Game: Dragon Quest VI: Realms of Revelation

Platform: DS

Publisher: Nintendo

Developer: ArtePiazza

ESRB: T

Genre: Dream traveling JRPG

Players: 1

What's Hot: Plenty of gameplay, flexible class system, bite sized side missions

What's Not: Story not very interesting, it's fifteen years old and shows, lots and lots of grinding

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Review by: Brandon "Dream World" Cackowski-Schnell

It's hard to fault Dragon Quest VI for what it is, namely a 15 year old JRPG. Of course it's going to have antiquated systems compared to the games of today, something you have to consider when going into it. Still, even if you can't fault the game for what it is, you do have to question why it was released now, especially on the heels of Dragon Quest IX, a much more modern feeling game in the same series.

The simple answer is that they could, and there are plenty of Dragon Quest fans excited for the game's North American debut, a decade and a half after it was released in Japan. Unfortunately for those coming off of Dragon Quest IX, or simply looking for a more accessible and modern JRPG, there may not be enough game here once you get past the novelty of its release.

The game starts off with you and your party heading towards the final showdown with Murdaw, the classic Big Bad. The battle doesn't last very long and soon you're chucked into an abyss and awaken in your village, tasked with going to the nearby town to sell some arts and crafts and return with a crown needed for the village celebration. It sounds mundane, especially coming off of the heals of an epic beat-down, but soon you'll be traveling between two worlds, the real world and the dream world, fetching magical artifacts for kings and meeting up with strange women in even stranger cabins in your quest to defeat Murdaw. The truth is that while the story does pick up beyond the initial errand running, it never gets all that interesting. There's an ever present evil and you have to tackle it. It's nothing you haven't seen before and nothing you won't see again.

Thankfully the sidequests are more interesting and unlike in other RPG's, Dragon Quest IX included, where a side quest can take hours upon hours, the side quests in VI can be completed fairly quickly, allowing you to then leave and hook up with the next person with their hand out. Provided you know where to go, that is. As in other DQ games, you can cast a spell or throw a Chimera Wing to get to past destinations, but figuring out where you're supposed to be going can be a chore.

Also a chore is the sheer number of random battles you'll get into as you're aimlessly wandering the countryside. Random battles in a JRPG are nothing new and you can't fault the game for not having the random beasties on the world map as in IX, but facts are facts and once you get used to being able to avoid encounters just to get to the next town and heal, it's hard to go back. It's also hard to go back to the extremely understated combat animations. The usual DQ whimsy is present in the enemy design, something I never tire of, but the battles are very graphically conservative. You see your enemies and you see them get hit, but there's no awesome combat animation when you unleash your attacks. Similarly, there are no changes to you or your party members to account for new armor and weapons.

As you progress through the story you'll amass a sizeable party of fellow adventurers as well as some unique modes of transportation, unless a flying bed is something you consider commonplace. I wasn't fond of the blank slate characters of IX as part of the fun of RPGs is meeting up with a bunch of interesting characters and hearing their bits of backstory. Once you make it to the All Trades Abbey you can go about customizing your teammates with the game's extremely flexible character class system.

With the system, any attributes that are built up through leveling can be carried over to other classes that share the same attributes. In addition to the starting classes, additional classes can be obtained through class specific quests. It's a great system that doesn't penalize you for tinkering around with it however its usefulness is somewhat limited. The flip side to having characters that are fleshed out prior to joining your group is that their career choices are pretty much set once they join up with you. You may be able to turn Carver into a magic user, but he'll end up being a terrible one which robs the class system of a lot of its flexibility. Most RPGs have rigid party members, so that's nothing new, it's just as shame when it's mixed with such a flexible class system.

I wouldn't say that Dragon Quest VI is a bad game, it just lacks a lot of the modern conveniences that JRPGs have incorporated since the game was initially released. For some fans, they won't mind this at all and the ability to play the last of the Zenithia trilogy is worth giving up some modernity. For me though, Dragon Quest VI felt a lot like camping in the woods when there was a slew of hotels, complete with cable tv and running water just over the rise. I wouldn't fault someone for wanting to stay in the woods; I'd just rather have room service.

Brandon Cackowski-Schnell is a regular contributor to GameShark and is the cohost of Jumping the Shark , GameShark.com's official podcast and co-founder of No High Scores.

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