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New worlds. New heroes. Same everything else. Like a drunken archer shooting through fog, Dragonquest VI : Realms of Revelation, completely misses the mark. From the lacklustre storyline to the endless routine fights, this game just fails for the routine RPG fan. If you like fresh material and an innovative approach then you might want to steer clear of this title. If, however, you're a die-hard Dragonquest or Japanese role-playing game (JRPG) fan, you'll likely find something here to salvage. The storyline hitch for this particular instalment is our world and the Phantom Realm. You need to reconcile the two worlds and put them back into balance. As you would expect determining the real world from the phantom world is further complicated by the fact that your party members appear to be suffering from amnesia. After completing a series of quests, you come to discover the dream world and the great evil that wants to conquer both. Your mission: Subdue the foe and restore order. The game's universe is decently large but you don't have much freedom to explore it. You can't access most areas until you've finished some part of the quest and the game plays more like a scripted adventure than an open universe. You're stuck on one chapter at a time, if you like it or not but I was pleased with the appropriate use of dialogue, and the information conveyed by NPCs can be quite useful in propelling the story forward. Your party toggles between two parallel universes as you follow the plot as it is laid out before you. The developers introduced some lame mini-games though, like slot-machine gambling and slime-slingshot shuffleboard, in an attempt to break up the monotony. As one might expect from the Dragonquest, you have the ability to specialize the profession of your party members and you have the potential to change vocations at the signature location of Alltrades Abbey. This feature helps to add some variety to the otherwise dull game play. All the standard game features included turn-based fights against slimes and the usual band of enemy critters. You fight for money and experience, but levelling-up is automatic and point-allocation is based upon your profession. The game denied me the satisfaction of uniquely developing my adventurer, which is a careless mistake in this day and age of customizable characters. I would like to compliment the developers on the creative diversity in weaponry, armour, alchemy, and enemies... but I can't. Money is easy to accumulate but there isn't a great deal in diversity of things to purchase. Armour, weapons, and special items are common in most of the towns. Even the holy water seemed unable to protect me from lower grade enemies and, alas, I was forced to slug it out through every battle. Graphically, the game delivers what one has come to expect from the series so there's nothing new to discuss here. There's no great use of movie sequencing, no great musical scores, no compelling script turns, no new features; it's all very par for the course. Without anything innovative, this game plays more like an expansion pack rather than a sequel. The developers should have been more creative before stamping a sequential number to a popular game title. It seems here they are just capitalizing on a successful name brand and this is the same game the fans have played before. It is just decked out in a nice new box. If you're a hard-core fan of Dragonquest series, you'll likely disagree with my complaints; but if you desire creativity, fresh material, enhanced features, and new experiences... stay away from this sequel. Perhaps there are some redeeming qualities that have eluded me, but if so... it's too little, too late.   Dragonquest VI - Realms of Revelation Format: Nintendo DS Publisher: Nintendo Developer: Square Enix ESRB Rating: E10+ Official Site: http://dragonquest.nintendo.com/ Rating: 4 / 10

 

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