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.
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.