You don't really play a Dragon Quest game for surprises. This is a series built on tradition - and on traditions that you can trace back some 32 years - so it's always going to be angling towards a more traditional brand of role-playing game. Indeed, Dragon Quest 11: Echoes of an Elusive Age - which marks the first mainline release for a new game in Square Enix's long-running series in the west for almost a decade - makes a virtue of that. There's no DLC. There's no online. There are no expansion packs or future amendments planned, and almost certainly no patches that might alter the story or introduce whole new chapters. This is a resolutely, almost aggressively old-fashioned game, one that feels like it's stepped out fresh from another era entirely.
And that's absolutely fine, especially when it's a game as sumptuous as this. Just as Dragon Quest 8 dragged the series into the world of 3D, Dragon Quest 11 does a fine job of introducing it wholesale to the HD generation (indeed, so belated has its introduction to that world been that it's also available in 4K on PlayStation 4 Pro, where it looks absolutely splendid). Those rich blues, greens and yellows that serve as the core part of Dragon Quest's palette, that feed into that feeling of sun-parched days that stretch out endlessly for summertime adventures, have never looked better.
Neither has its world, with Dragon Quest 11's kingdom of Erdrea full of exquisite detail. It's the way the landscapes dip out towards the distance, selling the scale of a game that'll happily consume 80 hours before you see its end; the way the treetops dance in an invisible breeze, selling Dragon Quest's stately, blissed-out pace just as well as Koichi Sugiyama's score. It's how Akira Toriyama's artwork has been expertly met by Square Enix's modellers, selling the comic menace of bodkin bowyers and lump mages with an all-new level of fidelity. It's about seeing familiar things presented to a level you won't have seen before.
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