Finished Dragon Quest V the other day, and I haven't changed my mind too much @"captain"#p84503 but I am pleased I finished it. I was still a bit put off by the music and tactile sensation of playing the game (so much mashing the Accept button...), I don't love Toriyama's art in this particular context, but it's a cool one. (as has been said... by millions of game players... for decades...)
The scenario is very good. That there is ||a **huge leap forward in time** immediately after the hero's father (a character you are more than slightly acquainted with) is **killed** and you're sent to a **labor camp**, feels transgressive today, at least to me, who has played relatively few JRPGs and no Dragon Quests. These narrative developments aren't appealing because they're dark and horrifying, but more because it's the game showing that it's willing to kill its darlings on some level—your parents die or aren't present in other JRPGs, but you only knew them for two seconds anyway and it barely matters. Here you spend a good few hours following your dad around and feeling like he's a presence in your little in-game life. The story takes place over a long period of time, and makes good on that promise so to speak: some characters you meet at the beginning are around at the end, and they change with you. When you're a child you get stuck running around with Prince Harry, who sucks, until you both are forced to build a temple for ten years together and you become inseperable friends. Later you see him get married and have children, just like you.||
...
Oh and you ||**get married** and **are crowned king** and **have children** whom you get to **name** AND then you're **frozen** for **another huge leap forward in time**! Your kids grow up!||
And so on.
In my game-playing experience I haven't seen Chekov's Gun invoked in game design too often, when near the very end of the thing you go back to some location from the beginning, or you finally interact with something you've been aware of/near for the whole game. I think Tim said somewhere that Dragon Quests do this a lot. DQV pulls it off in a number of ways, but my favorite might have been ||closing the loop on the gold orb exchange when you **travel through time**||. That the penultimate dungeon is ||the temple you were building in the labor camp near the beginning is cool by itself,|| but the feeling of returning was compounded for me since I played that early part of the game a year ago.
I didn't like the monsters too much, maybe by my own fault—I stuck with the first few I ran into and played most of the game with them. I used a slime, who had lots of useful magic abilities, and a yeti and my faithful sabretooth cat, whose non-melee abilities never seemed especially useful. I liked playing with my family (including Sancho, he is my family) much more. Felt a little weird when at the very end, my wife having done most of the damage to and landing the killing blow on the final boss, when we got back to the castle everyone says congrats to my son, the legendary hero who singlehandedly saved the world. I love my son but he wasn't legendary all by himself. His sister was there too! Whatever, I'm ||king||, I'll hire a scribe to write the history I witnessed.