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 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.