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.
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.