Dragon Quest XI is out in English and that’s just the tops. I’m really looking forward to revisiting my 2017 GOTY in the coming weeks and months. Last year, I was living a different life. This year a lot has changed for me: I have a kid now, I changed jobs, and I’ve moved across the country. Despite these big changes, and perhaps because of them, I’ve found myself thinking about Dragon Quest XI a lot.
Dragon Quest XI has a different subtitle in English than it does in Japanese. The English subtitle gets at what the game is all about. This is an anniversary game and in many ways it’s a ‘Best Of’ for the series as many of its major characters and situations resemble people or stories from previous Dragon Quest games.
There’s a lot of fun to be had in picking out the callbacks and references. Echoes of an Elusive Age skirts around this appealing aspect of the game, but the Japanese title is more overt with its intention.
The Japanese subtitle, roughly translated to In Search of Departed Time, has Proustian vibes about it and so does the game proper. Dragon Quest XI is a mile long window display of madeleines. With every nod and wink to the franchise’s history Dragon Quest XI makes, memories of the wheres, whys, and hows of previously played entries come bubbling up.
There’s a pleasure in nodding along with the little ‘aha!’ moments sprinkled throughout the game’s many hours but there’s something deeper than that as well. For me, it was a sense of a shared history. Dragon Quest and I have been through a lot together…
…Summer 2008, I was in a rut. The summer wasn’t going as planned. At the time I was a singer in a band that was struggling to get to where we wanted to be. We rehearsed a lot and tried to get a strong setlist together but there was a sense of wheels spinning about the whole thing. Other aspects of my life were lacking as college was a drag and I wasn’t looking forward to going back to class in the Autumn.
Each day bled into the next until August when I picked up Dragon Quest VIII. This was a game I’d always been interested in based on its graphics, but to that point I’d never got on too well with RPGs. Something about Dragon Quest VIII was different. It was that feeling of the wide open air and the chill pace of the town-dungeon-town structure that clicked and made those long summer days zip by.
It’s funny to type this, but thinking back on it Dragon Quest VIII rejuvenated me in a way. My bandmates and I talked about the game a lot that summer and listening to the soundtrack on the train rides into university later that year put the pep back in my step. After I finished VIII, Dragon Quest became one of my top gaming priorities. I played through all of the other games in the series and the series followed me through many ups and downs in my life.
Dragon Quest IX came with me when I moved to Toronto, Canada. I remember finishing up the final boss a few days after I arrived. I was staying in a hotel near Bloor. It was snowing outside the window as the credits rolled on the tiny DS Lite screen. I teared up a little, a combination of home sickness and the feeling of a great journey come to its end. This happened days into the start of a different journey in my life. I met my future wife in Toronto and played a lot of the ways through Dragon Quest VII in her apartment between work and taking in the sights and sounds of El Toro.
I also played Dragon Quest VII on a train to Winnipeg around Christmas 2010. The train was full with people heading home for the holidays and seats were hard to come by. I ended up sat next to a man who I’m pretty sure was a con man of some sort. He had approximately one million ticket stubs in his coat pocket and would go through all of them in sequence when the conductor came to check our ticket. He was a nice enough fella though, he bought me a donut when we stopped in one of the one horse towns on the way to Winnipeg.
That was a long train journey, but not long enough to put a dent in Dragon Quest VII. That game save followed me across systems through various hacks and workarounds and eventually ended up on a hard drive somewhere. I finished the main game in 2012, but haven’t worked up the courage to fight God yet.
2012 also saw the release of Dragon Quest X, the Japan only MMO for the Nintendo Wii. I think I can safely say that I was the first European to play the game which by some miracle arrived on my doorstep on its Japanese release date.
Dragon Quest X is a fantastic game that I wrote about on the old Games and Junk a little. It’s a great expression of the communal aspect of Dragon Quest games with people working together and swapping tips for success. When the game released, I was neck deep in a Masters’ dissertation. It didn’t get in the way of my work, but it certainly got in the way of playing any other game for a long time. My wife (then girlfriend) who was away from Ireland at the time would call me up on Skype and laugh that I was still playing Dragon Quest X at any hour of the day or night.
The Japanese version of Dragon Quest XI came out last year at the end of July. I played through both the 3DS and PS4 versions during August and September of that year. At the time, I was working a soul-crushing debt collection job with a BIG software company. Dragon Quest XI was a good respite from angry English people shouting down the phone at you for eight hours a day. My wife was pregnant at this time as well and I remember thinking that in many ways Dragon Quest XI would be the last hurrah before Baby Time. Now that I’m living in Baby Time I can confirm that there’s no time for anything but Baby Time.
Nevertheless, I’m excited to go through the story again. See what I remember and what comes flooding back. For me, and many others, a lot of nostalgia for older games comes from who we were when we played them. Dragon Quest has been with me for many years now and memories of the games and my own life go hand in hand.
We love to go back to stories that comfort us and I think Yuji Horii knows this better than most. He talks about creating a world you can feel with the Dragon Quest games, but it doesn’t stop at the game world as these games make you reflect upon the world around you too.
So, when am I going to talk about Dragon Quest XI for real. I’m not really. Right now, it’s fresh and it feels like the best Dragon Quest yet, but I felt the same about every other Dragon Quest I played right after finishing them. Somehow the series gets better and better. It finds new ways to make the familiar surprising again. It’s easy to imagine a world where Dragon Quest is a cynical cash grab, and by rights, it probably should be but somehow, despite the shifting trends of video games Dragon Quest remains pure, constant, and inevitably The Best One Yet.
The measure of XI will be in its staying power. Will it remind me of moving city or playing with my son or decorating my home in years to come? I don’t know for sure, but I’m happy to wait and see. Go forge your own memories with Dragon Quest XI , available now for PC and PS4.
