Play The Dragon Quest XI S Demo And Receive A Special Spirit In Smash Bros. Ultimate

The symphonic soundtrack for the game is so good, it's a wonder that they even have the option to use synthesized music in the game (thankfully not available in the demo).

One time I was with some one and wasn't very careful. A few days later I realized she gave me a bad case of tockles.

Not interested in the game even though it looks promising. I'll only download the demo to obtain the spirit.

10 hrs seems like an absurd amount. I will at least give it a shot. I wasn’t planning to pick this up, but maybe after a few hrs I’ll know if I wanna use my 2nd voucher on this

I'll be checking out this demo for sure. I was already probably going to be buying this game but it will be nice to play the demo first.

It's one of the big JRPG series so it's a right shame I've never played one.

Also even though I have SSBU and the fighter pass, I haven't touched the game since before the Hero released. lol

they should sell the 2d version as a stand alone game for $40

@Whalehome Welcome to the world of JRPG's. Where even the NES Final Fantasys could take around 100-200 hours to beat.

Well, since the physical copy of Gravity Rush I ordered online doesn't look like it'll arrive until Monday, I think I'll give that demo a try. JRPG's aren't normally my cup of tea, but maybe this one could be like Golden Sun, where it won me over, and became one of my favorite games!

Kind of liked the game yesterday. Never played DQ before.
Some game spects seem pretty old after Xenoblade games.

The graphics is pleasant to look at but there is some blurry image in the TV mode (not tried portable yet). But still the eyes can adjust.

Hearing symphonic OST is nice. I want to look at graphics and music comparison videos.

Basically I have always loved turn based RPG (like old Phantasy Stars or Golden Sun) Though haven't played a classic RPG for a long time. So might give this one a chance

@Heavyarms55 " it's a right shame I've never played one."

You are in for a real treat then. It's an amazing game.

@JHDK

They tockled your fancy.

@w00dm4n Maybe $20 - 30. I'm curious how well that would sell at any rate.

Really pleased they’ve put a demo out for this as I liked the look but wasn’t sure it’d be my kind of thing.

Loaded the demo last night and it’s absolutely gorgeous.

Going to enjoy trying the demo and will buy the game if it holds my attention

I had a quick go of the demo but I'm leaning more towards Grandia at the moment which just has a better battle system if I'm honest. I'll give it another go later on to see if it can sway me

I tried the demo but I am disappointed by the resolution. Nintendo should stop tolerate bullshots as the screens in the eShop (at least for DQ11) are much more sharper than the actual real game. What a shame. Id be sticking with the PC version.

I’d love to give this a go, most of it looks looks a right, bloody treat.
But I will not, I can not, I simply refuse to spend any money on a game where the protagonist has the most appalling hair style known to man; The Bell End.
What. Were. They. Thinking?
It makes me physically unwell, it is literally hard to watch and I need to avert my gaze.

If you want to turbo your resolution then play docked, handheld is not meant for high performance, some people are tick, if it's high performance on handheld then say bye bye to your battery within an hour of play. Even PC don't perform well when not plugged in.

@BlackenedHalo same here to be honest, when first booting you get the cut scenes which look nice and crisp but then in game it's a bit fuzzy and a bit of a shame

@Rpg-lover and you obviously have no close how the Switch works, if its sub 720p handheld it'll also be sub 1080pdocked as the GPU doesn't scale that much. So whichever way you play it you'll get a fuzzy/softer image

Played the demo and loved it. The game is gorgeous, day one buy for me.

@Kitchener It's not often I have strong opinions on character designs but the protagonist for Dragon Quest XI is, in my view, one of the most appalling I have ever come across. The hair-do is ugly and has been irrelevant in the fashion world for decades. The weird purple and grey outfit is so bland and uninspired. It just looks like it took five minutes to come up with. I realise Akira Toriyama is a top mangaka and the whole series is supposed to be conservative with minimal innovation but he has been doing Dragon Quest artwork for donkey's years now and it might be time to hand over the reins or at least look for some fresh inspiration from somewhere.

Thankfully in SSBU you can change the Hero's appearance to one of the more interesting aesthetics from previous DQ games but I'm not sure how much, if any, character customisation there is in DQXI itself to alleviate the offending design.

@TheRealKyleHyde what also made me upset is that the outfits do not change when you change the equipment:)
I didn't mind it in Xenoblade 2 though
But here it surprised me somehow

10 hrs! Makes sense, I started playing the demo and it just kept going. Very generous

@TheRealKyleHyde
You I like.

The game looks and plays really good on the Switch. Both handheld and docked. The game also is really good in it's story, music and gameplay.

This is a day one purchase, for sure. Even though september is going to be very expensive.

The hour and a half that I played of the demo has me sold on DQ11S. I was unsure at first but now I love it and hearing the demo has 10 HOURS worth of content has made me VERY happy! BTW does the free DLC for DQ11S apply to the demo and the full game or just the full version? If just the full game it's weird that they released it for download before the game is out.

I’ve never played a DW game and tried the demo for an hour and a half last night. So far it’s interesting and I’ll keep playing. Still unsure if I will pick up the game but the demo at least has me considering it. Before it, I could have cared less.

The demo is indeed really good but the music needs to be toned back in spots. Sometimes it is difficult to hear other noises.

@Zidentia you can adjust the music volume in the options
I reduced it to 8 but saved after so not sure if it will affect cut scenes

But yes, default settings make the music too loud comparing to voices

I've just had to give up the ghost with Ys VIII as I can't stand it, it's so clearly a PS Vita game and it's just no fun for me coming straight off the back of finishing Xenoblade Chronicles 2 with the vast worlds to explore etc.

I see that DQXI was a 3DS game... it's not the same story with this is it? Tell me the 3DS game is a different beast altogether?

@Zidentia you're right on that. I had to reduce it to 2 to achieve a comfortable balance (I usually never get music over 5 though)

@frabbit dragon quest XI was 2 games PS4/pc 3d game and 3ds 2d 8 bit art style.
The switch version has the two versions in one game (you can change the artstyle everytime you save) on top of other goodies

Too bad I trade in my copy a while ago lol. Loving this (4h in and running)

@Balta666 Ahh! Now that does change things. Okay dude, nice one, cheers.

@scandallas it'd sell well enough on mobile phones.

to bad Stadia doesn't use Google Translate as a feature. I was using my phone's camera to play the ps4 port of DQ1

@Zidentia That's why PC is a winner. You can adjust everything sound/graphics etc... well at least is playable on Switch

@SeerCoot But this game doesn't have random encounters. Monsters are scattered on the world map. You can fight them when you want to. That's why for you it's a must buy. did you actually even play the demo i'm questioning. Why starting about random encounters while this game doesn't have that.... i'm just wondering

@Kitchener you might hate the snippet you'll get to see once you reach the Manglegrove in the demo.

Thankfully it's perhaps the only one to highlight the character's hair so much.

To a degree I half wonder if the hair is because of how frequently past Dragon Quest heroes were compared to Goku -because- of similar hair styles and being designed by the same artist. Perhaps Toriyama finally got tired of the comparisons.

@TheRealKyleHyde if it means anything some of the costumes sets even in the original game lets you change the character outfit.

This said regarding the hero, how much you will enjoy alt-outfits with depend on your enjoyment of either ornate ful plate armor... or Mardi gras outfit(how you unlock THAT one is seriously a treat of awesome silliness though).

@Gau interestingly there ARE special "costume" armors sets in the game. A couple, including one for the hero, are surprisingly decent.

The sequence where you unlock the one i'm thinking on does come late-ish in the game but also is a surprisingly decent moment in the game too.

Then there's another costume well before that which is of a much more silly sort but also is unlocked in what I -still- think was an awesomely silly sequence in the best of ways.

@KayFiOS honestly with what I recall of Golden Sun keeping some of the more traditional aspects of jrpg mechanics, in particular for combat... you may well be at home with DQ11.

I've also been surprised (I've played on PS4 but still still get the Switch version. Might even sell my ps4 since I barely have any games for it) by how utterly silly yet also darker/sad the story could be at times.

Like... the voice acting for a specific character during the Dundrasil sequence of the story... oof. It still gets me sometimes.

Demo looks and runs great on handheld. Everyone should check it out. SE did a fantastic job... this is just icing on the cake.

@Zidentia it's admittedly pretty loud(thankfully music volume is adjustable in settings) but I'd say the symphonic soundtrack is still very much bearable than the synth track of the PS4 version. Really it's the themes with brass/horn instruments that might be the more annoying one but even there those hold up better on the symphonic versions I feel.

Like I had both my PS4 and Switch connected on the same TV to compare the two and while visuals are obviously generally better on PS4(though there are sequences where I like the brighter palette that seem to show in some daytime areas under the "simpler" lighting engine of the Switch version)... I keep being surprised by how better the symphonic tracks of the Switch version stand out as better than m the PS4 even when I thought I'd just gotten "used" to the synth track.

@carlos82 I'd say the battle system in the early game can truly feel over simple but at the same time I think it helps make it more accessible.

It does become much more involved when you start to learn more buff/debuff spells as unlike franchise focused on "weak point" mechanics to add complexity to their systems I feel it's in the prevalence of buff/debuff abilities in the endgame that Dragon Quest shines the most?

Like even status effect spells feels like they have greater room to be useful in Dragon Quest games than others where it fell the "race to find the one elemental weak point" is often the sum of their battle system compared to what I felt was a more gratifying exploration of character skills builds in Dragon Quest. Sometimes knowing what's best capable of hindering enemy damage-dealing capacity is as good if not better than finding which spell elements dish the most damage against them. In fact you quickly learn to love mage not for their "spellnuke" potential but rather for their "party saving spell barriers/buff abilities" potential. Particularly in the end game. They feel less "I just nuked the enemy with 9999hp spellnuke" and more "I just halved the damage potential of one category of the massive boss' damage dealing ability and just utterly negated his capacity to devastate us with his other abilities so feel free to say some thanks".

@Alucard83 but you'll probably never get a lot of the Switch's new content because it was developed using a newer game engine version than that used on PC or PS4(the engine they're using didn't even support Switch development at the time).

So even if the Switch's "definitive edition" ever come to other consoles it likely won't be until an additional 1-2 years from now by which point the PS5 may well be out which is perhaps the only reason the PC might get the content as a yet another full separate edition of the game being released crossplatform (the engine overhaul required to port the new content would probably void porting it over as mere DLC anyway since you'd have to redownload the entire game all over again).

@Ludovsky yeah that's just my first impression but I am going to give it a longer go when I have a bit more free time before I decide, Grandia has the advantage of me knowing it's full potential from playing it a log time ago. I will definitely be using the Japanese voice over because they were irritating in English during the battles 😆

@Zidentia This is a recurring problem in Dragon Quest games and spinoffs. It wouldn't surprise me to learn that the composer, Koichi Sugiyama (who is a horrible monster of a person in general) insists that his awful music be so loud by default that it just drowns out the rest of the sound.

@patbacknitro18 to beat? are you crazy? 50 - 60 hours at best, of course, when you do all side content, it can beover 100

@Roto13 he is really such a monster?

@Agramonte i dont agree... it is lowres and rhe graphics to soft

@SeerCoot @SeerCoot actually the battle system is similar to Ni no Kuni or Final Fantasy 12

@BlackenedHalo He's a Japanese war crime denier (denying the Nanking Massacre) and he's extremely homophobic and transphobic. He's basically Japanese alt right.

@carlos82 thankfully the battle voices gone down quickly in DQXI, mainly because Gemma doesn't follow you long in the game so it's basically exclusive to that "earliest intro segment" thing.

Unless of course you were talking about voices in Grandia in which case I want even aware ^^;;;

Honestly i'm kind of interested by Grandia but I hear it's very linear with many points of non-return.

DQXI admittedly has its own equivalent to a "point of non-return" but also it's kinda unique and not exactly in the traditional kind where you absolutely can't revisit stuff.

@Roto13 I love Dragon Quest and I have a hard time letting go of the franchise,.especially as it was a great help for me to practice learning english as a french Canadian kid.

But honestly I have to admit Sugiyama is the member of the "original trio" I really would miss the least when his 80ies years old fart self go.

Even his better work was in the past and recently learning what kind of a**hole he is definitely put a damper on my enjoyment of the games even if his involvement is exclusively in the music(an area where younger talents is increasingly standing out).
I understand he apparently hate America because of the nuke that he was actually alive when and I wouldn't be surprised if he probably justify his own country's denial of war crimes because of how the bombing of his own country is "celebrated" by others but none of that excuse his denial and even less his homophobic a**holery.

I guess the way I try to process this all sometimes is telling myself that learning english in part thanks to these games is what allowed my rural french Canadian self to actually access the internet and, through it, actually learn about and make most of my closest friends among the exact kind of folks he tries to deride in his personal life.

So I consider that his fail that indirectly it's thanks to this franchise that i probably became exactly the kind of people he hates over the years.

But honestly... I really won't miss him when he carks it.

@BlackenedHalo You mean on a TV? I do not have my dock hooked up so only saw it on handheld.

I already played it on PC last year @2560X1440 and 1080p... so yeah - if you can play it at home, you have crisper options.

Either way, one of my favorite games of 2018. Worth a play.

Never that big a fan of Square Enix stuff and JRPG - even if I really want to love them, I havent since uhm... Eternal Sonata. But I have to say I was really impressed with the demo and on a 49" TV I think it looks very nice. Actually one of the prettiest games so far (if we ignore Warframe). At least for me this will be a buy if the demo keeps delivering... funnily enough I find the music annoying and hope I can turn it down a notch in the final version. 😅

This could be a huge seller for the Switch.

@Ludovsky
I was surprised by the levels. I have to adjust them. It just seems odd they wouldn't lower the volume of the music during scenes with vocal and situational sounds.

@Roto13 If you would only listen to artists who aren't insane in the brain, there would be no one to listen to.

@Swiftstorm you can lower music volume and in the full version there will be the option to switch to a synthecized version of the soundtrack(which is the version on ps4 but it wasn't well received there either).

A free DLC at release will also let you wear a costume that apparently switch the overworld soundtrack to that of dragon Quest viii while you wear it too: https://youtu.be/KWh7Qg8JRvY

@michellelynn0976 honestly I think so and I feel it's not a coincidence Nintendo is promoting it so much almost to the level of their own IPs.

Like I noticed that it's releasing in a packed month but at the same time it also release after everything else. That gives it perhaps even more of a chance because everything else will have had the time to come and go before it's even released.

That way instead of releasing only to be eclipsed by Zelda immediately after, people will have had time to play Zelda(perhaps even beat it since it's not the longest game) and THEN learn that Dragon Quest 11 is releasing with almost no major nintendo IP until Luigi's Mansion at the very end of October.

That's a pretty decent window of opportunity and for a title Nintendo is themselves promoting which is quite the contrasts to the 2018 PS4 release where Sony immediately spent their advertising exclusively on Spider Man leaving Square Enix of America to advertise it and I feel they never really figured how to ever sell the IP.

@Ludovsky ... awesome thanks! Actually thanks a lot for that info!

just downloading it rn to play the demo just to get the spirit in smash

I pre-ordered the DQ switch which comes with the "gorgeous edition" of the physical game which comes with some extra DLC content i guess.. So I'll be waiting for that to ship before I play it at all.. I've already played it for several hours last year on the 3DS any way but stopped when I found out a switch version was coming out..

I was going to play the demo, but then I saw that you can't select 2D mode in the demo, so I decided to hold off until the full game. I want to play the whole game in 2D since I already played it in 3D on PC.

l been playing the demo now and wow l want this game and l still got more to do in the demo rn.
it seems to be more fun than botw imo

Tim Rogers called this the greatest DQ game of all time

@sanderev never played this but love ff7 turn based battling so this sounds great. If demo grabs me I will get this but my wallet is only so big and as you say. A lot of day 1 games coming 🤔😩

@TheRealKyleHyde and @Kitchener there are two suit of armor costumes that The Luminary can wear which completely covers his hair if you're that bothered by it.
https://i.imgur.com/Ifehyc3.jpg
You get the recipe to make it in Act 1. Costumes now have a designated costume slot on Dragon Quest XI S too, so you can legitimately just wear it on him for the rest of the game from that point on.
And there's an emerald green variant of this same suit of armor they added to the Dragon Quest XI S as well.

@Terrible_Majesty Tim Rogers gushing about Dragon Quest in his review for this game is the reason I played the entire series first the first time recently.

@Roto13 that was honestly one of the most entertaining reviews I have ever watched!

@Roto13 how long did it take you to finish all previous ten games? I’m doing the same with Dark Souls but I’m stuck on part two

the lab boys told me about this, i was kind of disappointed but after awhile i kind of accepted it as fate.

@Ludovsky Look at how well Square/Enix games are selling as well. This is gonna be a new era for Nintendo and Square.

I own the PS4 version and play it on a PS4 Pro and 4K screen, which is very clear. After playing this Switch version, it may seem odd to say, but the softer visuals seem more suited to Dragon Quest.

@8bit4Life honestly there's many times I felt the same.
There are times where the more enhanced shading and lighting is better in PS4..
But there are many others were the resulting color palette on the Switch "simpler" lighting engine were just more... pleasant to look at?