I was reminded of Dragon Quest 5 by facebook and wrote up a little thing for my friends there. Most of whom have not played a Dragon Quest title. For reference I played the game mostly on my BlackBerry android, emulated.
Dragon Quest 5 is never hard. Maybe I’m playing it wrong but doing the best I can I don’t think I died more than half a dozen times over its considerable length and I consider that kind of a failing.
Dragon Quest 5 is a game that was always talked up to me, its the pinnacle of the early Dragon Quests, the one that ushered in modern Dragon Questing. It is to Dragon Quest what Link To the Past is to Legend of Zelda. Its tight as a drum this game. Too tight.
To keep piling on the metaphors this game feels like a nice train ride. You ride a train to the end, find the switch to go down the next line and then you ride again. And though the places you go are fantastic it rarely felt like MY adventure. Even with that one BIG CHOICE. Thank goddess for optional content you can stumble onto.
This would be a great first rpg, you couldn’t do much better. But it would be a better syndicated saturday morning anime. Its Princess Bride meets Conan the Barbarian. It perfect adolescent imagination fuel. I will be gifting this to people’s children for sure.
This game is so well liked its been ported to PS2 and the DS. I actually started on the DS version before losing it and its an amazing port job with fully 3D sprite looking environments that are like pixel accurate if you don’t rotate the camera. But DO so you can look out over balconies and off of towers. It gives me the “thrill” of 3d like when 3d was new. The PS2 version is very pretty as well but I have not played it.
I write all this in the middle of playing Lufia II a game I am coming to consider to be a perfect jrpg. I love these characters, this weird world, the battle system, the monster designs, the perfect length dungeons, the actually challenging brain puzzles. Its a gas. Dragon Quest V is more ambitious, more magical, louder but by far a worse game. Which might not be fair given Lufia was out in 1995 and DQ5 was out in 1992. But there it is.
I can’t play the older versions of DQ5 because there’s no Debora and I refuse to settle for less than debora.
in the early 00s, i managed to get an RE fan on an RE forum big into the first two Lufias because i said they were the RPG equivalent of RE’s puzzles (not really true because lufia’s puzzles are better). it’s too bad lufia is a dead series. the music was amazing.
Translation: If you enter your name as TUT and set the message speed to “Fast” in Dragon Warrior 2 (US), you won’t encounter random battles until the Gremlins in Lianport unless you save. Probably good for speed-running, but I wouldn’t want to be called “TUT”.
well then
fuck me yes
i bought it on switch to play ‘at some point in the future’, what a silly sausage i’ve been
plz fix the bug where jade’s normal attack animates at 30fps instead of 60 on pc
gosh, that’s gonna be real close to new console releases… i wonder if i’ll be able to play dqxi special edition in 4k 60fps this christmas…
if you’re a good boy this year, anything could happen
this was a bug? I put 90 hours into the game and thought the game just slowed down during jade’s animations
i also played this game for like a hundred hours and literally never noticed this
These new ports of DQXIS will apparently not look as good as the original PS4 and PC versions since they are based on the Switch version now.
Classic
i believe we can file this one under OOF and LOL
oh hey welcome to the club
i played the demo on switch and i guess having a nice pc has made me one of those people but the low frame rate and decreased texture fidelity didn’t really put me in any rush to play it
I’m like, maybe a third or a quarter of the way through DQXI? I dunno, I’m real slow in this game so maybe 25 hours for me is 15 hours for someone else.
Anyway, I have three major criticisms of this game (that I am enjoying a lot):
- The ethno-tourism is irksome. I was pretty much fine with it up until using pacific islander “accents” and architecture as flavor. It’s like, let’s go visit a bunch of cultures without any of the real-world background of them, which is fine when it’s Italy, but not as fine when we’re talking about indigenous people. Y’know? It just seemed gross. It’s also annoying to have to read things in those terrible eye dialects (hi @Tulpa) or hear the really bad mock-accents.
- Of course, the women in this game are occasionally treated as objects, because it’s a JRPG and apparently we can’t have women in a JRPG without also having a slobbering pervert give me recipes to make them dress sexier. Also Jade’s entire “Allure” skill tree is irritating and embarrassing. She has a big spear, but it does more damage to gently tap monsters with her ass. Fuck you.
- I think the big loss in going from 2D overworld to 3D areas disguised as an overworld is the sense of connectivity. It doesn’t feel like one big space that has smaller more detailed areas in it. Instead, it feels like a bunch of smaller detailed areas connected mostly linearly together like pearls in a necklace. It also means you just use Zoom to go from place to place without any sense of travel. It doesn’t have any sense of “journey” if that tracks
I’m digging the game more every hour, but I can’t help but be critical of everything I touch, which is…I guess why I’m on SB? Anyway, maybe I’ll feel differently later in the game, but I doubt it.
i picked italian because i knew you’d see it, but i’m mostly fine with any western european accentism for the same reasons, it’s just not as loaded. It’s still fucking intolerable though.
All comedy accent characters should be Dutch or Belgian IMO