Dragon Quest VI: Realms of Revelation (DS) review "Though Dragon Quest VI features an interesting and surprisingly complex plot, that’s not actually its most impressive accomplishment. The game probably could have done just as well without doing anything interesting with its plot because the real appeal comes from its impressive scope, its ingenuity and its remarkable depth."

Dragon Quest VI: Realms of Revelation is that rare RPG that feels too long and entirely too short all at once. It feels too long because 30 or 40 hours into the whole affair, you’re still not sure when it’s going to end and common sense tells you that it already should have. It feels too short because even when you top 50 hours and you finally defeat the last great evil threatening the land, it feels like you’ve hardly played at all. In other words, the game is that rare RPG that feels just about perfect.

The story begins with what you might suppose is a sneak peak at its conclusion. A group of three friends spend a few moments huddled around a campfire, then leave to storm an evil castle where the villainous Murdaw awaits their arrival. Armed with powerful weaponry and infused with a sense of justice, the friends finally corner the fiend in his throne room. They draw their weapons, ready to fight to the death, but instead they are lifted into the air like rag dolls. Their bodies are turned to stone, their souls flung to the ether. They will not know victory that evening, only despair.

So the story starts again, an indeterminate number of hours, days, weeks or months later. .. or is it sooner? The timeline in Dragon Quest VI can be difficult to track. What matters is that the new story begins properly, with a young boy in a village. That young man heads down a treacherous mountain trail to retrieve a wooden crown for a harvest festival celebration, only to find that the man who can craft it has gone missing. The hero seeks him out and eventually finds him, but an accident takes place and the boy falls through a massive hole in the ground. Mishaps like that happen to heroes sometimes, so the fall barely counts as a surprise. What’s surprising is that the young boy lands on the ground in one piece. He gets up, dusts himself off and wanders to the nearest village (which isn’t that far away), only to find that just about no one can see him. Is he a ghost? Has he died? The answers to those questions aren’t as simple as they might seem. In the process of seeking out the truth of who he is and what has happened to him, the young man will eventually embark on an epic quest that finds him traveling freely between two worlds, joined by an increasingly large cast of friends that appear to include some of the very same people who tried to take down Murdaw all those… days ago? Years ago?

Though Dragon Quest VI features an interesting and surprisingly complex plot, that’s not actually its most impressive accomplishment. The game probably could have done just as well without doing anything interesting with its plot because the real appeal comes from its impressive scope, its ingenuity and its remarkable depth.

When you start playing and the little map on the top screen starts to fill in, the world seems quite large. You don’t know the half of it, though. After you fall down the hole near the start of the game, you land on a whole new map and the top screen makes it clear that you haven’t yet explored any of it. You find yourself looking at a second map, equally large. Some of the towns are the same as they were on the first map, with people who are vaguely familiar. Other destinations are all-new. It’s up to you to sort out what’s what and it’s up to you to find the connections between the two worlds.

Big is good, but the worlds in Dragon Quest VI are noteworthy because they’re also masterfully designed. At first it can seem like there are numerous stray mountain ranges, forests, swamps and deserts that are placed where they are for no discernible reason. That’s even true in some cases, but you’ll eventually come to appreciate the fact that nearly every corner of the world map serves a purpose even if you don’t see it for 20 hours. A line of trees doesn’t seem significant as you wander a lonely coast on foot, but when you come back later on a flying carpet and you’re trying to pass across that coast on the way to a new city you just learned about, suddenly those trees mean a lot more than they once did. They mean another cave or a trip to a parallel world or even other things that video game critics have no right to spoil. If you’re someone who appreciates the art of quality game design, odds are good that you’ll find yourself stopping to savor the awesome at many points throughout your epic journey.

Another bit of good news is that the lengthy quest and huge worlds give your characters plenty of time to grow in an extremely practical sense. You begin with just the one character, but he joins up with magic users and warriors and eventually even monsters (though you can no longer simply recruit monsters on a whim as you could in Dragon Quest V). Each character who you find or recruit can take advantage of the game’s equivalent of the traditional class system, known here as the “vocation” system.

The way the vocation system works is that a given character levels up a particular vocation and learns new abilities that he wouldn’t be able to master if he were following a different profession. For instance, as a warrior he might learn an ability that allows him to attack twice in a round. As a martial artist, perhaps he’ll learn to go on a violent rampage that randomly targets friends and foes alike. As a mage, he could master devastating spells. The options that vocations permit grow even more interesting as you discover that you can switch vocations almost any time you like. It’s only possible to learn the finest moves in the game if you take the time to follow all sorts of career paths and that takes the sort of time that a briefer quest wouldn’t allow.

Graphically, the game is more difficult to commend except as a model for efficiency. Environments have improved significantly since the game was originally released on the Super Nintendo, but this isn’t a game that is ready to spend much time focusing on flash over substance. With only a few exceptions, it looks no better than the (admittedly beautiful) DS ports of Dragon Quest IV and Dragon Quest V did before it. You’ll see a few especially stunning sequences throughout, but those sequences only stand out precisely because they’re uncommon. It’s clear that the developers devoted more of their resources to making your time enjoyable than they did making things pretty.

Substance over style may seem like a risky design choice in this day and age, but it has clearly worked wonders for Dragon Quest VI: Realms of Revelation. Between a complex plot, a massive quest that spans multiple worlds and character customization that keeps the player curious about what other skills he might learn even after he beats the boss and heads into the post-game content, Dragon Quest VI is a solid contender for the RPG crown. Make no mistake; this is the one that you can’t afford to miss.

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Staff review by Jason Venter (March 15, 2011) Jason Venter has been playing games for 30 years, since discovering the Apple IIe version of Mario Bros. in his elementary school days. Now he writes about them, here at HonestGamers and also at other sites that agree to pay him for his words.