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.

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.

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.

being dragon quest it’s obviously a joy; that said though it really feels loose, to think about or to play — with a tight thematic focus like dqv this could easily be another masterpiece. outside of the light tragedy of the hero’s true identity the dream world concept doesn’t feel very fully utilized — e.g. terry and milly were my favorite part of the game but i can’t stop thinking that their story could have been much more with involvement of the dream world.
as the close to a trilogy, it works, but compared to 3 in that sense it feels both less foundational and less daring.

Unfortunately a corrupt save has set me back several hours on this one and I just don't want to do it again. Not a bad game in all, but feels like a huge step back after V, which has probably the most ambitious and fleshed out plot and cast of all the games up to this point (and even comparable to the major modern installments in the franchise). VI feels empty in many ways by comparison; long stretches with no forward momentum on the thin main plot, far less party chat dialogue, and only a couple characters that feel like more than very simple tropes.

The most noteworthy element of the game is the updated class system, which takes longer than expected to get access too, but does offer lots of customization, and massive injection of abilities over all the previous installments. This does kind of encourage a lot of grinding, of which it already feels like the game has a fair share of in a series that is known for it, but the freedom and potential for super versatile characters is neat nonetheless.

Visually the game is pretty in line with the previous DS remasters, though the quality of sprites feels closer to V's improvements over IV's. However, whether it's partly in the choice of remastering, or just a matter of the songs themselves, I found the score to be one of the least effective in the franchise. It felt like there was far less variety, and that many of the songs had a hollow vibe, like sparse sounds in empty spaces. It's kind of uncanny, and combined with my issues with the plot, really sealed this vaguely unfinished feeling I took from the game as a whole. I can only say I found it marginally more enjoyable (or perhaps just less frustrating) than IV.

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.

Dragon Quest VI

Woo me ha gustado mucho, encima no parece para nada de su época por cómo está montado y los temas que trata y tal.

Lo único que realmente falla es el gameplay, zonas larguísimas, demasiados RE y muy chungos algunos, etc.

(8/10)

Hasta siempre Zenithia.

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.