Dragon Quest V: Hand of the Heavenly Bride
I played through the DS version of this game. I think I started it well before the pandemic, got like ¾ the way through, switched to a new release then forgot about it for years. But it was nagging at me that I never finished it, so I did finally complete it.
This game was a bit long to get through. I played the SNES version with a fan translation, decades ago and remembered it fondly. I remember liking the idea that you start the game as a child, follow your character through adulthood, have a child, and on a minor twist to the ‘hero of legend’ trope, you aren’t actually the hero of legend, but your eventual son is. But playing it again, it didn’t seem as impressive. Dragon Quest games are always kind of basic. So maybe they don’t age as well.
In terms of general gameplay, the battles get repetitive. There never feels like much strategy, and even with the magic in the game, it usually feels like the best method is to just melee attack everything, so every fight feels like an auto-battle (I ended up fast-forwarding the emulator on most of the battles). Even boss fights are the same thing - buff your melee attack, debuf the enemy’s defence, and then just keep hitting. There’s elemental magic in the game, but it never really seems like elemental weaknesses have much of an impact.
The ‘innovation’ in this game was that you could recruit monsters. After a fight, if you’re lucky, a monster might offer to join you. I forgot how central this mechanic was in the mid-game where your entire party is basically monsters. But there isn’t a ton of differentiation between the monsters, and because they don’t have a lot of characterization, you don’t really feel attached to spending a lot of resources on them. After you get your kids, you have human party members, so you basically just ignore the monsters you recruited in the last third of the game, making it all feel pointless.
The DS port is pretty bad (it seems the same as with Final Fantasy, where the 3D DS ports were the worst versions of the game). It converts a 2D game to 3D, which was totally unnecessary. It makes town and dungeons more annoying because things can be hidden by the camera view which you need to rotate. It adds nothing to the game, but an inconvenience. They also did a weird translation where they give some characters and towns stereotypical accents, but there’s no voice acting. Like you go to one town and they’re all the text is in a Scottish accent, and one character basically uses a Mario-like exaggerated Italian accent. The final boss just uses some weird symbols, as if it’s like l33t speak or something. Just a bizarre design choice. Then they added a ton of unnecessary dialog. You can talk to your own party. They rarely add anything useful. Most of it is fluff. Like if you walk up to a sleeping character and then talk to your kid, they’ll say ’dad, it wouldn’t be nice to wake that person up’. I just can’t believe they paid someone to write reams of pointless dialog like that.
So it was kind of disappointing to revisit a game that I remembered fondly and kind of lose that feeling after playing it.