The History of Dragon Quest VI

Two worlds, one hero, and the end of the Zenithia trilogy.

Dragon Quest VI (Super Famicom, December 9, 1995), subtitled Maboroshi no Daichi, the Land of Illusion, closed the Zenithia trilogy that IV and V began. It was the first Dragon Quest developed by Heartbeat rather than Chunsoft, the final Dragon Quest released for the Super Famicom, and one of the best-selling games on the system in Japan, with well over three million copies sold. North America's planned Super NES version was cancelled, and the game stayed Japan only for fifteen years.

THE MAKING

A new studio takes the series

The founding trio stayed constant, as it had since 1986: design and scenario by Yuji Horii, art by Akira Toriyama, music by Koichi Sugiyama, published by Enix. The developer changed. Heartbeat, a studio founded by former Chunsoft staff, took over the series with VI, on a 32-megabit cartridge, at the very end of the Super Famicom's life: VI was the penultimate title released for the system.

The trilogy it completes is loose by design. IV, V, and VI share the floating castle Zenithia and themes rather than a continuous cast, so VI could open somewhere new: a village in the mountains, a hero with a sister and no past worth mentioning, and a hole in the world that should not be there.

THE DESIGN

The world above, the world below

VI is built on a pair of maps. The hero slips between the real world and a shadowy phantom world, a dreamlike reflection where places and people exist in altered form, and progress means reading both. The subtitle is literal: the second world is the land of illusion, and much of the plot is the two worlds explaining each other.

Its lasting mechanical contribution is the vocation system. At the Dharma shrine, characters take jobs that reshape their stats, and skills are earned by fighting battles against enemies strong enough to teach something; grinding slimes does not advance a vocation. The system proved durable enough to be carried into Dragon Quest VII. Monster recruitment, V's invention, returns here through a vocation skill, the Beastmaster's, rather than by default.

THE EDITIONS

The trilogy's missing chapter, for fifteen years

Original · 1995

Super Famicom, December 9, 1995, Japan only. It launched the same week as Namco's Tales of Phantasia, whose producer later blamed that collision for Phantasia's slow start.

Cancelled · Super NES

Enix America planned a North American Super NES release under the series' Western name, as Dragon Warrior V. It never shipped: Enix's North American operation closed in the mid-1990s, and with it the last chance for a 16-bit English VI.

Nintendo DS · 2010 to 2011

ArtePiazza's remake reached Japan on January 28, 2010, then North America on February 14, 2011 as Dragon Quest VI: Realms of Revelation, the game's first official English release, and Europe that May as Realms of Reverie.

Mobile · 2015

iOS and Android ports followed in June 2015, completing the pattern of the whole Zenithia trilogy: Super Famicom originals the West skipped, English editions a generation later on handhelds.

THE RECEPTION

A giant at home, an absence abroad

Japan · 3.2 Million Shipped

VGChartz records 3,200,000 units shipped; the Dragon Quest Wiki, summarizing Japanese sources, puts it at well over three million copies, among the best-selling Super Famicom games ever.

Famitsu Readers · #34, 2006

In the magazine's 2006 readers poll of the hundred best games of all time, VI placed thirty-fourth: the lowest of the Zenithia trilogy on that list, behind V at eleventh and IV at fourteenth, and still on it.

The Contemporary Caveat

Retrospective coverage of the Super Famicom original, SNES Central's review among it, praises the length and the job system while noting the core gameplay is essentially unchanged from its predecessors. VI refined the formula more than it reinvented it.

The Western Dissent · Silence

The most consequential review VI received in the West was none at all. With no English release until 2011, Western magazines covered it as an import curiosity, and a generation of Western Dragon Quest fans simply never played the trilogy's ending.

THE LEGACY

The system that stayed, the trilogy completed

VI's vocation design is the thread that runs forward: VII rebuilt itself around jobs, and the idea of skills earned through vocation mastery recurs across the later series. Its two-world structure, a real world and its dreaming double, became one of the series' recurring devices as well.

For collectors the game's shape is its story: a three-million-selling Japanese hit with no Western Super NES edition at all, not a rare one, a nonexistent one. Every English copy in the world is a DS or mobile descendant. The Super Famicom box is the only original there is, which is precisely the kind of gap this Library exists to document.

The Gallery The History of Dragon Quest V