Funbil Forgive me, Insert Credit Forums, but I feel I have sinned…… I started playing Dragon Quest 5 a while back, but it’s starting to feel like a chore so I’m putting it down. It’s curious to me, because everyone who really knows about DQ always says 5 is the best one (including Yuji Horii!) but I just don’t really see what the appeal is!
DQ5 is one of the few ones that I needed to come back to a few times to get through, and I still don’t love it. For me, it’s I think the destabilizing feeling brought on by… err… general and vague spoilers… the revolving door effect of the human characters coming in and out of the party so often, and how the monster collection gimmick just doesn’t really do much for me either. The monster collection thing is just collectively not as interesting to me as a well rounded fulltime party member, and it’s absurdly late in the game before you are able to have characters who are going to be staying with you in the party until the credits roll.
As a storytelling exercise, it’s absolutely wonderful. I feel this way about all of the “classic” DQ games to a certain degree, but on a narrative level of both scale and experimentation those games still feel impressively put together, and I reckon at least half of them if not all of them were ahead of their time.
But I gotta admit I cannot escape the idea that that narrative structure is interrupted by incongruent developments in gameplay. Like, cool, people come and go in ur life, that’s great. But the potential impermanence in human relationships does not mesh well with a gameplay system based on incremental growth. I think eventually it gets tiring to me because it doesn’t give you enough constants in this regard, or rather, it gives you constants (Hero) but a lot of them aren’t my thing (monster recruitment). So the narrative masterstroke ends up at least to me feeling a bit hampered by the thought in the back of my head that I don’t need to invest time or effort or gold into this guy ’cause I don’t know if he’s gonna be in the party
I mean, you know, Dragon Quest V is great but from what I remember on our dedicated Dragon Quest thread there isn’t all that much consensus at least on this forum about any one of those games being identifiable as the best of the bunch, really. I think what I really like about Dragon Quest and especially the pre-disc media games is that they’re of such a consistent quality or a consistent stature among contemporary games that I think most bigtime Dragon Quest fans all have their own personal choice for what is the best one (III for me, VI as a close second). Maybe this is kind of a consequence of us all (or mostly??) listening to the podcast the forum is attached to, so we end up having the panel’s tastes ever so slightly if not moderately outsized upon our collective opinions, and I know Tim Rogers is perpetually elevating Dragon Quest V as their personal favorite, for reasons I’m looking forward to hearing more about in ACTION BUTTON SEASON 2. I expect or at least hope that that video will also include some level of parallel discussion about other Dragon Quest games and especially the other classic ones, if for not other reason than that I feel like Dragon Quest V’s greatness kind of speaks for itself and for Tim I bet it’s personal-personal as he does, so I’d love to hear more about what he in particular thinks about the other ones more.