Great Games: Dragon Quest V
Slime family values
NOTE: For this review I played the DS version of Dragon Quest V in Japanese. I encourage anyone who wants to play this game to pirate it through an emulator.
SPOILER ALERT: Plot details for Dragon Quest V and Final Fantasy IV follow.
Dragon Quest V is a rip-roaring adventure with plenty of twists and turns as well as a hero’s journey which mirrors the journey of life itself. The winning formula of Yuji Horii’s writing, Akira Toriyama’s colorful art, and Koichi Sugiyama’s strong melodies, work together to achieve a masterpiece in this legendary JRPG series.
The plot of DQV is rather well-known among fans. It opens as a father and son journey, but your father is killed and you are made to spend ten years of your life in a slave labor camp. What an opening! It reminded me of the start of Conan the Barbarian (1982), where Conan’s father is killed and he is forced to slave away for years on the Wheel of Pain. In the labor camp, you are joined by fellow slaves, Henry and Maria, who help you escape. I assumed that they would be permanent party members, but they’re only with you at the beginning. Instead, you reunite with two of your childhood friends, Bianca and your Sabercat.
The villain responsible for your father’s murder, Bishop Ladja, has also captured your mother. You go on a mission, not only to save her, but also to find the Legendary Hero who will save the world. This is where DQV’s protagonist stands out. You are not the “Chosen One”, but his assistant. Kurt Kalata of HardcoreGaming101 also noted that “Rather than being a strong warrior, he’s a healer and a monster tamer, a far cry from the typical swordsman found in other RPGs.”
Over the course of the story, you will choose a woman to marry and have a son and a daughter. This was quite a mature narrative for an RPG, and even now, it’s still something that I don’t see very much of. You and your wife are turned to stone not long after your children are born, and for eight years you both must go without seeing them. Your children do find you, of course, and your son turns out to be the great hero of legend you had been searching for. Even after all time, the scenes of you in stone, helpless before the changing seasons, still have a palpable sadness.
The gameplay is the same take-turn strategy of any DQ game. The characters also have specific attributes. The Hero not only has strong attack power, but he can also serve as a backup healer. I mainly used my son for buffs like Insulate and Kabuff to protect my party. While the daughter has some strong offensive spells, I mainly used her to lower the enemy’s defense or raise my party’s attack. There’s great item towards the endgame called Sage’s Stone, which allows you to Multiheal your whole party. This went a long way towards conserving my party’s MP for the final dungeon.
What DQV added to the gameplay table was monster taming. It was the first DQ game to let you recruit monsters to your party once you defeat them. This feature adds a lot of variety in how you will want to shape your party. Monster taming has not only become a staple of DQ, but it was also adopted by other JRPGs, like Persona and Pokemon.
DQV’s soundtrack might be Koichi Sugiyama’s best. My favorite tracks are “Melody of Love”, “Make Me Feel Sad”, and “Magic Carpet.” The theme “The Ocean”, probably served as the basis for his masterful “Sky, Earth, and Sea” in DQVIII. I was fortunate enough to have heard an orchestral rendition of the soundtrack for a live concert. This occurred shortly after Sugiyama’s death, so the concert also served as a tribute to him. Sugiyama is understandably a divisive figure due to his denialist views on Japan’s WWII war crimes, but his impact on video game music cannot be ignored. Without his work on DQ, we would not have Nobuo Uematsu or Yoko Shimomura.
I can’t help but compare DQV to a rival JRPG, Final Fantasy IV. Both games were released on the Super Famicom within a year of each other, and both represented dramatic turning points for their respective franchises. They both featured stories with unconventional heroes (FFIV’s Cecil opens the story as a murderer), had romances which culminated in marriage, and introduced new staples to the gameplay (while DQV debuted monster taming, FFIV debuted FF’s Active Time Battle system). They also both received great remakes on the Nintendo DS. If I had to choose my favorite game between the two, I would prefer DQV. While FFIV had better villains, from the Four Fiends to Golbez, DQV’s story felt more human and tragic. DQV’s monster taming also offered more personalization than FFIV’s predetermined classes.
I encourage anyone who wants to play this game to pirate it through an emulator. The game’s English DS port is obscenely expensive, and until Square decides to re-release the game, it’s the best option for most people. There’s also the phone version, of course, but I imagine that most people would rather not play games of this sort on their phones. It is sad that a classic such as this has become so rare in the West due to corporate neglect, but then, piracy exists for a reason.
