Dragon Quest XI Footage Demonstrates Cooperative skills, Horse Riding, And Plenty Of Battles

Square Enix shared the latest gameplay for Dragon Quest XI on PS4 and 3DS during a recent V-Jump live stream. The footage shows demonstrations of Cooperative Skills, horse-riding, and a boss fight.

The footage starts out showing the party at lower HP, and the reason being was to demonstrate a special rare item called “Miraculous Drop” that basically makes the entire party go into Zone mode.

Going Zone mode doesn’t prevent taking damage, but it allows for the use of “Cooperation Skills” that can be used when two or more characters are in Zone mode. In this example, we see a Cooperation Skill between Senya and Veronica called “Ramuda’s Prayer” that regenerates HP and MP at the end of each turn for the entire party.

Another advantage of using Cooperative Skills is that they activate at the very start of the turn, so you don’t have to worry about turn orders while using one. We also get to see a Cooperative skill between the protagonist and Camus called “Shadow Attack” that deals great damage.

Skills are learned using points on the Skill Panel. It also shows when a new Cooperative Skill is available through learning new skills. For example, this one shows that Flame Slash for Eleven will include a Cooperative Skill, meaning that acquiring the skill allows him to learn both skills.

Next up is a look at some footage from the PlayStation 4 version of the game at the 12:15 mark of the video (there’s also a hilarious skill from Row on the 3DS footage a little before that.)

The first thing we see here is that the game is being played with all four Restrictive Play options of “cannot escape from battles,” “cannot make purchases,” “cannot equip armor,” and “Shy Curse (cannot talk to NPCs).” Again, you’ll get to take them off and on at any time, as they’re mostly there for personal challenges.

Since V-Jump mostly works on Skill Panel and crafting weapons for the fight against the boss, you can head to the 28:50 mark to see where they get on a horse mount to speed things up to the boss.

While riding a horse, you can trample weak monsters with ease, but unfortunately you can’t do that to NPCs that get in the way. The event for the boss fight starts at the 34:35 mark of the video. They struggle through the fight with the handicap of not being able to equip armor or make purchases for items that could’ve been useful in the fight, but they manage to pull through, nonetheless.

Dragon Quest XI releases in Japan on July 29, 2017 for PlayStation 4 and Nintendo 3DS. The game is also in development for Nintendo Switch.