Dragon Quest Heroes 1 is good and bad. If you play through the entire game it's worth playing because it's a mix of Dynasty Warriors and tower defense and the tower defense does add a lot to the game, however if you play the end game content where tower defense really isn't a thing, the game is complete trash because the combat is incredibly weak. The second game feels both better and worse, but it's still the same game essentially. The tower defense is simply replaced with your standard more difficult progression, kill all enemies with maybe two tower defense battles the entire game, neither being that great. The exploration is kind of cool but it's just a bunch of walking and when you're not somewhere you haven't been and no challenge exists, it's just as bad as the first games end game. The end game is pretty trash, there's end game cntent but extremely repetitive, going back to any other area makes it just as bad as the original. So these games aren't anything beyond good for a single playthrough.
Dragon Quest Builders, I've only played the first one and I've enjoyed it. Think Minecraft but much much much better. There's actually objectives and goals. From everything I've seen and heard, yeah, the second one is way better. A lot more quality of life improvements, improvements in combat, the game now allows you to grow crops like Harvest Moon, etc. I'm going to eventually get the second game.
Dragon Quest 11 is a great game but has issues. Now first off, Dragon Quest 11 has the best characters in the entire series, especially Veronica. The "normal difficulty" is so stupidly easy and unfun that the game itself isn't fun at all, atleast to me. If you like to just walk through opponents in an RPG then it should be enjoyable. However, at the same time, Super Strong Monsters difficulty has several difficulty spikes that make you hit a brick wall until you grind a few levels. Regular battles are all also difficult, but they feel balanced incredibly well, hard to where many battles could end in a party wipe, but not too hard. As someone who doesn't like bad balance, there are two sections that I ran into on Super Strong Monsters that I was grinding for two or three hours on both of these sections to get past the bosses. The first one was this sandcrab that could OHKO the players, the second one was a spider that could web the entire group and have turn after turn after turn uncontested.
Unfortunately, after finishing off the spider boss, I turned the difficult to normal and saved. I never played the normal difficulty, but after pushing myself 30 hours to around the very middle of the game, I couldn't take playing this difficulty anymore as I wasn't putting any effort and just wiping the floor with everything except bosses. I determined that the bosses should have ever so slightly more health than what they had on normal and normal enemies on Super Strong Monsters were the perfect balance. So essentially the game is a bit unbalanced on both aspects imo. Either way, you can't switch back to SSM after switching to normal. I made an irreversible mistake and for that a game I would have completed I never will unless I decide to play the Switch version or the PS4 version gets DQ11S.
The final issue, the reason I'm not restarting unless I play the S version is the storyline. Now the storyline isn't bad, it's well, cliche, but that's what Dragon Quest has always been. The problem with the story on DQ11, is it drags on FOR HOURS. Without any spoilers, once you reach the very middle of the game, you have literally four hours of nothing but follow this character for awhile, then go back and forth to speak to different characters in this "new town" and then go outside of the new town to meet the last party member and have a stry battle, then go back in the town for more dialogue. Four freaking hours of this. This is just the very last part in the story I've experienced before quitting the game, this isn't counting how long the rest of the story drags. So yeah, I like the characters, and every time Veronica speaks it's the height of the games dialogue, but I do not like how such a merely average story drags on and on and on. That's actually what makes the story worse.
Each character has a predefined role and you can swap out any of your characters with any other character in combat at any time. Now when I say charcters can swap out and they fill a specific role, it's not at all like "change characters and attack" like Final Fantasy 10. The chracters don't fill a one dimensional gameplay mechanic.
Additionally, the game has your characters going into a sort of limit break style mode after a certain amount of actions. This is called being "pepped up," instead of the much cooler sounding Japanese name for it being "in the zone." You can tell if your characters pep is going to end by the character flashing, however, if you take them out of combat, they stay in this mode indefinitely. So you can essentially save the characters pep and then bring them back into combat when you need to use it. Each character has their own pep skills they can use, but they can also use combination pep skills that can have different effects. One instance of pep includes the hero and one or two other characters, this skill gives a 100% chance that the enemy will drop their rare item, give more gold, and give more experience. I've came across enemies that give you every seed type so you could essentially max out character stats and the Falcon Sword would then be the best weapon in the game, especially with Erik who is the only character in the game who can dual wield.
Anyways, you can slightly build each character towards how you want them to play, but for the most part they'll still be in their specific role. Erik is the only character who can use boomerangs, but he's also the best character with swords, and the best character with daggers. Veronica, Serena, and Rab can use other weapons, but you're not going to want to use anything with them but staves. I prefer claws with Jade, but she is also the best character with spears. I honestly actually feel that while Sylvandro isn't specifically support, he fills that role better than attacking, he's quite bad at dealing damage and he's limited in his support role outside of hustle and increasing attack power. If anything, Sylvandro's best role would be assisting as a secondary dagger user if you go for daggers with Erik. There's another character I got but I don't want to ruin anything by saying the weapon he used.
I really do think Dragon Quest 11 is a great game, but the issues with it are annoying, and as I said, once I removed Super Strong Monsters, I unknowingly ruined the game for myself, so remember, if you do play, make sure you add super strong monsters. This is done by hitting triangle when adding the hero's name. It's a little hard starting out, but trust me, the normal difficulty is stupidly easy and you want to just stay away from it.
*edit*
I hate visible encounters and the way it's done here is pretty bad.
Also, the point system is carried from DQ8 again but in DQ11 it's the first time this system has ever been good. Yes, I think the point system that started in DQ8 has been garbage ever since it's been implemented. On this game however each character has a grid and you can view almost every skill in the grid to determine how you're going to progress. You can learn abilities only from abilities you've already learned. You can also reset the grid as well so you can reallocate the points any way you like(I think the fifth town in the game you can do this in, it's not too far in, but not too early either. Maybe 10 hours or so?)
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