Dragon Quest VI: Realms of Revelation

About Dragon Quest VI: Realms of Revelation

Dragon Quest VI (1995) is Heartbeat's Super Famicom finale to the Zenithian Trilogy, a role-playing game of an amnesiac hero moving between a Real World and a Dream World, and Japan's best-selling game of 1995.

Dragon Quest VI: Realms of Revelation in Depth

It is a traditional overhead role-playing game with random turn-based battles in first person, now with animated monster attacks. The party grows over the adventure, and progress depends on beating bosses and triggering story events. At Alltrades Abbey, characters can take one of several starting classes, each with eight levels earned by winning battles rather than by experience. Each level teaches spells or skills that are kept across class changes, and mastering certain combinations opens hybrid classes, such as Gladiator from Warrior and Martial Artist, and eventually the Hero class. It was the first in the series to give human characters special skills that are not spells. Other features include the wagon, a day and night cycle, mini medals, casinos, the new Slime Arena and Best Dresser Contest, and bonus dungeons.

The game opens with the Hero and two companions facing the demon king Murdaw and being overpowered, only for the Hero to wake in the mountain village of Weaver's Peak. He soon falls through a hole into a world where no one can see him. That world turns out to be the Real World, and the one he started in the Dream World, made of people's dreams. Many of the cast have lost their memories, and they must recover who they are while stopping the Archfiend Mortamor from merging both worlds.

Making Dragon Quest VI: Realms of Revelation

Heartbeat developed it in place of Chunsoft, with Horii writing, Toriyama drawing and Koichi Sugiyama composing as before. Enix delayed it by more than a year to develop it further, showed it at Shoshinkai in November 1995 and released it on 9 December. It launched with 1,274,857 sales, sold 2.5 million in December alone and reached 3.2 million in Japan, the year's best seller.

It was not localised at the time: translating it would have required bigger and more expensive cartridges, and by then Enix had dropped the Super NES and the American market. GamePro listed it among the best Japanese games never released in the US. Gamasutra's Kurt Kalata praised its dream-world scenario, suggesting it influenced Chrono Cross and Final Fantasy X, and its improved class system, calling it "still a fantastic game". The 2010 DS remake by ArtePiazza brought it to English for the first time in 2011.