I just finished Dragon's Quest V for the SNES. Normally I would write a mini-review highlighting the positives and negatives of the game, but every highlight I could think of ended up having both positive and negative aspects associated with them. Anyway, here we go....
Dragon's Quest V is my first DQ game. I'm not huge on this style of jRPG where you give orders to your sprite characters and watch the results of the combat round scroll by. But I had played through all of the older, classic Final Fantasy games and thought I'd give a DQ one a try.
- The game covers many years as generations of a family fight against an encroaching evil. I liked this idea more than I liked its implimentation. Having the game broken up into several time periods does give the game a more epic feel as the main character grows from a small child to an older, seasoned warrior. However, the plot makes some pretty big jumps like when your character decides out of the blue to get married and start a family. The marriage is shoe-horned in so that the game can jump the next few years to the following generation of adventurers, and therefore it doesn't feel organic.
- Some story developer thought it would be a great idea to have characters quickly bounce in and then bounce out of the party and then go fuck off with their own unrelated storyline. In theory this sounds reasonable since it shows that the game characters have their own desires and wants than spending their lives being murder hobos. The problem with this is that you never really bond or care about any of them. The one NPC that I felt was the most developed was Prince Harry, but even he is only a party member for a fraction of the game.
- Monsters can be invited to join the party, which is great but equipping them and raising their levels requires quite a bit of grinding for XP and treasure. The idea of monster companions is fun because of their special abilities, although they do lack any sort of personality once joined with the party. When human characters join the party they often do so at a low level, with the same issue of having to grind to raise their levels and to gain enough coin to equip them. The game encourages you to keep a large party, especially towards the end of the game where the dungeon has monsters that can quickly incapacitate a party member and the last few boss encounters practically require you to move party members in and out of combat. But grinding to get the party members levels up takes forever and is just a miserable experience.
- Also, many of the party member abilities no longer seem to be as effective against high level monsters, resulting in my depending more on my heavily armed and armored melee sluggers and characters that could heal or remove status effects. Inversely, the last few dungeon levels have monsters that often insta-kills a party member. This was more annoying than anything, since raising an incapacitated character costs a good amount of magic points and many of the dungeons are long with encounters popping up every few steps.
I do like how DQV tried to separate itself from the Final Fantasy series by a generational storyline, monster recruitment, and a huge roster of party members you can take along with you. However, the final product just isn't well put together. My biggest gripe is with the incredible amount of grinding with combat encounters that are monotonous. Honestly, much of the problem is that I'm not a huge fan of this kind of gameplay. On a whim, I thought I'd try a more recent indie RPGMaker darling and fired up Tales of the Drunken Paladin in order to make a comparison. This was a game I thought I would like, but when giving it a go I found DQ5 was still superior in writing, dungeon design, and gameplay. TotDP just pissed me off with an attempt at humor that was trying waaaay too hard. A washed-up, drunken paladin is a great idea that should allow for the perfect blend of bitter comedy and small moments of pathos, but our rotted culture can't even seem to get an idea as simple as this right. Instead TotDP goes out of its way to make your main character a complete buffoon, and later companions act as they too bothered to deal with him or go about saving the world. After a couple hours of this I uninstalled TotDP and went back to finishing DQV. Despite its faults DQV still holds up well against more modern competition.
