Dragon Quest VI: Realms of Revelation (2010)

I did not finish Dragon Quest VI: Realms of Revelation. I got a good 22 hours in, game time, however.

Quite frankly, the combat in Final Fantasy 1 (the GBA/PSP version at least) is better. The combat in this game is a legitimate chore and a bore. Magic, at least to my experience, feels completely and utterly useless offensively. Not being able to target individual monsters is a bizarre choice. Combat happens way too frequently, even for a JRPG. It highlights the beauty of Pokemon to me. Random encounters only happen in dungeons and designated areas (grass). The combat and its frequency drove me away.

The story was the nail in the coffin. It peters off halfway through, when you kill Murdaw or whatever his name is. Before that it was intriguing and really drove me to uncover the mystery of the Dream World vs the Real World. But after that, you're just kind of told to dick around and find yourself, which is kind of boring. At first it was cool, you beat the big bad, now you gotta deal with the fallout, but it quickly just becomes a game of wandering around trying to trigger the arbitrary events and I just got so bored.

Maybe it's because I played and finished Final Fantasy 1 days before starting this and got burnt out on JRPGs, but Final Fantasy at least had some dope magic. Also far more player autonomy in the sense that you could choose which spells your PCs had, whereas DQ just gives you them seemingly at random, then you choose a vocation and you have a slightly less random but still entirely out of your control selection of spells. It was kind of inhibiting and really sucked all the fun out of the game.

The menus are a goddamn mess. I didn't figure out how to sort my items until after the previously mentioned spoiler event. Saving involves finding a priest and mashing the A button through 8 screens of slow ass text. I used save states, which mitigated that fairly annoying feature, but christ on a cracker, this game would be unbearable without the speed up function.

There's some good though. The rotate feature is nifty. The art is good, even though everyone has the same faces as DBZ characters. But can I really complain about same face syndrome when I have a JoJo profile pic and well... [LOL][1]. The music is... fine. I begrudgingly say this, because the composer is a dickhead and a war crime denier.

All in all, I can't say I'm a big fan, though Hero is fun in Smash. I'll try some different Dragon Quest games eventually, but from what I've read, they're all very similar.

[1]:

I'm playing through the main dragon quest series and just finished 6 (on DS) and was pretty let down.

the dream world thing was confusing for me as both worlds look the same. I think if they used recolored textures or a filter or something for the dream world it would have made things much more obvious. a lot of the intricacies of the story revolve around whether you are in the dream world or the real world, but I kept forgetting which one I was in

the world was too big for the normal dq format of the game being linear for the first half and then being open ended-ish for the second half. There are now two maps, and the whole under water part. Exploring this big new world was really a drag, especially the ocean floor where you get random battles every 5 seconds and there are no real landmarks to work from. I also found many of the directions NPC's gave to be really off. '"the cave by the river to the east" was actually halfway across the map, and past another river. Or sometimes they would say something is to the "west" when it's VERY far northwest. I know they don't give exact instructions, but because you've got 3 different ways of exploring the map, it leaves you wasting a lot of time. Wasting time was helpful as I didn't need to grind until the last boss though, but made the game take much longer than it needed to be imo.

The story felt compelling and driving in the beginning and at the end (I particularly liked the end which redeemed the game to 3 stars for me) however the middle was a bit of a drag, this may have been because i was so lost and had to keep resorting to guides (which I don't like to do unless I'm really stuck).

The mini game was pretty fun and nice touch and the class system was cool. Never really got into classes in DQ games before but this was fun. The only thing is if you grind the classes you end up with A TON of spells and abilities which makes the late game take forever. Most of my characters had 8-9 pages of spells!

so all in all, good dragon quest game brought down by being too open-ended towards the end.

apologies for my bad reviews, just want to leave my impressions informally.

It consistently both dismays and impresses me how little the Dragon Quest series needs to do in order to make each of its sequels feel fresh and enjoyable. Bringing back a plucky motley crew of characters (as opposed to the family structure of the previous one) and a lighter, more expansive story, Dragon Quest VI does the same old thing each Dragon Quest does, combining the job system with monster recruiting and only a dash of something vaguely new due to style. Why the four stars?

Instead of relying on any particular new mechanic, Dragon Quest gives plenty of mechanical freedom for the player to structure their party around anything they wish from the previous games, making it quite flexible. The graphics (this is the SNES version for review) are much more gorgeous than the previous games, making full use of what the SNES has to offer. The dream world should feel tired but makes for a handful of fairly interesting story twists and adventures.

The most amazing thing, I must admit though, is finally having a sack to store items. Thank goodness.

The Dragon Quest series could keep afloat by doing the same dang thing over and over, and this entry is no exception, managing to stay at a consistently good quality without going into any particularly experimental territory. Feel free to bump this down to three stars if you're looking for something new, but this one is still a treat.