Started playing DQXI: Definitive Edition on the PC. It's an entertaining, classic JRPG that so far is fun. As I've gotten older the linear, non-reactive style of JRPGs has grown stale for me, so I'm not sure if it'll keep my interest for it's entire length (DQ games tend to be incredibly long) but so far I'm enjoying it.
That said, there's already a couple of things that annoy me:
- Enemies respawn about a minute after you defeat them. At least wait until I transition to a new map before respawning.
- The music is super repetitive. Every track seems to be five seconds long that just loops endlessly. I'm only a few hours in and already when I'm in a non-story section I mute the game and play my own music as I dungeon crawl and fight enemies.
- You can jump, which allows you to get on top of some stuff to collect hidden items, but where you can jump is completely arbitrary with invisible walls and ceilings everywhere.
- Enemy AI is pretty stupid. Enemies constantly heal themselves at max HP and seem to use abilities at random, like using a spell to up their strength when they're near death.
- When you think 'definitive edition' you think they've combined the best aspects of the different versions to create the ultimate one. Not so here. It's pretty much just a port of the Switch version. This means all the models (both character and environment) have had their polygon count noticeably reduced, the textures (while slightly improved over the Switch version) are worse than the original PC ones, both the lighting and shadows have been simplified, and the draw distance and stuff like the grass was reduced. There's also a missing mini-game that was removed from the Switch version and not reinstated for the 'Definitive' edition. Fortunately you can fix (or at least make better) some of the graphical problems with .ini tweaks.
