RPG Diary

Dragon Quest V

Dragon Quest V was not originally released in the US so it's a lesser known title. Still, it seems fairly popular now since the remakes were released here. I played this game a bit when I was younger, but I ultimately abandoned it for reasons that I cannot remember. I enjoyed Dragon Quest IV, so I'm looking forward to trying this one again.

Title	Dragon Quest V
Year	1992
System	SNES
Developer	Chunsoft
Publisher	Enix

Dragon Quest V's story is divided into three chapters which span nearly 30 years of the main character's life. I thought this was a cool idea that I have not really seen before. While I really enjoyed the childhood part of the game, I kind of lost interest afterwards. I was disappointed that the villains introduced in the first chapter did not seem important during the rest of the game. I also thought the story lost momentum in the second chapter when the hero starts just wandering across the world without much going on. Despite this, there were a few memorable twists in the story that did surprise me. However, the whole marriage to childbirth sequence in the second chapter happened way too fast and felt forced.

Dragon Quest V is credited with being one of the earliest games to feature "monster catching". This is a bit of a misnomer as it's really just a random chance that a defeated monster may join your party. While cool in concept, I found it fairly underwhelming. The monsters did not seem well balanced. Monsters that learn healing spells (or more rarely, reviving spells) are far more valuable since you can spam their spells from the wagon. Slime Knight gets both healing and great stats and equipment, so it stayed in my party the entire game.

The party size was reduced from 4 to 3 in Dragon Quest V and I think this makes the game less interesting. With only three slots, I found my party pretty much reduced to the hero, the strongest physical attacker, and a healer. This was disappointing because the game throws so many different characters at you, but most of them did not seem to be worth using. Remakes of this game have since increased the party size back to 4 again.

The AI party members from Dragon Quest IV return, but this time there is an option to explicitly select actions for them instead. I thought this was a great balance — I used AI to plow through mundane random encounters, but was still able to use spells (healing!) effectively during boss battles.

Ultimately, I was disappointed with Dragon Quest V as it didn't live up to the hype I saw online. I'm sure most people are playing the remakes instead, so I'll have to try one eventually to see if they flesh out the story better. I also have some doubts about the accuracy of the translation I used, so I am interested in an official translation.

After completing a game, I add it to my overall enjoyment ranking which orders the games I've completed from those I most enjoyed to those I least enjoyed. I was fairly indifferent about Dragon Quest V. I had similar feelings about Pokemon Scarlet and Violet, but that at least has the fun monster collection aspect.