Fairy Tale Beginnings - Dragon Quest V

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Alex_V

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Edited By Alex_V
The thing I like about Dragon Quest V is that it doesn’t muck about - it’s a simple, slightly old-fashioned RPG that is quite happy to simply play to the traditional strengths of the genre. A decent storyline but nothing overwrought, some character tweaking but not enough to get boring, and some combat shenanigans without ever getting over-complicated.

My pet hate in gaming (and particularly in JRPGs) is over-fussy, long-winded dialogue, and this game is great at simply setting up characters with a couple of lines of spoken text, and usually leaving it at that. I don’t want to hear everybody’s life story in a game like this, any more than I want to hear it in a movie or TV show. The shopkeepers here are basically shopkeepers, with the merest of tweaks just to keep it interesting - it’ll be a travelling salesman rather than a shopkeeper, or the shop is in a cave rather than a building. The game is very good at keeping the variety up without the game losing its focus.

And the game succeeds at doing the standard JRPG set up without too much fuss. Each area seems open-world but is artificially gated - your dad is ill in bed so you can’t venture too far, or something like that. Within these areas is a different aim, the equivalent of a different dungeon to explore in the world, and you tool up and then take it on. If you fail, a day passes and you try again. It works very well. The more you fail, the more chance of you levelling up in the meantime and getting better gear, so there’s no real pressure to succeed first time around. Very user-friendly and non-stressful, but addictive enough to keep you playing.

The presentation is really nice, with the option to spin around in full 3D - it gives the game an interesting visual style, because essentially it is still a top-down traditional JRPG. Praise to the production team on this, because they seem to have tweaked a classic game to give it a real boost for the DS, without killing what was essentially great about the original game itself. It feels modern, but it’s a vintage effort. It feels like we’re paying homage to games past, which gives me a fuzzy feeling in my hardened gamer’s heart.

I’m about 4 hours in, and things have really taken a turn for the worst. 10 years have just passed in my life and I feel slightly bewildered and disorientated, but I’m pretty determined to see things through, presumably to my death as an old adventurer, with all the rights wronged and justice served. It feels much more like a genuine life story than Fable II, which felt too contrived and obsessed with ‘emergent gameplay’ to be really genuine. This is just the story of a life lived in fairy tales, and I’m happy to accept the simplicity of it at face value.

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Alex_V

651

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832

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Reviews: 2

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#1  Edited By Alex_V
The thing I like about Dragon Quest V is that it doesn’t muck about - it’s a simple, slightly old-fashioned RPG that is quite happy to simply play to the traditional strengths of the genre. A decent storyline but nothing overwrought, some character tweaking but not enough to get boring, and some combat shenanigans without ever getting over-complicated.

My pet hate in gaming (and particularly in JRPGs) is over-fussy, long-winded dialogue, and this game is great at simply setting up characters with a couple of lines of spoken text, and usually leaving it at that. I don’t want to hear everybody’s life story in a game like this, any more than I want to hear it in a movie or TV show. The shopkeepers here are basically shopkeepers, with the merest of tweaks just to keep it interesting - it’ll be a travelling salesman rather than a shopkeeper, or the shop is in a cave rather than a building. The game is very good at keeping the variety up without the game losing its focus.

And the game succeeds at doing the standard JRPG set up without too much fuss. Each area seems open-world but is artificially gated - your dad is ill in bed so you can’t venture too far, or something like that. Within these areas is a different aim, the equivalent of a different dungeon to explore in the world, and you tool up and then take it on. If you fail, a day passes and you try again. It works very well. The more you fail, the more chance of you levelling up in the meantime and getting better gear, so there’s no real pressure to succeed first time around. Very user-friendly and non-stressful, but addictive enough to keep you playing.

The presentation is really nice, with the option to spin around in full 3D - it gives the game an interesting visual style, because essentially it is still a top-down traditional JRPG. Praise to the production team on this, because they seem to have tweaked a classic game to give it a real boost for the DS, without killing what was essentially great about the original game itself. It feels modern, but it’s a vintage effort. It feels like we’re paying homage to games past, which gives me a fuzzy feeling in my hardened gamer’s heart.

I’m about 4 hours in, and things have really taken a turn for the worst. 10 years have just passed in my life and I feel slightly bewildered and disorientated, but I’m pretty determined to see things through, presumably to my death as an old adventurer, with all the rights wronged and justice served. It feels much more like a genuine life story than Fable II, which felt too contrived and obsessed with ‘emergent gameplay’ to be really genuine. This is just the story of a life lived in fairy tales, and I’m happy to accept the simplicity of it at face value.