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.

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.

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 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

The least of the three DS Dragon Quest remakes, but by no means a bad game. We begin with our heroic party failing to defeat a big bad, who seals them in a realm of sleep and dreams. Obviously our main character manages to break free of the spell and begins a journey across both the real and dream worlds to reassemble his party. The overall story might not wow but the character writing is actually very strong and is used to explore the differences between the two worlds as characters and locations appear across them in different forms.

The world-hopping does lead to some awkward difficulties in tracking your quest though, especially if you put the game down for any length of time. Many major features - even the job system - don't become available until after 10-15 hours of play, and the fact that VI is the grindiest game in the series since II compounds the slow pacing. Not the JRPG to suddenly sell you on the genre, but a great example of it if you're already into them.

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.

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.