DRAGON QUEST XI S: Echoes of an Elusive Age - Definitive Edition

This was my first Dragon Quest game and I somewhat enjoyed it. But looking back over time, my view of it has diminished gradually. First, I want to start with the positives. - I think the game looks great and sounds great with one major caveat. - The story was interesting for the most part and there were some cool moments. - The voice acting was competent. - The world was gorgeous to look at and had a good variety of biomes. Now we get to the stuff I didn't like. - The game was waaay to easy. I played on the normal difficulty for my first playthrough and I don't remember losing a single battle the entire time. I'm sure if I were to replay on Hard, I would have a better time with the combat, but that leads to my second point... - I don't think this game has any replay value. With how linear the progression is and the story only giving you the same party members and lack of build variety I can't imagine there being enough to experiment with. - The game feels bloated in length. By the time I got to the end of the story, I felt incredibly burnt out to the point I didn't even finish the epilogue. - The music is nice, BUT there isn't nearly enough of it. You listen to the exact same battle theme and overworld theme through probably 70+% of the game. And it restarts every time you start and stop a battle. So you only hear the first 30 seconds at most of each song most of the time. It got old incredibly fast and never changed. - The crafting system didn't feel worthwhile for the most part. By the time you could craft gear that was worth making, you would get to a new town or something and be able to buy better gear. It just felt like there needed to be more to crafting in my opinion. Overall, I would give this a mixed review if I could. If you're a fan of classic, long JRPGs then you'll probably have a fine time. It's a well made game that runs good but didn't have enough depth or variety for me to justify it's length.

A "definitive" version that still looks visually inferior to the original in terms of lighting, textures, character models, geometry, and foliage. Mods sadly can only repair so much. Vanilla game is a visual masterwork and it's a shame SE didn't try to backport all these wonderful QoL changes and OST fixes to it.