Infinity Strash: Dragon Quest The Adventure of Dai Review (PS5) | Push Square

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Infinity Strash: Dragon Quest The Adventure of Dai is a game of two halves: a surprisingly simplistic action RPG and an endless barrage of static, visual novel-style cutscenes. It bears the name Dragon Quest and is published by Square Enix, yet it feels entirely barebones; with basic gameplay and a poorly presented story, we're left confused about who this one was for.

But first, some background. Dragon Quest: The Adventure of Dai began as a manga series in Japan in 1989, based on the mega-popular Dragon Quest video game franchise. It was a hit, and there was an equally popular anime adaptation in 1991. Fast-forward to 2020 and the anime series is revived, with an action RPG announced to be in the works because of the infuriating ubiquity of transmedia storytelling. Infinity Strash is that action RPG, and it retells the first 42 episodes of the revamped anime, which is 100 episodes long, leaving plenty of room for a sequel.

Game Studio and KAI GRAPHICS collaborated on Infinity Strash, which is, in essence, a series of extended cutscenes pulled from this newest anime series bolted onto a combat system. When not staring at stills from what we have to imagine is a better-paced narrative, players will be blasting through bland environments full of enemies pulled from the larger Dragon Quest universe, occasionally punctuated by a boss encounter, which are reused to an unfortunate extent.

We weren't expecting Dragon Quest XI: Echoes of an Elusive Age quality, being a spinoff and a subseries. But the Dragon Quest Heroes and Dragon Quest Builders series are well regarded enough, so seeing such a barebones effort from the storied publisher is surprising. Technically speaking, It all works, and it even looks nice enough — but