Finished this game yesterday at about 85 hours after doing all the side-quests and trials, including the Tickington quests and the "extra" trials and bosses (which I guess weren't in the PS4 version). Fantastic game, though I don't know if I'd rank it as my favorite DQ - gameplay-wise I thought it made a lot of welcome innovations to the DQ formula (though I wouldn't mind if I never had to forge a +3 item ever again), but the plot and characters hit some weird notes at times and didn't feel quite as cohesive as entries like DQVIII. I appreciated all the QoL features which I assume were added to the "S" version (e.g. being able to purchase missing materials, forging anywhere).
With the characters, I liked/was okay with most of them (and thought the English voice acting was great) but they definitely had some "iffy" aspects. I'm not sure what the point was with having Veronica be a literal adult woman in a child's body... it added nothing to her character or relationships and mainly resulted in cringe. Rab's character was kind of a throwback. And I think I saw this discussed when the game came out, but Sylvando was an... interesting and somewhat complicated character for me to take in, as a gay man. On the plus side, I like that he was given a nuanced backstory, that he was an awesome fighter, and that he wasn't treated as the butt of a joke. His speech and mannerisms were intentionally campy but it added levity and humor and could be taken as earnest representation (even though the word "gay" was never uttered).
But then I played his side-story after Act I (which again, I don't think was in the PS4 version) and I started becoming really uneasy as he gathered his entourage. Suddenly the speech and mannerisms which were just a part of Sylvando's character became overdone affectations that men developed after meeting him. Suddenly there was an association between campy speech and being overly dramatic/close to tears, cowardly, and fawning over "manly" men. I couldn't excuse it anymore as "here's a great character who has stereotypically gay mannerisms as a part of his personality"; rather it was "here are a bunch of characters showing stereotypically gay mannerisms as a joke about how silly they are." In the end I wrote it off as outdated cluelessness by the writers rather than malicious homophobia, but it was still disappointing after the goodwill I had developed for Sylvando himself.
In terms of playing on Switch, I could tell the graphics weren't quite top of the line (even docked there were noticeable jaggies) but I loved the convenience factor - I almost never make time to settle myself in front of my PS4, but my Switch is always at my desk and I can play it whenever - don't think I would have finished this game for another year if I played on another platform. So I'm looking forward to them announcing the next entry, and hope if it goes multiplatform that they make a Switch version again, but hopefully releasing the same time as the others.
