I’ve had enough. I made it to the 35-hour mark, right outside the final boss’s castle, and couldn’t bring myself to move another step. Plus when I think about it, I really don’t have anything personal against Mortamor. I’ve killed his sub-bosses and I’ve opened the way to his lair, so someone else can have the honor of finishing him off. I’m done.

I wasn’t even going to write about it, but… after 35 hours of (dis)service I reckon it deserves a few lines. Here goes:

Things I liked.

1. It can’t have been that terrible if I managed to stick it out for 35 hours… Actually, no, it was that bad. But if I keep telling myself that, maybe one day I’ll believe it :-(.

2. The first 8 hours or so when I was hunting down Murdaw were fun.

3. Lots of treasure to find and chests to open. If there’s one thing Dragon Quest always does right, it’s being generous with the treasure. I just love the rich red-and-gold design of the chests.

4. I’ve traveled in a number of unusual game vehicles, but a flying bed and a private island? That’s new.

5. The ability to do things out of sequence after a certain point and go exploring all over the world is good… in theory.

Why I quit.

1. The abysmally high encounter rate.

2. The abysmally high encounter rate.

3-100. The abysmally high encounter rate.

101. The abysmally high encounter rate. I couldn’t enjoy exploring or progressing the story when I had to fight a random battle every 7 or 8 steps. Only Arms’ Heart and P2: Innocent Sin have frustrated me more when it came to random battles.

102. Those darned random battles aren’t even interesting. With everyone except the hero on Auto, they rarely take more than 2 turns, but it’s two turns of everyone using the same attacks on the same enemies.

103. I like the “traditional” order of plot progression in RPGs. You start out just wandering around, do a few quests, kill a few bosses and eventually everything becomes clear. The final boss reveals himself/herself, you go after him/her, struggle a bit and finally succeed, the end. In Dragon Quest 6, all that played out in the first 8-10 hours, so everything that happened after that felt like one long drawn-out post-game dungeon. From the start of the game, everyone was going Murdaw this, Murdaw that. Let’s beat Murdaw, if you beat Murdaw, everything will be fine. So I was in Murdaw Mode for the first third of the game, I finally beat him and everyone’s happy. In my heart the game ended there.

104. Apart from the Murdaw bit, the rest of the story isn’t very interesting. Murdaw terrorized the entire world (or so they say, but he wasn’t that bad), but the rest of the Dread Fiends stick to petty crime like luring lazy villagers to their doom, squatting in celestial palaces and building undersea dungeons without the proper zoning permits. And the final boss hides in his castle and zaps people every once in a while. Most people in the world don’t even know any of the other fiends exist, that’s how non-threatening they are. I can’t get psyched up to beat bosses like that.

105. I have to gather the legendary items and go to Zenithia again?! Give me a break!

106. No clear sense of direction. Once I beat Murdaw, the world opened up to me, but I had no idea what I was supposed to do or where I was supposed to go next. The original DQ6 came out in the golden age of strategy guides, and it really shows.

107. Weak cast this time round. Apart from Carver, they’re all generic nice folk with largely interchangeable lines in party chat. There were no particularly memorable NPCs either.

108. The Slippin’ Slime mini-game is no fun at all, especially compared to DQ5‘s T’n’T. It’s a relatively minor point, but I had a great time with T’n’T last time, and I was hoping for a similarly enjoyable experience.

Welp, that’s it for Dragon Quest 6. Since all DQs are essentially the same game, I’ll wait… hmm, another year or so and then play DQ7. Another year after that, I might tackle DQ8. Once that’s done, I don’t like the direction the new games (9 and 10) are taking, so that’ll be the end of the series for me.

More immediately, I felt like playing an SRPG, so I started one yesterday. It’s called Ragnarok ~Hikari no Yami no Koujo~ and I’d heard it was bad. Having played a little bit… yeah, it’s kinda bad. But not quite bad enough to quit over, so I’ll put in a few more hours and see how it turns out.