Dragon Quest VI: Realms of Revelation

Dragon Quest VI: Realms of Revelation arrived on the Nintendo DS as the last of the trio of remakes of classic entries in the series, bringing a story woven through with the theme of dreams and parallel worlds. Playing as a nameless hero, the player discovers that the waking world and the dream world are connected and that the boundary between reality and dreams can be crossed, which opens up unconventional paths of progression and side quests hidden precisely in the dream plane, which the player must gradually explore alongside the waking one in order to understand the true nature of their own destiny.

The game introduces a class system similar to later entries in the series, where the player can freely change character classes and combine learned abilities across professions, giving plenty of room for building one's own strategy in turn-based combat and for experimenting with unusual skill combinations across the whole party. The DS version also features improved graphics compared to the older release, added dungeons, and the ability for players to communicate via local wireless connection to share characters and exchange rare items. The visual style remains true to the traditional Akira Toriyama, whose character and monster designs give the game an unmistakable character recognizable at first glance.

Realms of Revelation was received as a solid, if somewhat less imaginative, entry compared to the previous remakes, yet still praised for its extensive content and class system, which offers considerable freedom in building characters. For fans of the series, it represents the closing of the remake trilogy on the DS and an opportunity to experience an entry that had long been unavailable in the West, reaching many players only with its arrival on this platform, many years after it was released in Japan. Today it is valued especially for its length and the depth of its class system, which rewards players willing to invest time in experimenting with less common class combinations.