art style. The game world feels open world even though it has loading screens, but unfortunately, some maps look a bit empty, as shown in our screenshots.

Hardware requirements are quite light, even at the highest details, which means even lower mid-range cards will be able to reach 60 FPS, with high-end graphics cards having plenty of power to spare for even higher settings through config file edits or super-scaling. Unfortunately, the GTX 1080 Ti can't reach 60 FPS in 4K, which I find a bit surprising given the visual fidelity. NVIDIA definitely has a clear performance advantage in Dragon Quest XI as the GTX 1060 6 GB, for example, is almost 30% faster than the Radeon RX 580 where we usually see them both neck-to-neck. The available graphics options are pretty limited, but the community is hard at work to figure out things for this Unreal Engine 4 powered title.

Mouse and keyboard controls are alright, but could definitely be improved. For example, to select commands during fights you have to use the cursor keys, while you use WASD the rest of the time to move your character. It wouldn't have been that difficult to allow menu choices using WASD in combat, as moving around in combat doesn't seem to do anything gameplay-wise. Playing with a gamepad is really the best choice for Dragon Quest XI. The whole pace of the game does feel a bit slow at times, so I recommend you grab Cheat Engine, bind "Speedhack" to an unused keyboard key, and toggle that from time to time, or maybe I've just gotten impatient over the years...

If you are starving for JRPG content on the PC, then definitely go for Dragon Quest XI asap. If you have other games to play anyway, maybe consider waiting for a sale as the $60 price point feels a bit steep. On the other hand, you should easily get 50+ hours of playtime out of it, which is considerably more than in most other PC titles. For me so far: best JRPG this year.