I fell in love with Dragon Quest at a young age with DQIX. They announced this game not too long after, and I was crazy excited for it - but I didn't really understand that it was a remake of a Super Famicom game, so when the day finally came, I was a little let down by the lack of a character creator and the "downgrade" to first person battles with sprite graphics. I dropped the game for a few months, came back to it on a random night and got absolutely sucked in. Something just clicked - the dream world plot was so mysterious, I realized how huge and grand the world was, and the class system proved to be addicting.

I still have so many moments from this game permanently ingrained in my mind and I plan to replay it again soon. The evil world you visit in that final stretch of the game was so immersive and the whole summoning scene where a demon demolishes a castle blew my mind. Gradually coming to love this game's older style was probably the beginning of my descent into dungeon crawlers

Man...53 hours...I honestly think it took me as long to beat this game as it did to play the other games up until this one combined. I usually don't start out talking about things like that, but it's kind of the best way to express that this Dragon Quest game is different from the past games.

As I've played the series I've said that I can oddly see the parallels between how Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest grew between their matching numbered games, but I honestly think FF6 and DQ6 don't quite have the same parallels except for MAYBE that both have an issue where the plot comes to halt and there's a lot between that time and near the end where there's just side quests and dead air of vague story, before the story revs up and gets going again.

It's honestly becoming kind of hard to talk about this series graphically because it seems each game uses the same sort of graphics and animations as the last. DQ 1 - 3 as far as the Switch remakes look the same, DQ4 - 6 on the DS kinda looks the same with very small improvements in spots. this isn't a bad thing, because as I've said with 4 and 5, the game's look great and remind me of that era between SNES and GBA. I will say the one thing that has been getting much better per game is the character art, definitely has improved a lot.

Everytime I write one of these reviews I kinda worry if when I think of music to the game, have I been hearing the same tunes between the trilogies and aren't noticing or are the compositions so alike that I'm confusing them? Either way, I really like the music even if I'm too the point I swear I've been hearing a lot of these songs for like 6 games with little change, but if it's not bothering me, it's apparently pretty good then.

Now for the story...as I said earlier, the game has this weird issue that the story kinda disappeared for a good chunk of the game and was just sending me for place to place late into the game, but before then...the story was going very nicely. The mystery of why you constantly find yourself going between two worlds that seem closely related to each other and why things are affecting one in ways that sometimes do or don't change the other. I really liked the story overall, and honestly found most of the characters to be pretty interesting. It's weird, but I kinda like the "Hero" design of this game out of the 6 so far. Oh, and unlike some of the past games, this actually fixed something I've complained about and actually made the villains important and were a constant through the whole thing.

As for the gameplay, not much really changed from the past games. Exploration was mostly the same, dungeons and puzzles were the same, combat didn't have too much of a difference....except the Vocation system was brought back. I absolutely love job/class system games in RPGs and I love to customize my team and especially since there's a Martial Artist vocation I went straight for it! But...this system felt like a double edged sword. Unlike the past games, you learn skills from the Vocations as they go up by rank. this is done per battle and isn't tied to your experience level. every skill you learn in your Vocation you get to keep when you move to another vocation, so there's plenty of hybrid customization. even better, some vocations when mastered make a new Vocation, again an awesome system, but where the double edged part comes in is...the Vocations kinda feel like accessories or something to that nature, because when you equip a Vocation it doesn't change anything about the character aside their stats and skills they can learn. This mean that you can have a Mage which in most games uses Staves or Clubs, but in this game equipment types are tied to the character themselves not the Vocation...so if you make the Hero a Mage...he's gonna be a sword and shield heavy armored Mage casting spells or in my case a Martial Artist with the same equipment, but using fist-like skills and kicks despite having a giant blade and wearing heavy gear...get what I'm saying? It's weird, but not entirely bad...just strips the identity of the Vocations a little.

I did have some things that caused me not to be able to give this game the 5-star treatment.

- I'll start with the biggest issue and the reason it took me 53 hours. Grinding is required and I don't mean just leveling, Vocation grinding too. the final boss ALMOST requires 3 particular Vocations to be mastered or you're highly unlikely to win.

- Sometimes there's so much space between story bits, it's easy to forget what you were doing originally.

- The map really could be smaller, so many areas had little to no point to it and it makes it worse with two worlds.

- Half the total characters are optional characters and half of the main characters are under developed story wise.

Honestly I really liked this game for what it was, but I kinda felt it needed to be reeled in a bit and shortened to be a tighter experience, it has all the makings of a great RPG, but is a little too bloated in spots, but other than that, a pretty solid entry in the series.

played at the same time as the snes version and i like that version much more but 6 is definitely one of the better dragon quests. in terms of the ds version specifically, the localizations post-4 still arent my favorite but it definitely isn't as bad, and party chat is a really good addition to 6 since it has my favorite collective party, but gutting monster recruitment is kinda lame. aesthetically i find it weaker than the snes version in every regard other than battles, but it was a nice companion piece to the snes version if only because the fan translation isn't great

I got a used copy of this game at a GameStop, easily over 10 years ago at this point, and got probably 2/3rds of the way through before getting lost in the underwater part and losing interest. Would come back to it every now and then, and at one point dabbled in playing an English patch of the original version for Super Famicom, but couldn’t muster the motivation to start from scratch and actually beat it until a couple years ago. Really good game, kind of barebones and the removal of monster capturing from the original was kind of a bummer, but they make up for it with special recruitable monsters you can get in side quests. Probably my favorite of the (nowhere near enough)Dragon Quest games I’ve tried out so far.

This game is a lot of wasted potential, but even among that I found a lot to love. I can’t forgive the level cap system being poorly implemented and the evident plot details missing. Content bloat is also a constant issue due to the lack of coherent plot and character side plots, resulting in consistent tedium during a lot of the latter half of the game. I understand the prevalent mentality behind skipping 6 and after playing it I kinda agree. I had a great time but this is certainly a hard title to suggest unless you’re in the thick of DQ as a franchise and need to assuage your curiosity.

An underrated installment. While the characters leave a lot to be desired, the scale of the world is vast, the individual towns still have engaging stories, and there are some very interesting twists and plot developments nonetheless. The game's theme is identity, and the game plays with the conflict between the player and their own idea of the hero (or rather how the player gives the hero a personality) and the hero's own personality. Interesting fourth wall breaks are at play here that are unfortunately little noticed and little discussed. Still a great game.

So I started this playthrough back in 2018, fell off for years, then picked it back up in 2020 or so and went through most of the rest of the game. Dragon Quest VI is weird because it's vignette-based and the main plot doesn't build its tension much so when I got to the last leg of the game, the Dreadworld, I didn't feel connected to the story and felt like I had seen enough. I quit knowing I was just a few steps from credits.

And I was okay with that but I don't like leaving playthroughs unfinished, especially if they are so close from the end (and even if I was playing on replaying this game anyway), so I paused my Dragon Quest VII run to close the book on this one and pushed out the last few chapters. I pride myself on my recent habit of finishing RPGs but any playthrough that has years worth of breaks in between– you're gonna lose the plot. Luckily finishing this game off wasn't too hard since I picked some great class progressions.

So what is the deal with Dragon Quest VI? I think its focus on vignette-based storytelling and having two large worlds to explore make it a little immemorable. There is too much game in this DQ6. Too many towns, too many vehicles. The real world/dream world plotline is overly complicated. I never got a good sense of how the two worlds work together.

That said, any game with a class system as robust as the one DQ6 has gets point for me. That sort of thing– picking classes and levelling them up– has great appeal and overall the Dragon Questiness of this journey is infectious and satisfying.

And I guess I am a little forgiving of this game's shortcomings because they were trying to do something different. Yeah, I prefer the tighter narrative of Dragon Quest V but Enix had already made that game so for the next one they went for something more open-ended and episodic. They might have not done a great job but overall I still think they made a pretty good game.

Finding your true self

Some might consider Dragon Quest VI to be the "black sheep" of the series, an entry that doesn't fit the conventional archetype a series has already presented itself but I feel like this claim is furthest is from the truth. It's very true Dragon Quest VI does a few things different in terms of how it presents exploration and the pace of a story being a bit erratic not to mention returning the job system from Dragon Quest III with a few quirks but I feel like that's how every entry fixes a little bit of the possible stagnation that really sticking to the formula brings. In all honestly, I actually enjoyed my time with Dragon Quest VI. Not a perfect game by any means, but it was trying out a few new spices here and there and maybe using a different part of the meat but it's still the "mom's cooking" of japanese role-playing games the series has become known for.

It almost feels odd to explain in detail what happens in Dragon Quest stories due to their true designs of being the chosen one and defeating the great evil that brought monsters to the land but Dragon Quest owns it really well that it's hard to mind. The weirdest shift in the narrative design is what happens after a certain point, the game feels really streamlined and things are happening, characters are developing until a certain point. The game really opens up and it's up to you to figure out where to go next. For a majority of the game, you don't even find out about the big bad until you are on the final fifth of the game when the name is finally uttered. The stories throughout the game relies on smaller more personal arcs you experience in the various towns, helping the various townspeople out such as fighting a strong lizard-type enemy in a cavern while carrying a huge coffin to my personal favorite short story of climbing a cliff to make a "badge of courage" to a little kid that never got the chance to live his own life. I think the small personal stories despite not contributing to the overall overarching narrative are great but I do understand that it doesn't really bring anything forward until you eventually get a little lore dump and then it's a rush to the end in a sense. The characters are good with Carver being a personal favorite, a big man with a big heart with a sense of humor to boot. Milly is the kind and motherly figure of the group harboring her own woes and development is tied to another character you'll find out about later. Nevan just kind of seems very dismissive of you and the world until the gods tell him to join you and that's pretty much how he joins. He is the personification of the nerd emoji but the guy has a good heart. The characters don't really develop much until you do their arc which really stems from the very late parts of the game with some of them never developing at all which is kind of sad but party chat always does provide a bit of insight on their thoughts at the very least. One of the biggest things I can attest to is the weird pacing in general with how the game carries itself. I'll just say there's multiple world maps you have to progress through and with that makes a longer game being it took around 45 hours to beat this one compared to barely 30 in some of the earlier longer titles before but the thing is also having to juggle progression constantly between these worlds which feels a bit like it was taking more time than it needed to just not leave the premise of what it was trying to do underutilized.

To my general surprise, the gameplay in Dragon Quest VI has improved a bit in the general sense that you finally have specific physical actions for the physical attackers in the game. One of my biggest complaints for the series early on was that going physical really just meant only being able to really just attack and that's pretty it and now you have a huge variety of physical moves to do from niche attacks that do more damage to flying enemies or group attacks and so forth. Other than that, the gameplay will feel right at home with anyone that has played Dragon Quest before barring the biggest change being vocations and how the vocation system works. After a certain point, you are able to change vocation which are essentially jobs in any other series and you can essentially change the stats and how your characters fight. In terms of what you can actually use: You got your regular physical fighters now upgraded with new abilities, your classic mages specializing in medical or harmful magic, the odd ones like dancer, merchant and gadabout (also known as jester) that do very specific things. There are also advanced vocations that pretty much serve as specialized upgrades in the sense that they require you to master two beginner vocations to grant access to them and then the ultimate vocation being the "hero" vocation which requires mastering four advanced vocations for everyone but the main character which only needs one. It sounds fun until you start to realize how slow the process is to leveling vocations which is extremely slow. I try not to grind at all in Dragon Quest to keep the challenge up but I did spend around an hour and a half grinding in purely recommended vocation spots and even after that I couldn't level up my main character to even get the "hero" vocation that already had ridiculously less requirements than everyone else and ended up beating the game without my hero ever getting that vocation which kind of sucks considering how much powerful your hero usually gets in the end. It was a bit underwhelming honestly. The one cool thing about these vocations is that any skill you learn on a vocation is permanently learned on the character regardless of vocation so you can eventually have every skill on everybody but it seems arduous to do so considering how much time you'll even need to spend doing so.

The game in a graphical sense looks just as great as any Dragon Quest Nintendo DS can look, not much is ever changed between the trilogy of games re-released on the DS in terms of general presentation and graphics. The soundtrack for Dragon Quest VI is alright at best, very few songs I generally like Saint's Wreath that really fit in with the bittersweet moments this game has throughout sharing its smaller tales of the worlds we're in. I think the soundtrack overall is a bit weaker than I would've liked but it gets the job done.

Definitely not the low point I personally thought and serves as yet another adventure and an extremely loose finale to the zenithian trilogy, Dragon Quest VI might be using different ingredients this time around to develop the iconic japanese role-playing style it's known for but it's still manages to ooze the charm and experience I've come to expect from the series. If this is what fans consider one of the lowest points of the series, I'm extremely excited for the rest of the entries going forward. An epic of self discovery through parallel realms.

Dragon Quest VI is to Dragon Quest V what Dragon Quest II is to Dragon Quest I. What I mean by that is it feels less like a refinement of what made the previous game great, and more like they just jam packed as much shit into it as they possibly could without worrying about how that might effect the delicate balance that made its predecessor work so well. This jam-packed approach works a lot better here than it did in DQII, largely because it's built on a sturdier foundation, but it still ends up feeling pretty bloated.

I think the bloated feeling is most prevalent in the UI. Dragon Quest has always had a very simple interface to compliment the relative simplicity of the mechanics, but this is pushing it to the limit I think. The UI strains against the sheer amount of content, finding towns you've been to, key items you need, or skills you want to use in menus becomes more and more cumbersome as the game goes on. Finding exactly where you need to go between the real world, dream world, and underwater in the real world becomes almost too much to handle as well. Even with the addition of the map in the DS version I still got lost pretty often, trying to remember which of the towns in my zoom list correspond to which tiny little dots on the map, and that's without even mentioning that the underwater zone doesn't have its own map.

Despite all that I still really enjoyed my time with the game! I think DQ is usually at its best when you're journeying from town to town having episodic adventures, and this game contains like 2 full seasons worth of episodic adventures. Bringing back the job system and giving you so many party members to choose from also offers a lot of mechanical depth to chew on while you're diving into those episodes. The job system is a massive improvement over its iteration in DQIII, just having the ability to switch between vocations without any penalty gives you so much more freedom to mess with the system and min-max your party.

I think the dream world-real world dichotomy is great too, even if it feels a little more derivative than DQ's usual narrative tricks. Exploration is really spiced up by having the ability to travel back and forth between worlds in different spots, and each location has a different set of vehicles available to you so you really have to think about where you're able to go in each. There's also plenty of moments of realization where you see a connection between events in each world, or get to effect change on one world with your actions in the other.

There really is a lot to love here, and I think DQVI pushes just about every limit that a Dragon Quest game of this era can for better or worse. This is definitely a comfort food type game that I could just turn my brain off and replay with a different set of jobs while watching some trash TV.

I think this is the most interesting Dragon Quest game I've played so far in terms of how I feel about it compared to the previous ones. Do I like it more than 4 or 5? Nope. Do I like it more than the first three? Yup. But it's not as easy to find why I like it or not.

My favorite moments in the series have always been the Personal Stuff, and the first arc in 6 really nailed that and I was adoring it. But then the world opens up and you spend ~10 hours visiting new cities and gaining different vehicles to reach more places - and to be fair pretty much every single vignette in such cities was beautiful and touching, many of them bittersweet as well as the game deals heavily with themes of loss of loved ones, loss of time, and hopelessness.

Despite that, during all those hours I couldn't stop thinking "Okay, but where did the A plot go?" because it seemed to have completely vanished. And then all of a sudden things just clicked, and everything was recontextualized as part of the bigger picture, which was really a journey of self-discovery, and the game won me back again.

I think this had my least favorite implementation of Party Chat, with most characters having a neutral voice and almost entirely talking with you only and not each other, which in turn might make some of these characters forgettable in the future, but I had a tremendous amount of fun with the vocation system compared to how it was in DQ3.

The new minigames are finally fun for me, unlike the board game or tombola from previous entries, the style contest is hilarious, recruiting all the slimes was fun, the huge amount of missable/optional story moments hidden in every corner made exploring the world so more rewarding, and it was surprising to see how it connects with the other Zenithia titles.

I have a huge fondness for the Zenithia trilogy and it's sad to see it end, and me and DQ might grow distant for a while as it's with DQ7 that the games balloon in play time and they might not be for me anymore, but I'm pleased to have gone through it.

It's a shame that Dragon Quest VI is widely regarded as a weak entry by fans rather than just an ambitious game with notable shortcomings. I don't want people to get it twisted. This is a great RPG, it's still Dragon Quest so it beats a lot of the competition out there basically by default, it just happens to pale in comparison to IV and V, the other entries in Dragon Quest's Zenithian Trilogy.

The game's pacing is out of whack and that stems from the story just not being very engaging, which is a shame by Dragon Quest standards. However, the game has some really likable characters (Carver, Lizzie and Terry are GREAT) and the job system really pushes this thing over the top, making it still very fun to play moment to moment. What can I say, I love a good job system.

Though I will say on the story, the last leg is genuinely really awesome and the ending is just gorgeous. Really loved the way this thing wrapped up by the end. If you're struggling through it, try and push through to see how it wraps up!

Anyway yeah, I'm glad I played that. Took me longer than I would've liked though.

This is so close to being a great Dragon Quest game, but there are just too many little things holding it back. I really enjoyed the first half where things were focused, but it just seemed to fall apart as time went on. About halfway through the game, things open up into a big non-linear McGuffin hunt... or at least that's the intention. In DQ3, anywhere the player goes can lead to progress toward one of the McGuffins. In DQ6 there are plenty of wrong answers. Not only are there far more locations, but there are two different world maps, with even more eventually being piled on later. These combined with the complete lack of direction players are given when they are unceremoniously plopped into the game's second half lead to overwhelming confusion, and no small amount of frustration as players wade through encounters on their way to locations that they may or may not be able to access, and may or may not have an objective for them right now. Navigation of that world is far more difficult than in other DQ games. The player's "vehicles" are different for each of the two overworlds. Just because you can cross water in one world doesn't mean you can in the other. This leads to jumping through a bunch of hoops just to re-earn an ability the game has kind of already given you. Switching between those two worlds can also be a huge hassle, especially early in the game. DQ6 really feels like it's too big and too complicated for its own good.

The halfway point is also where the vocation system comes in, which is nice, but the rest of the game is engineered to drag you through as many battles as possible to make sure you're getting enough points to adequately progress through that system, and combat just isn't interesting at all. If you've ever played any other DQ game, there's nothing here to excite you mechanically. It just ends up feeling like a long grueling slog. I can only ask myself why the vocation system was introduced halfway through rather than from the start. To make matters worse there are a LOT of needlessly frustrating sections of the game that require talking to an NPC, talking to another NPC, running back to the first NPC, and then going back to the second NPC. Things like that. There are also a bunch of instances where players have to speak to every NPC in a town before the plot will advance. The worst example of the NPC backtrack runaround is in one of the game's dungeons where the player is tasked with escorting a cowardly child. Every time the player makes any kind of progress through the dungeon, the kid runs off and hides, thus forcing the player to backtrack through at least one screen's worth of dungeon to find the little shit. At one point he runs all the way to a neighboring town, and the game does not give any hints as to where he's gone. This plays out at least 5 times.

It's unfortunate that so much of this game comes together. The story is pretty interesting, although many details of it do not hold up under scrutiny and thinking about it too hard will only lead to headaches. The small, episodic town stories that DQ so often employs are really quite good here, with a lot of cool and memorable moments, as well as a genuinely cool twist or two. I can't recommend it as a standalone entity, but it's still worth a look for fans of the series.

a good time but the weakest of the Zenithia trilogy by a very wide margin

The dream world/real world stuff here is a really interesting premise narratively and it's a shame that the game doesn't explore it to its fullest extent. There's some great moments (we all remember that part in Weaver's Peak) but it feels like a missed opportunity otherwise. The game also really loses its steam after Murdaw's Keep and the back half of the game is full of "what the hell" moments and bizarre dialogue triggers that were very few and far between in 4/5. The characters are all very well-written but it's a little unfortunate that you still can't party chat with anyone in the wagon since that's where the overwhelming majority of their characterization stems from (even if 7 dialogue boxes after each NPC conversation is a bit much). It's especially upsetting since Nevan and Ashlynn, two of the more enjoyable characters, break into a million pieces of glass every time they get hit and just aren't viable for an endgame team

It's cool to see the vocation system return but unfortunately it works more to this game's detriment than anything. They try to strike this weird middle ground between DQ3 and 4 where you can customize characters to a certain degree but they still fall into certain archetypes and it just does not work. There's very little reason not to make Carver/Amos into gladiators and so on. And since anyone can learn healing spells through the Priest vocation, MP management becomes a non-issue very early on. It lacks both the lock-and-key design from 4 where you're encouraged to swap in different party members to suit the battle's needs and the free-form customization from 3 where you swap between vocations instead.

This is still Dragon Quest at the end of the day so the town/dungeons are still excellently designed, the world-building is super strong, and the art is still Really Really Good but it's easy to see why people consider this a bit of a letdown after 3/4/5

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Since this is the final entry of a trilogy, I’d like to write a few comments on this set of remakes as a whole:

- The remakes themselves are beautiful. Gorgeous, vivid environments with extremely detailed spritework and some amazing animation during battle scenes. Some of the most pleasant games on the system for sure
- Holy shit the text speed is way too slow. Molasses level. It blows my mind they went three whole games without letting you skip text scrolling with A. The DQ7 remake on 3DS doesn’t fix this either apparently and I’m dreading my playthrough because of that
- I’m a little disappointed that the overworld maps aren’t polygonal like the town/dungeon environments. It’s not a huge deal, but the rigid, tile-based visuals just aren't on par with the rest of the game
- The audio quality is super poor, DQ6 on SFC in particular sounds like a completely different game
- hello all you chucklefucks at Square Enix. why the hell aren’t these on PC/consoles.

that’s all. it feels like i’ve played basically nothing but dragon quest this year despite it just being three games so it’s gonna be a long while until i pick up again with 7. hopefully by then i’ll be able to buy it on a modern storefront on a modern console and play it there instead of having to whip out my waxy wired earbuds and greasy old 3DS from 2012. also dq3 remake next year please.