Reviews// Dragon Quest VI: Realms of Revelation

Dragon Quest VI: Realms of Revelation is the latest release in Square-Enix’s series of classic Dragon Quest remakes on the Nintendo DS, bringing many of the older games in the series to western shores for the first time. But does a sixteen year old SNES-era JRPG really have much to offer?

DQVI has a fairly basic story at its core, but it’s told refreshingly well. Throwing you right into the thick of it with your party planning its attack on Murdaw’s castle, any savvy gamer will probably recognise that things are about to go wrong from the moment their party makes their way into the Dread Lord’s throne room.

Sure enough, one surprise attack later and the player finds themselves waking up in their home village as though nothing had ever happened, a clear sign that something isn’t quite right. Setting out once again to find and destroy Murdaw, you’ll soon find yourself travelling back and forth between two superficially similar but substantially different worlds.

The exact nature of the two worlds is kept fairly under wraps for quite some time, though there are plenty of hints towards what’s really going on. The on-going mystery is enough to draw you into the story and they reveal the answers at just the right pace to maintain your interest.

Despite the promise of the setting and plot however, the game is held back by an incredibly bland cast of underdeveloped and generic party members. With an old fashioned mute hero backed up with big dumb muscle and a quiet girl who would probably be considered the smart one from sheer lack of competition, your core team of characters doesn’t give you much to invest in. Things get slightly better later on as you pick up slightly more unique and quirky companions, including a small range of monsters that can be recruited into fighting the good fight, but none of them are terribly interesting.

The most unexpected moment would probably be once you seemingly complete the story only to find both worlds completely open up for you to explore immediately after, offering far more quests to discover and unlocking plenty of new features. While this does vastly increase the scope of the game, the sheer amount of things you can go and do all being thrown at you at once can be quite overwhelming, and the game offers no recommendations as to where to head next.

This complete change in style makes the preceding adventure seem like a really big prologue, and the gameplay picks up quite a bit with the addition of greater exploration, new characters to be recruited, and most importantly the restoration of Alltrades Abbey, where the vocation system is unlocked.

Choosing from a list of vocations such as the archetypal Warrior, Mage and Priest and more unusual fare like the Merchant and Gadabout classes, your vocations enable you to change the roles of your formerly pre-set characters. Vocations earn experience independently from your level and you retain any acquired skills even after you switch to another vocation by returning to Alltrades Abbey.

This allows you to outfit your characters with whatever range of abilities you like, with the eventual goal for truly dedicated gamers being the total mastery of every vocation. Most slightly more casual gamers will no doubt be satisfied with the option of giving their heavily armoured tanks some healing magic or creating powerful spell casters who can both deal out heavy damage and inflict status effects on enemies.

Mastering certain combinations of vocations will unlock more advanced vocations that teach more varied and powerful abilities however, so even if you’re not interested in putting a hundred hours work into the game at least there’s some incentive to get some grinding done. If anything it’s strange that you have to get as far into the game as you do before unlocking vocations as they’re by far one of the most interesting elements of the game.

The graphics are really nice. Admittedly that’s on the SNES scale of nice but it’s definitely at the higher end of said scale. It’s simple sprite-based stuff but really brought to life by the amount of detail and smooth animation involved. That’s in combat at least, where the enemy monsters bounce around between turns and then jump out and attack. Outside of combat the sprites are disappointingly lifeless, with little animation at all making conversations particularly dull.

Conclusion
Ultimately Dragon Quest VI is everything you would expect from a remake of a sixteen year old game. It’s very competently made, with great presentation all round and solid gameplay mechanics, but it also feels very dated and brings nothing new to the table. If you love old-school JRPGs then you’ll definitely enjoy this, despite not getting anything here that you haven’t already seen before.

However, while the characters might be bland and the story forgettable, that’s really not what Dragon Quest VI is all about. What the game offers is potentially hours upon hours of gameplay through the process of levelling up your characters and the various vocations. Whether or not you have the patience or interest in pursuing all those hours of play will determine whether or not DQVI should be your next must-have title, but either way there’s a decent little classic here that fans of the series won’t want to miss.

SPOnG score: 80%