Ruined the perfect score, sorry. This is closer to a 3.5 for me but I rounded up. Maybe would be higher if I didn't get the platinum but I did. I feel the last third of the game dragged on but a lot of that was to get trophies. Didn't like the Tickington stuff at all since you lost a lot of the modern quality of life changes, maybe if I'd played the whole game in 2d it wouldn't have been as big of a deal.
There's a bit of magic in this old series. The gameplay can become repetitive and the structures of the story are well-known. There's a danger that any Dragon Quest is going to feel like paint-by-numbers. And yet... the repetition is satisfying because of the impressive pacing. The story might be the same old song, but everything works together incredibly well. That includes the orchestrated score, which, even playing over and over, has a richness in its instrumentation that the synthesized versions lack.
Almost despite myself, and against the headwinds of its predictability, I found a bunch of story beats to be effective. It's easy to hold a grudge against the kingdom that initially betrays the main character, but the game does well to redeem some of its characters. The story effects the world in big ways, and most chapters and acts do well to explore those effects. Each character has an arc, and as party members I wound up utilizing each one in different scenarios. I even think the crafting works, with a mixture of unique items that can only be bought and many, many pieces of equipment that the player is better off making and refining.
If you're looking for a turn-based RPG that tells you a familiar story of a warrior gathering a gang of talented and singular characters around them to defeat the big bad, you could do much, much worse.
