Dragon Quest Retrospective: Dragon Quest V

 

With the release of Dragon Quest IV in 1990, the series built upon seeds planted in the third game and showed not only Japan but North America as well what the future of gaming could be. The game contained a narrative unlike anything the genre had seen before, and continued to build upon the kind of gameplay fans had some to expect.

The developers knew that a fifth game in the series was going to have to somehow top the lofty heights of the fourth, so where it only took two years after the release of Dragon Quest III before the next and final game in the series for the NES came out, the wait for Dragon Quest V was two and a half years. I don’t know whether the game was in development for two and a half years, but given its quality, I wouldn’t be surprised if it didn’t at least receive enough time and care to become the best game it could possibly be. Nothing about the game feels rushed or incomplete or left on the cutting room floor. I don’t recall any plot threads that are left dangling, nor any gameplay elements that didn’t feel fleshed out.

I hope that, in today’s Retrospective article, I can adequately explain why Dragon Quest V is one of the best games in the series, and possibly of all time.

 

Papas/Pankraz’s Story

Dragon Quest V opens with a king anxiously awaiting the birth of his son, and indeed, it is a joyous affair. But right as soon as the baby’s named, tragedy strikes and the baby’s mother dies after successfully giving birth. The scene ends with the crying of the baby, rendered quite well with the SNES sound chip.

The action cuts to a ship where the young boy, six years later, is accompanying his father Papas on a trip. The ship sequence helps teach players who might not have played a Dragon Quest game before to check everything, even drawers and jars, for important items, since Papas makes it a point to remind his son about checking things before leaving the ship. If you don’t, whatever you could’ve looted from it is gone forever, so it’s a harsh lesson to learn.

Papas and his son, here called Tyger because why not, arrive at Vista Port on their way to their home in Santa Rosa. It’s in Santa Rosa that Tyger meets Bianca for the first time and finds out about the first quest of the game, a rescue mission in the village’s nearby cave.

What’s interesting about the Santa Rosa Cave is that the game has attempted to prepare players for it by providing a few Medical Herbs and a Leather Hat. The cave itself provides a Leather Shield and Wayfarer’s Clothes for free, so Tyger should be well equipped to survive most battles. Tyger also has enough gold to buy something from the weapon shop, and it’s this weapon that gets him through, likely in one go, but it depends on how unlucky he is when fighting the Whackamole. The Whackamole can deal ten HP damage per hit, but only *if* it hits, and actually dealing this damage seems to be exceedingly rare.

Once the six year old Tyger rescues the grown adult who got pinned by a rock, it’s time to go home and rest. Such is the life of a Hero!

There’s a cute scene prior to the dungeon where Bianca, two years older than Tyger, tries to read him a book and fails, which says a lot about the education system of Dragon Quest V. It’s possible this also says something about the world’s gender inequality, except that Tyger himself can’t read at all, not even any of the signs he comes across in his adventure, so the game gets around this by telling the player what the sign says, then saying that unfortunately, Tyger is unable to read it so it’s assumed that he doesn’t get to benefit from the information, although he actually does get to benefit as a result of the control that players have over his actions.

I was reading at an age younger than the game’s main character, so I don’t really think he has any excuse.

The man in the cave is looking for herbs to make medicine with, and now that he’s been rescued, Papas and Tyger accompany Bianca and her mother back to Alkapa, since they’re in Santa Rosa to buy the medicine. In Alkapa, Tyger learns about a castle named Lenoire that they must never, ever go to. This is RPG shorthand for “this is the next dungeon, guaranteed.”

In other games, this might’ve been enough. On the NES, this might’ve been enough. But Dragon Quest V makes it known fairly quickly that it’s a very narrative-focused game because it gives players an incentive to ignore the warning and go up north: Bianca and Tyger meet a pair of asshole kids physically abusing a sabre kitten simply because they can, and they decide they’re tiring of their game, but want Tyger and Bianca to go up north and brave the Lenoire Castle before they’d be willing to relinquish the kitten into their care.

The second dungeon of the game will likely take players a few attempts to make it all the way through, even with Tyger knowing Heal, simply because he doesn’t have a lot of MP and won’t have had an opportunity to save up for all the strongest weapons and armour yet. When he does, though, the Thorn Whip for Bianca and Boomerang for himself are fun weapons because they hit multiple targets at once and are pretty strong anyway for this point in the game, so solo enemies and boss fights aren’t hindered by leaving stronger weapons at home. The game justifies Tyger staying in Alkapa for a few days until the dungeon’s complete by having Papas fall ill with what his friend Duncan has (he’s the man the medicine is for), but the downside to taking a few days is that it just prolongs the abuse the poor kitten’s suffering. It’s a miracle they didn’t kill the kitten with their kicking or decide to just drop it in a bag and drown it after getting tired of bullying it.

The game also provides a place to rest within the castle and once Tyger and Bianca find it, they don’t have to go back to Alkapa to heal up.

What’s interesting about the battle system, which players may have noticed while being escorted around by Papas but which they’ll definitely notice now that they’re exploring an abandoned castle at night is that attacks will now redirect to another enemy if one were to die before a character can hit it. This is something Square figured out how to do on the NES, but Enix apparently had no idea how to do it until the SNES came along.

I can’t help but wonder if the Torch found within Lenoire Castle is a callback to the very first Dragon Quest, where players were required to carry around torches in order to navigate dungeons before the developers decided to just do what everyone else decided to do from the start and just act like dungeons are always well lit and/or the characters always bring with them a means to illuminate the dungeons.

Come to think of it, a lot of the improvements to the quality of a player’s control over their party in an RPG came about because developers decided that this or that thing was an acceptable break from reality. The original Dragon Quest was so hyper realistic that every little thing had to be manually done, even to the point of ridiculousness and even when it didn’t make sense. In teaching players to use keys on doors, the hero was locked inside the king’s throne room and wasn’t allowed to just ask a guard to let him out. The player had to manually tell the character, from a menu, to open a door or climb down a flight of stairs, as if they were intellectually challenged and needed guidance to figure out what to do when standing in front of an artificially constructed incline. “Ah. My old enemy! Stairs.”

Fast forward to the start of the SNES generation. At a time when Cecil is able to walk through most doors automatically in Final Fantasy IV, the main character of Dragon Quest V at least has a button on the controller that interacts with doors so that they don’t take more than a moment’s hesitation. Stairs were taken care of way back in Dragon Quest II, fortunately, but with the additional buttons a SNES controller contains, players can talk with characters easier, as well as interact with doors and treasure chests and drawers and urns and anything else that contains items.

Another nice callback to the first Dragon Quest is having the battle screen appear overtop of the overworld. Even though it doesn’t seem to save a lot of time, it does make the battle system feel like it’s faster on the SNES than it was on the NES.

Both Tyger and Bianca receive spells that hit multiple enemies at level 8, which helps when they find themselves in a “boss” fight with four enemies, a fight which can be won in a single turn thanks to Gust and Firebal.

Okay, it’s probably about time that I talk about the game’s translation. If you’ve played the DS version, likely none of the place names I’ve mentioned are very familiar to you, and you might wonder who Papas is and why I haven’t mentioned Pankraz yet. That’s because I played the original SNES version with DeJap’s 1.0 translation patch. DeJap eventually released a revised patch, but it mainly contained a bunch of corrections to typos and other things. In these patches, DeJap used spell names from the NES era, including Firebal, which I guess shoots a firebal at each enemy in a group. (And yes, I made that joke before.) The 1.0 version is also the version I had on my computer when I started playing and I didn’t feel like finding the newer patch and restarting. The version I played is the same overall game, of course, but with a rougher script.

Up until the fifth game, Dragon Quest had been making its way to North America faithfully, while we only received the first Final Fantasy and then skipped to the fourth, but starting with Dragon Quest V, Enix began to pass over North America and thus we missed out on several of their SNES games. This unfortunately wouldn’t cease until the PlayStation era, which meant that we went from “Dragon Warrior IV” to “Dragon Warrior VII” since they weren’t too worried about renumbering games on the PlayStation like Square had been on the SNES. We also ended up getting Chocobo’s Dungeon 2 from Square and never got the original, and we went from “Final Fantasy III” to “Final Fantasy VII” within the span of three years, leaving fans to wonder where three whole games disappeared to.

It was around this time that the emulation scene started blowing up, helped at least in part by the fact that NES and SNES games were small enough that you could download them relatively quickly, even on the turtles we had for modems back then, and you could save many NES games on a standard 3 1/2 inch floppy, so if you wanted to, you could play those early Dragon Quest games anywhere.

When fans of Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest discovered there were a bunch of games they hadn’t played yet, amateur translation groups got together to help make those games accessible. Dragon Quest V might not have been the first to be translated (if I recall, Final Fantasy V was the first major translation project finished by the community), but once it was, one of the greatest RPGs we never played was suddenly available for the very first time.

I don’t know if it was just because of the translation efforts or the ROM community in general, but companies like Square began to care a lot about making sure North America had access to the games we never got the first time around, and thus five out of the first six Final Fantasy games, including two we never originally got to play, were re-released on the PlayStation and they were all brought over. Some time after the merger with Enix, the company turned their attention to the Nintendo DS and ported Final Fantasy III to it, the final game in the series we’d yet to legally play. They also began to do for Dragon Quest what they’d done for Final Fantasy and re-released several of the games so that we would be able to play the ones we were missing. It was on the DS that we were first able to legally play a version of Dragon Quest V.

Anyway, the next challenge for our intrepid heroes is to defeat the boss of the castle, but once he goes down, he asks to be spared and in typical Dragon Quest fashion, Thou Must. The reward for defeating the boss of the ghosts haunting the castle is that the rightful spirits of the castle can finally rest, and they gift you with a Golden Orb.

Bianca and Tyger become infamous back in Alkapa, which I suspect is largely because a pair of children, eight and six years of age, ridded an entire castle of evil and helped a king and queen regain their eternal rest. This is something none of the adults were willing to do because they were too busy telling each other ghost stories and warning each other away from the “dangerous” castle. I know the kids are our future, but I can’t imagine Tyger is strong enough to wield any kind of professional sword yet.

Before Tyger returns home, with the rescued kitten following him, Bianca ties her ribbon to the kitten’s tail. It doesn’t show up as equipment (yet), but it’s a sweet gesture anyway.

Back in Santa Rosa, it’s pretty chilly, as if winter is hanging on a little too long. People have discovered that they’ve begun to lose things, or maybe just misplace them, and it’s driving everyone a little nuts. There’s also a stranger hanging out in town, having just arrived the day before. In most games, the two events would be directly related, but Tyger goes to talk to the strange man, who wants to check out the treasure that he got from the ghosts in Lenoire Castle. Being the trusting sort, Tyger hands over the Orb and then receives it back a moment later. But then the stranger begins getting a little personal in his dialogue and I think I need an adult now.

It looks like the stranger has nothing to do with the weather, once Tyger finds an elf hidden from sight in the town’s bar. The elf is excited to finally be spotted, for he’d been pulling pranks and misplacing things in order to get someone, anyone’s attention and even that wasn’t working. The elf takes Tyger into the elves’ hidden land, which is locked in a perpetual winter, unable to transition to spring.

If this sounds at all familiar to you, a magical land where winter is never ending, it’s very familiar to me. This potentially makes Tyger an Isekai hero because he finds himself Narnia’d to a place which needs his help to solve literally the exact same problem Narnia had. Such is the life of a Hero. And being that Hero is pretty much the reason Tyger can see the elves in the first place and travel to their land.

As a little spoiler for later on in the game, it turns out that the hidden magical land of the elves is accessible from the world map once the player finds the means to get there, so Tyger isn’t actually an Isekai hero. That said, the Dragon Quest series does eventually start to flirt with the concept of a multiverse starting with the side game Dragon Quest Monsters. Tyger might not have been an Isekai hero, but Terry from Dragon Quest VI actually is. I look forward to writing about that.

The elves need Tyger because they themselves can’t fight: swords are too heavy for them. So wait, if they’re not strong enough to wield them, why does the local weapon vendor sell Copper Swords? I should really try picking one up in real life sometime to see how heavy they actually are. Maybe they’re lighter than I think they are, but even if the elves could hold a Copper Sword, they still seem to need Tyger’s help, and Tyger is apparently strong enough to use one at barely six years of age.

That said, one elf temporarily joins Tyger’s party as he goes to find their stolen flute, the one that will help them bring about the spring. Bella might not be able to carry swords, but her magic is still very handy. As a guest character, she doesn’t level up, but she comes with Heal (which eases Tyger’s burden a little bit since he also has Heal), Decrease (this comes in handy in the two boss fights she helps you with, it lowers the enemy’s defense), Firebal (as stated earlier, burns a group of enemies) and Surround (although I typically don’t use it, it decreases the physical accuracy of an enemy, assuming the enemy isn’t resistant). Decrease perfectly compliments Tyger’s Upper spell (increases a party member’s defense), so as a result of not having to cast Heal as often, both him and Bella can treat the bosses like punching bags. As such, both Zaile (er… Zyle?) and the Snow Queen go down pretty easily.

I assume that the disparity between in battle names and the same names in dialogue is one of the things that DeJap fixed in their revised patch.

After finding the flute and bringing it back, Lady Powan promises to be of help once Tyger is older. If that’s not foreshadowing, I don’t know what is. But imagine that, six years old and the elf queen owes him a favour! Such is the life of a Hero.

Something you’ll notice if you’ve played up to this point is that the game goes to great lengths to make sure that Papas doesn’t get ahead of his son. He’s either busy with work at home or flat on his back with a cold, whatever excuse the game can give in order to allow Tyger to do whatever he needs to do at the pace he’s comfortable with. Does it take thirty sleeps before he’s strong enough to finish in Lenoire Castle? Papas… probably should go to the hospital if an illness is lingering that long, and maybe get hooked up to a ventilator because it’s probably COVID, but the point is that the game makes sure the ghosts are dealt with before Papas takes his son back home. He’s also very busy at home when Tyger goes to the land of elves to help them with their winter problem and get them prepared for the spring thaw. How very nice of the king of Reinhart to wait until Tyger’s finished with his quest to summon his father.

Papas seems to understand that the rigors of taking care of a family while journeying at the same time are hard on a young boy and he likely doesn’t want Tyger to grow up to be just like him. The song “Cats in the Cradle” probably haunts most fathers since by the time they’re no longer too busy to spend time with their son, their son is now too busy to spend time with them. And Tyger’s only six years old! Papas wants to raise the poor kid right, since he’s going through life without a mother at this point. Their constant gallivanting around the world probably makes it seem like he’s going through life without a father, too. And that’s the last thing Papas wants, for Tyger to feel like he has no parents. So he makes a promise to Tyger before leaving for Reinhart, that they’ll settle down for a while. Likely not forever, since his quest is an important one, but right now he just wants to raise Tyger properly and give him an actual childhood. Thus, Tyger has that to look forward to. As soon as his business in Reinhart is done, he’ll get to have an actual, proper childhood.

The business in Reinhart has to do with the king’s son Henry. He’s first in line for the throne but he’s also a brat. So the king’s hoping Papas can be a positive influence in the kid’s life. The king is apparently too busy to raise Henry himself and the Queen is Henry’s step-mother, with a son of her own to look after. It doesn’t seem to be an ideal situation for Henry, so he’s basically become a punk kid who acts out at every opportunity. Henry’s back story is very similar to Tyger’s own, so for Papas, it’s likely an uncomfortable reminder of what Tyger could’ve become if he was any less of a father or if he’d remarried after the death of his wife, like the king of Reinhart did.

Just when it begins to look like babysitting is in the player’s future, a band of kidnappers break into the castle and take Henry, so it’s up to Tyger and Papas to go rescue him. Actually, Papas leaves his son behind to go and rescue Henry himself, perhaps still not believing that his son is strong enough to come along, but after fighting his way through the cave with his sabrecat by his side, Tyger meets up with his father and his father notes how strong he is, and how proud he is of his son. So the pair set off, more than just father and son, they are a team of equals now.

Rescuing the prince is simple, although Henry is such an ungrateful brat that it’s tempting to leave him behind. But the cave’s NPCs let slip that the queen paid them to get rid of Henry, so that her own son Dale could become the next king, and they plan on selling the prince as a slave. Naturally, Tyger and Papas are going to go put a stop to that, as is befitting of Heroes.

An overwhelming amount of enemies show up, but Papas holds them off so that Henry and Tyger can escape. Naturally, this leads to the next boss fight.

The strategy for defeating Gema is a bit tougher since Tyger doesn’t have Bianca with him, and his sabrecat likely still doesn’t have enough Intelligence to act thoroughly tamed. The monsters in the game require an Intelligence stat of 20 before they’re willing to listen to your commands 100% of the time. Any lower and they’ll often do whatever they want. This sort of thing will come up later when the game’s monster recruitment system is introduced. Fortunately, a sabrecat around level 10 or so doesn’t have a lot of variance in how it acts, especially when facing a single enemy, so fighting Gema is actually a lot easier than it may first-

Oh. Oh dear. Maybe I’m wrong. But Papas to the rescue, right?

 

Tyger’s Story

It only takes five hours for the game to subvert every expectation players might have had at the start. Dragon Quest V is a brave game indeed to sell its hero into slavery for ten years and also force Prince Henry into the same slavery. It doesn’t seem real at first. It’s an RPG quest, it’s not supposed to end in failure with your father, seemingly one of the main characters, dead! And what about the kingdom of Reinhart? What happened to them when Papas didn’t return with Henry? As far as they’re concerned, Henry’s simply vanished. And of course, the Queen isn’t going to tell anyone, she’s probably all too gleeful to put Dale on the throne instead of Henry once the king’s kicked the bucket, if she doesn’t ascend to the throne herself. I don’t know what the rules are for the kingdom of Reinhart, but most of the Dragon Quest games seem to be based on European fantasy tropes, right down to Western-style dragons instead of Eastern-style dragons, castles modeled after European medieval architecture and even most of the accents in its recent English translations are found on the European continent somewhere, so presumably royal succession in the series is also handled in the British manner.

But this is the farthest from Tyger’s mind. For ten long years, he’s defied the slavers and refused to accept defeat. With his dying breath, Papas told him that his mother is still alive somehow, somewhere. He just needs a way out so he can start looking.

After ten years, an opportunity appears. A recent addition to the slaves, a girl named Marina, breaks away from the religious order keeping them and becomes a slave herself as a punishment. Her older brother is a guard in the temple the slaves are building, but this doesn’t garner any special treatment for her. In fact, the other guards try to bully her, but are taught a lesson by Tyger and a weak, level one Henry. Beating them up and keeping Henry alive is a good way to get him his first level up. It’s also a good way to get thrown in the temple’s prison.

Fortunately, helping Marina means that her brother, Joshua, feels like he owes Tyger a favour. He has found out that once the temple is complete, the religious order is planning to destroy all evidence of how it was built. This includes killing all the slaves or forcing them into worshiping their evil god. Joshua provides Tyger’s gear and items and sets up a barrel for him to escape in with Joshua’s sister as well as Prince Henry, and all three end up at a nunnery. Marina stays behind, so Tyger and Henry set out into the world.

Oracle Valley is north of the nunnery, and is where the game’s casino can be found. At this early stage in the game, players likely don’t have a large amount of money to gamble with, but then that’s why it should be considered gambling, right? The possibility to win big, the likelihood of losing it all, that’s what a casino is all about. And the casino in this game has some pretty attractive prizes. Although there aren’t any card games that emulators can help cheat at, there’s a slot machine with the potential to pay out a huge amount, and I’m sure there are players who would love the opportunity to power through their adventure with the King Metal Sword slicing through bosses like butter or the Gringham Whip making all of their enemies drop at once.

The King Metal Sword costs so many casino tokens that players won’t be able to win it with just one lucky jackpot on the slots, but the 30000 token potential payout for lining up all 7s would certainly help.

The game’s paced quickly enough that if players would rather maintain a steady momentum, the bridge north of Oracle Valley takes them back to their old familiar stomping grounds. However, it’s been ten years and a lot has changed. Reinhart has destroyed Santa Rosa, meaning Tyger no longer has a home to go back to. Henry doesn’t have a home to go back to either, since Reinhart isn’t letting anyone in. However, Tyger finds out that his father hid a great treasure in the Santa Rosa Cave, so he and Henry make their way inside to find out what’s so important that Papas had it hidden away,

This is where the game’s monster recruitment system begins. You see, before leaving Oracle Valley, there’s a special vendor who can be visited during the night who offers to sell a very cheap wagon, so cheap that Tyger doesn’t need to grind any money for it, assuming he doesn’t gamble it all away at the casino. It’s also so very cheap that only a few battles need to be fought if money is somehow lacking. Once the wagon is acquired, monsters will start asking to join the party, but it’s entirely a random system. As far as I can tell, I’m not able to influence which monsters offer themselves to Tyger, and if there is a way, the game doesn’t communicate it. This could be a case of trial and error where players are supposed to use items in battle to see what they do, or there might’ve been something in the Dragon Quest V manual, but since the game never came out in English on the SNES, we never got that manual. I suppose I could’ve looked it up on GameFAQs, but I typically would rather not do that to play games, even if I’m being silly for not doing so.

That said, I do feel like the game may be balanced around party members that the game can guarantee that players have at any given period. When adventuring with Bianca during Tyger’s childhood, Lenoire Castle is balanced to give somewhat of a challenge for the two children exploring it. The land of fairies is balanced for Tyger, his sabrecat and his fairy ally. After escaping slavery, the game’s balanced for Henry and Tyger, with a monster ally being a nice bonus to have, and so on. There’s a point later on in the game after Tyger’s married and had children, where he’s adventuring with his twin children, and the game is balanced around the three human characters, with five monsters hanging around in the wagon on the exceedingly slim chance that something goes absolutely pear-shaped with the main group.

Oh yeah, it should be mentioned that the maximum number of party members in battle in Dragon Quest V is three, for some reason. Despite party size being eight, the developers chose to limit the number of characters who could participate in battle.

There’s even an enemy at one point in the game that tries to get players used to swapping characters in and out of the wagon by charging at a character and knocking them inside the wagon, taking them out of the battle completely. Players are expected to use the option to change the line-up of the party during battle in order to get their party member back. This is likely the only time most players will use the option, though.

Players will find the monsters they can recruit have their advantages and disadvantages. Some make their disadvantages known rather quickly, like the Brownie or Slime that might choose to join. Brownies and Slimes are weak and their stats grow slowly, but it’s a gradual growth over a long period of time. It’s better than nothing to have one along at the start, but expect to baby-sit it a lot. It’s not outside the realm of possibility that players have to go back to Santa Rosa to resurrect their Brownie ally because he died again.

Some monsters seem to have a huge advantage over others, like the Bomb Baby, whose stats are very strong for how early in the game they can be recruited (55 strength at level 4? Yes please!). They can also be equipped with the Bladed Boomerang, so the best way through the Santa Rosa cave is to recruit this monster and equip it well. To compensate for how useful this monster is, its Intelligence takes a long while to build up to 20, so it’ll often act on its own rather than do what you want it to do. The Bladed Boomerang will offset this for the most part, since one of the things a monster will do is choose a different enemy to hit, and you won’t even notice when the Bomb Baby does this if it’s using a boomerang weapon. However, Bomb Babies also have the ability to sacrifice themselves to deal damage, a move which often kills it unless it’s at full health, and at this relatively early stage in the game, no one has Vivify, Revive or Leaves of the World Tree. You might as well leave the cave and resurrect the monster at the church. There’s also nothing like having the monster be at 19 points of Intelligence, knowing a level up is coming soon, and seeing it explode twice in a row when trying to grind it to that 20th point. It actually has two abilities that sacrifices itself, but never has enough MP to cast one of them, so it always fails. The other costs no MP and does 80% damage it itself and an enemy, so if it’s been damaged at all in battle, it runs the very real risk of killing itself.

Once the Bomb Baby reaches 20 Intelligence, players won’t have to worry about it deciding randomly to commit suicide any more. This makes reaching Papas’ treasure a lot easier to manage. And what a treasure it is. Papas bequeaths his son a letter explaining what really happened to his mother. Instead of dying during childbirth as the game seems to indicate at the start, Tyger’s mother was kidnapped by an evil being who wants to use her power to further his own goals. Papas also left behind a sword, the legendary Zenithian Sword, a weapon that may only be equipped by the Legendary Hero. Legend has it that, when the world is in dire need, the Legendary Hero will be born to defend it. The Legendary Hero is the only person capable of equipping Zenithian gear including the sword that Papas found. Sadly, he had yet to find a person who could use the sword. But then, he never thought to let his own son try. Logically, it’s worth a shot. I mean, such is the life of a Hero, right?

In a shocking twist, Dragon Quest V‘s main character is not actually a Hero. Way back in Dragon Quest III, it showed that Hero was technically a class and not just the birthright of the main character (even though in that game, it actually was the birthright of the main character). This game takes that notion to its logical conclusion by asking the player to follow a character that has a special lineage but not the correct special lineage. Tyger cannot equip the Zenithian Sword, so unfortunately it needs to go into storage. And so the group heads east to Reinhart, where Henry finally decides to convince the guard there to let them through. Unfortunately, the castle is inaccessible during the night, and during the day there’s no way to actually get through to talk to anyone important. That said, players can observe that there looks like a cave entrance beneath the castle during the night, so once they can cross the bridge again during the day, they can use the cave to sneak into the castle.

Dale is overjoyed to find that his brother’s alive, but something rotten has taken hold in Reinhart in the ten years that Henry’s been gone. The former king of Reinhart died not long after Henry vanished and Dale was put on the throne instead, and the kingdom of Reinhart sacked Santa Rosa, using the disappearance of Henry as an excuse. Fortunately, the series staple Mirror of Ra exists, hidden away in a tower that’s sealed by a mysterious power that apparently only Marina can open. While going through the dungeon beneath the castle, Henry and Tyger find the Queen locked away, but this surprises Dale when he finds out because his mother’s been in the castle this whole time. It turns out that an evil creature has been pretending to be Dale’s mother, while his real mother languishes in a secret prison cell, repentant for her actions from ten years ago, and the Mirror of Ra is legendary, both in the game’s world and the series itself, for reflecting the truth of a situation.

I don’t really feel inclined to forgive her because Tyger lost ten years of his life to being a slave. His childhood is gone forever, he can’t get those years back. His father also got caught up in the plot and paid with his life. The Queen essentially is responsible for the murder of Papas as well as the enslavement of Tyger and Henry and the theft of the throne. Also, I know Dale’s on the throne now and so his mother’s not the Queen any more but I still call her the Queen since that’s what she was ten years prior. I know she got imprisoned and replaced, but I highly doubt that she’s paid in full for her crimes yet. I don’t even think it’s realistic to assume that she lost ten years of her life as well.

At this point, it’s only about ten hours into the game, five hours after making it out of the evil temple, but Henry’s already leaving the party. He doesn’t want the throne back, even as Dale begs him to take it, but instead he wants to help advise Dale to be a better king. He doesn’t hold Dale responsible for what happened, as well he shouldn’t because Dale is just as much a victim as Henry.

One of the good things about this game is that when Henry leaves the party, he gives you back all the stuff he was carrying. Or rather, it goes into the game’s storage system. The system exists so that players can manage all of the key items that eventually accumulates and clogs up inventories. Even though Squaresoft was experimenting with giving players more inventory space at that point in the development of the Final Fantasy series, Enix was far less generous, and in some ways they still are. Even in the recently released Dragon Quest XI, Medicinal Herbs take up one spot each in a character’s inventory, which means they somehow take up the same amount of space as a sword or a piece of armour. Dragon Quest V doesn’t even have the advantage of having a bag to store excess items in!

That said, throughout most of the game, I did not want for money. After making it out of childhood, I tended to have more than enough gold pieces to keep up with equipment for Tyger and Henry, then Tyger and Bianca, then Tyger and his children, and even had money for my sabrecat’s occasional upgrades. I think what the game means for players to do is upgrade all eight party members (the humans plus all of their monster allies, since there can be up to eight characters at a time in the wagon), but just like with other RPGs, I rarely swap my party around, other than when my human party members come and go, or when one of my monsters hits their level cap and stops improving. The Bomb Baby that carried me through the first ten or so hours of freedom after being sold as a slave ended up peaking early at level 15 upon which it stopped gaining levels entirely and was the one sent into storage to make room for my wife when I finally got married.

It can be very tempting to stop sending monsters into storage to make room for new ones that join, especially since the limited inventory space means that if players aren’t selling older weapons and armour, they’re shuffling them around between monsters every time an upgrade is found or bought. How I play the SNES version of the game is that I hang on to most of my gear, thinking that I might come across a monster in my travels that can equip it, so even a Pot Lid gets held onto, until a monster comes along that I know for a fact is so much better than what I have already in my group and I really should make space for it. Then an older monster gets sent away along with everything they’re carrying. Most of the time, though, I find myself dismissing monsters when my party is full, so I didn’t recruit everyone I possibly can. This also keeps relatively weak monsters in my party, not that it really matters since my human characters are usually strong enough that they don’t need help.

Once Reinhart is saved, ships start arriving at the nearby port again, so Tyger can finally sail off to other lands. The next part of his journey involves clearing out a lighthouse of monsters. Or does it? Yeah, there’s an NPC that pulls the player’s leg and tricks them into thinking there’s a quest there. The real next quest involves saving the village of Kabochi from a monster that attacks at night. Its home is in a nearby cave and so Tyger goes to rid the world of a vicious enemy, but as the fierce adult sabrecat advances towards Tyger, he sniffs at the ribbon Tyger’s carrying, the one that used to be tied to his tail, and recognizes the scent of Bianca, still clinging to the piece of material after a decade. The sabrecat also recognizes Tyger and is more than willing to join the party, especially since now he has 21 Intelligence and will finally follow all of Tyger’s commands.

Unfortunately, this doesn’t sit right with the people of Kabochi, who have decided that Tyger is a grifter scamming them out of the reward money. They don’t give him a chance to explain the extraordinary circumstances he and the village find themselves in, they give him the money and kick him out. Even though he’s solved their problem and by sheer coincidence he knew the sabrecat, he’s made an enemy of the village and is no longer welcome there.

This is something that rarely comes up in RPGs. Most of the time, the player is meant to feel like the hero of the entire world, everything they do ends in success (or most of what they do, anyway) and eventually the whole world practically worships them. Granted, it’s usually a much more compelling narrative for a character to be brought low every once in a while, but some games simply don’t want to do that. Here’s a boss, kill the boss. Here’s another boss, kill that boss. Some games break that pattern a little, and then there’s Dragon Quest V. Up to this point in the game, Tyger loses his mother (although not in the manner the game initially suggests), sees his father die, is sold into slavery for ten years, returns to his home village only to see it destroyed, finds out that he’s not the Legendary Hero the world is in desperate need of, and the first thing he does when he finally leaves his home continent is anger a village he’s trying to save, burning a bridge behind him that he doesn’t intend to burn. Is this truly the life that a Hero is supposed to live? He’s not even a Hero, for crying out loud!

He has a bit more success resurrecting a spell known as Return. The spell allows players to return to places they’ve visited before, and it might’ve come in handy during the ten years he spent as a slave, although when Tyger returns to the temple later in the game, he finds that both Outside and Return don’t work there anyway, so it wouldn’t have made a difference whether the spell existed or not. Armed with this spell, the game blocks off the next part of the quest until Tyger actually uses the Return spell to go back to Reinhart. It turns out that Henry and Marina are married and are nagging Tyger to find a wife and settle down.

Which is exactly what the next part of Tyger’s quest entails. A rich man named Master Ludman is looking to marry his daughter Flora off to a brave adventurer, so he offers two tests: the winning adventurer must be strong and brave enough to retrieve two rings from two separate dungeons. A fire cave contains a ring of fire and a water cave contains a ring of water. These two opposite elemental rings must both be returned, I guess by the same person, so that they will have proven themselves worthy, except that the ring of fire is the only one freely accessible to all. Once someone returns the ring of fire, Ludman lends them the use of his ship to retrieve the ring of water, This means that whoever brings back the ring of fire is the only person who is even capable of finishing Ludman’s requirements, and presumably if they fail, Ludman would have to have the ring of fire returned to the fire cave so that others may try. It’s like how, after the Kentucky Derby is run, only one horse is capable of winning the Triple Crown that year, and if another horse manages to win the Preakness or Belmont, the Triple Crown does not get awarded at all.

Of course, this is assuming there’s only one fire ring. Maybe there are others, since there’s at least one NPC in the water cave looking for the ring there, and if he doesn’t have the fire ring, this might turn into a Triple Crown scenario where two people each have one ring and Ludman might not be able to offer them Flora’s hand in marriage? The game doesn’t go into what happens if there’s a tie somehow.

Ludman also is willing to throw in a shield that’s been passed down through the family for generations as Flora’s dowry, but Flora rightly protests, saying that she should marry for love, not just marry whoever wins Ludman’s competition. Ideally, players might not want to just take Flora’s hand in marriage and may assume that this is going to end with Tyger going his merry way with a shield and no wife, for if Tyger talks to all the NPCs while in the middle of this part of the story, he meets an NPC named Andy, one who grew up with Flora and who has feelings for her. Presumably she has feelings for him, too. There’s no way the game would force Flora to marry Tyger, right?

After finding the fire ring, Tyger sets off to find the water ring, but the way is blocked by a gate. If there’s one thing the Dragon Quest series really likes, it’s putting gates across rivers. So he goes to the nearby village to find out what he must do to unlock the gate. Perhaps the developers wanted to show mercy on the player and not drag out this part of the plot for too long because at the nearby nameless village, Tyger and Bianca reunite, and Bianca can unlock the gate without requiring a two hour side quest to prove his worth. If anything, defeating the ghosts ten years prior already proved his worth.

Bianca is unfortunately at the same level as she was when she last adventured with Tyger, but enemies give enough experience that she’s able to catch up pretty quickly. She also finds herself very reluctant to see Tyger married off to someone he barely knows, but for the sake of the world is willing to let him go, and is so hesitant to ruin his quest that she even decides not to tell him how she feels about him.

Flora knows, though. Whether because she’s desperate to get out of her father’s deal or because she truly cares about Tyger and Bianca’s happiness, I don’t know, but she manages to convince her father to let Tyger decide who he is to marry, herself or his childhood friend.

This is where most players might assume there’s a “But Thou Must” decision coming up, given the series reputation for such decisions in the past. But what could that choice be? Is Tyger truly meant to marry Flora so that he can receive the Zenithian Shield and therefore be one step closer to fulfilling the game’s main quest line? If he doesn’t get the Shield, he may never be able to actually find the man worthy of using the Zenithian gear, and what with evil increasing by the day, he may be dooming the world. Does the game mean for Tyger to marry Bianca? The game goes to great lengths to show Bianca grappling with the notion that she’s in love with Tyger, and includes an NPC who has a similar relationship with Flora as Tyger and Bianca have in order to show that Flora will be alright in the end.

It turns out that this is truly the player’s choice. The game is set up so that both answers are the correct answer. Tyger can choose to marry Flora, or he can choose his childhood sweetheart Bianca, and the story will continue either way. In fact, with how the game’s story is structured, having Tyger and Bianca meet up when they’re young and go on a quest together, then reunite when they’re older and after Tyger’s been presumed dead for a number of years and after his father’s killed, the actual “correct” answer is to marry Bianca. It makes the most narrative sense.

Come to think of it, The Lion King didn’t rip off Kimba The White Lion at all. It ripped off Dragon Quest V. The Lion Guard even gave Simba and Nala a son to go with the daughter they already had in Simba’s Pride, so I should’ve named the main character Simba and his son and daughter Kion and Kiara. Maybe I’ll remember for next time.

 

Bianca’s Story

Master Ludman doesn’t seem bothered that his plan to marry his daughter off has ended in failure. Instead of dwelling on it, he gives Tyger the Zenithian Shield. Presumably, Tyger needs it more than Flora does. He also receives Ludman’s ship in order to make his way all throughout the world on his quest to find the Legendary Hero, defeat evil and find his mother. Now he has a wife to take with him, too.

However, the ship is trapped in a small ocean due to how the world is designed. The developers made sure that there’s a very limited area that players have to work with at any particular period of time. That way players don’t get lost looking for their next objective and are prevented from doing things out of order. Certain features of the geography keep players from breaking the game’s pacing by freely exploring before it’s really time to do so, and so the game feels like it’s paced very well. Case in point, when players receive Ludman’s ship to go get the ring of water, the waters they sail in are framed by rocks, so that even though the navigable land doesn’t encircle the water completely, players can’t get out and go elsewhere. The rocks also prevent players earlier in the game from venturing too far away from other objectives while exploring the continent on land.

This design philosophy also makes its way into how the dungeons are designed. Perhaps because of the greater capabilities of the Super Famicon and SNES, the developers were able to do things with dungeons that they weren’t able to do on the Famicom and NES. There’s one dungeon later in the game where players have to navigate by manipulating rails in order to direct minecarts around, for example. Not every dungeon is a puzzle, either. Some just make navigating through them a lot more engaging just by how good they look. If you remember finding the underground castle in Dragon Quest IV, nearly every dungeon in Dragon Quest V feels as grand as that.

In order to escape the completely closed off body of water, Tyger must Return to Port Selmi, for somehow Ludman has transported his ship there for Tyger to use. From there, he has access to an island where the game’s Small Medals can be traded for items, as well as a desert island where the Zenithian Helmet is kept. At this point, unless players don’t check every pot, drawer, chest and so on, they should have enough for the Sword of Miracles, a weapon that heals players for about 25% of the HP it deals out in damage. Hit an enemy for 100 HP damage, it’ll heal its wielder by 25. This is a very valuable sword to have, since it can substitute for a Heal spell and therefore save a bit of MP. It’s also much stronger than the Bladed Boomerang, which many players would likely still have equipped on their main character and which Tyger did have equipped before swapping it out for this sword. In fact, this sword actually can last for the rest of the game.

The Zenithian Helmet is unfortunately not available for just anyone to acquire. It’s guarded by Queen Isis, who is only willing to give the helmet out to whoever is able to actually equip it. That said, the queen is able to sense a power in Tyger she’s not sensed before and she offers him the chance to wear it and see what happens. Is this when the game finally allows Tyger to meet his destiny and take up the Zenithian equipment in order to save his mother?

Nope. The helmet reacts negatively to him like the sword once did. It’s a little disappointing but no matter. The helmet is left behind and Bianca and Tyger go on their way. Isis does tell them before they go that there’s a land called Granvania, where a king named Papas once lived, and that the tale of Papas taking his son with him to find his kidnapped wife sounds pretty much the same as Tyger’s tale of the murder of his father and the search for his kidnapped mother. So Bianca and Tyger go in search of the kingdom of Granvania, which is on the other side of a steep and treacherous mountain range, but the pair of adventurers are up to the challenge.

Or they think they are. Bianca collapses in a mountain village about halfway across. After resting, she claims she can continue, so the pair resume their journey. They manage to make it through the mountains and into Granvania, where once more Bianca collapses. It’s revealed that not only is Bianca not in a condition to travel, she is very much pregnant. Having seen pregnant women before, I have to say, either the equipment she can wear is very good at hiding pregnancy, or she had to have been carrying a decent amount of weight already in order to not know that the sex she and Tyger have been having bore fruit. Big girls do need love too, and there’s certainly nothing wrong with being a chubby chaser.

The current king of Granvania is more than willing to step aside for Tyger to take the throne, which is a refreshing change from people throwing a fit and refusing to relinquish control to their successor. I guess in this case, video games trump reality. However, the kingdom’s chancellor wants nothing to do with it and does his best to put roadblocks in the way. I wonder what it is about Yuji Horii and chancellors.

Sorry, just thinking ahead for a moment. Pay it no mind.

Tyger easily fulfills the chancellor’s conditions for taking the throne, much to the chancellor’s dismay, and he returns in time to witness the birth of his twin children, a son and a daughter. Given that I have a very shallow well of names I like to draw from when naming characters, I gave my son the name Rusty and my daughter the name Sara. But that night, after King Ojiron throws a party and announces Tyger as the new king of Granvania, effective immediately, everyone’s been put to sleep with a potion and Bianca’s been kidnapped by monsters. The chancellor is also missing, how suspicious.

Rusty and Sara have been hidden away, so with his children safe, Tyger ventures out to search for his kidnapped wife. Players who enjoyed Dragon Quest IV probably remember the special flying shoes that Ragnar could use to reach an otherwise inaccessible tower. Tyger finds similar shoes as he goes out in search of Bianca, so he uses them to cross a lake and enter a tower where powerful enemies lurk. He also can’t use Outside to escape, so by the time he finally reaches the two bosses of the tower, the fights are a bit harrowing. Still, the Sword of Miracles helps him pull off one of his own and he makes it to where one of his father’s murderers are keeping Bianca. But it’s a trap, and the final boss of the tower, Centarsus is planning on killing Tyger and disguising himself as the chancellor. Centarsus is one of the monsters who killed Tyger’s father, so things are very personal for him, despite how depleted he is. Still, the Sword of Miracles comes through and one of his father’s killers is lying defeated on the ground, a mortal wound soon to claim his life.

At this point in the game, the monsters whom Tyger has recruited can also be the difference between life and death. His sabrecat is a valuable and strong ally, with the ability to use a turn to increase his attack power. This is also where an ordinary slime might have its time to shine. Slimes learn a very limited amount of spells, but they learn some of the most important ones. Increase buffs the party’s defense and can be stacked up to two times, it’s like a full party but half power Upper. Bosses that use physical attacks are much less of a threat and therefore the party doesn’t need to heal as much. Slimes also learn the spell Vivify, but…

Okay, I know I probably harp on about Vivify too much every time I talk about Dragon Quest, but it really is the worst spell in the series. If a character is lying on the floor and needs to be brought back to life, you really can’t count on Vivify coming through in a pinch. The spell typically is understood to have a 50% chance of success, which is the percentage usually given when a game’s manual is willing to divulge it. Whenever it’s not, it always feels as if that chance is far lower than 50%. There’s nothing like using the spell to try to resurrect someone, only for it to fail so often that players have to quit the dungeon and return to town in order to replenish their MP and either try again to bring them back or give up and pay the money to revive their companion at the church. During my playthrough of the game, it got to the point where, I used up all my MP trying to get my other two party members back, but fortunately had Farewell at that point, which uses up all the rest of the character’s MP no matter how much they have and kills him, but brings back their companions as a result. One of their companions had the much more reliable and powerful Revive spell, so if I had known that the game was going to give me the middle finger whenever I tried to use Vivify, I would’ve just saved myself a lot of time and used Farewell a lot sooner.

I don’t think I ever got Vivify to the point where it felt like it had a 50% success rate. It honestly felt like it had a 5% success rate.

Anyway, after defeating the third and final boss of the tower, Tyger thinks he’s rescued Bianca, but Centarsus has noticed how radiant Bianca is. It turns out that she has the blood of the lineage of the Legendary Hero inside of her, and Centarsus sees an opportunity to stop the Hero from being born. Presumably, this means Flora has the same blood in her veins, since the game is able to continue even if you choose her. Before he dies, Centarsus has one final trick up his sleeve and he transforms Tyger and Bianca to stone before they can defend themselves.

I’m sorry, I truly am. Half of Bianca’s contribution to the story of Dragon Quest V seems to be getting incapacitated by pregnancy or being kidnapped or turning to stone…

If you recall back to the discussion from my Final Fantasy IV Retrospective, statues in the deepest part of a dungeon might as well be lost forever, their frozen victims never seen again. It’s roughly the equivalent of death, for even in a sturdier stone form, a body turned to stone will eventually begin to erode. It won’t happen right away, and a body might remain intact for decades, maybe centuries, but eventually something might happen to the statue that would render it no longer intact enough to bring its victim back without outright killing them. If a man is turned to stone and smashed to dust, it might as well count as being killed because that dust is not living long once it’s brought back to flesh and blood.

Bianca and Tyger may have caught a break, for looters have managed to make it through the tower and they see a pair of very lifelike statues they can sell. But rather than someone finding and rescuing them, Tyger ends up being sold for a couple thousand gold pieces and taken away to a very remote island, and Bianca’s fate is unknown, for the looters have their own special plans for her.

And yes, I do think this counts as a princess getting kidnapped and literally objectified.

 

Rusty & Sara’s Story

The years pass. Tyger The statue, for that’s all he’ll ever be again, is put in a place of prominence in the front yard of a wealthy married couple who have just given birth to their son, Gigo. The statue gets to bear witness to all the milestones that it won’t ever get to experience in Rusty and Sara’s lives. Gigo’s first steps, his first words, all the fun he has playing in the garden. Things seem to be looking up for the family until monsters arrive and kidnap the young child.

Gigo’s father blames the statue, and kicks it over in anger. There it lays as the seasons pass. Winter, spring, summer, autumn… snow covers it and then melts away as the sun warms and then bakes it and then eventually leaves of golden and fiery hues cover it before the snows come once more. An endless cycle of watching the world pass it by. Does it even remember it used to have a name, a life, a purpose?

One day, a group of adventurers, an older man and a pair of young twins arrive and when they express interest in the statue, the older and embittered owner of it just gives it to them. He doesn’t want to see it any more, for it’s a reminder of the son they lost. The girl holds up a unique staff and suddenly the statue remembers who it once was and returns to life. Tyger finds himself surrounded by not only a friend of his family, Papas’ friend Sancho, but his son and daughter as well! Rusty and Sara are now eight years old and presumably that’s old enough to go on a quest to save the world.

Sure enough, true to the foreshadowing from Centarsus, Rusty is the Legendary Hero, the one born to wield the Zenithian gear and save the world. Now that Rusty and Sara can join the party, Tyger is given the location of his mother’s birthplace, where he receives a magic carpet to fly into locations he might otherwise not have been unable to get to. The carpet can’t go any higher than a few feet off the ground, but can hover over water, so it’s perfect for navigating rivers. It’s also perfect for reaching the hidden cave in the mountains where Tyger can gain access to the Zenithian Castle where it came to rest in the bottom of a lake.

Hang on, Tyger’s taking his eight-year-old son and daughter around the world on a quest to save it, not giving them an opportunity to enjoy their childhood, risking his own life to find his wife and living with the very real possibility that he could orphan Rusty and Sara? He really did grow up just like his father.

When questing with Rusty and Sara, the twins start at level 5 but gain a lot of power very quickly, for enemies give out a lot of experience points at this point in the story. In just one hour, they gain over ten levels, and although those first few battles are a bit dangerous for them, eventually they reach the point where their defense is comparable to their father’s. One of Sara’s spells is also a lot more compatible to my style of play than it has any right to. If you didn’t realize Bikill (Oomph in later translations) can be a curative spell, then you’ve never cast it on someone equipped with the Sword of Miracles. Bianca gets the spell too, so at a point where the Sword of Miracles might be swapped out for another weapon by a more offensively-minded player, defensively-minded players can keep it equipped and use Bikill as a substitute for Healmore and maybe even Healall. An attack suddenly doing 200 damage instead of 100 means that Tyger gets healed for 50 points and the enemy usually goes down in one hit. Even grievous wounds may potentially be fully healed in this manner. That, coupled with the Staff of Benediction that’s obtained in the cave that leads to Zenithia, means that a lot more healing can be done with a lot less MP. The Staff of Benediction acts as a free cast of Healmore, and when given to Sara, it means she can buff her father’s attack, increasing his own ability to heal himself with the Sword of Miracles, then brandish the Staff of Benediction to heal for free whoever’s a little low on HP. This is one of the biggest reasons I’m convinced that the game’s balanced around the human characters and not around the recruitable monsters. There really is no way for the developers to know which monsters you’ve been able to recruit and which you didn’t, and so there’s only the guarantee that Tyger, Rusty and Sara are in the party on the way to Zenithia.

Much is revealed within the walls of the sunken Zenithian Castle. Although not revealed at the time of the previous game, it turns out that the castle floats in the sky thanks to a pair of orbs, one silver and one gold, whose magic held it aloft. The fairies were the source of those orbs, and the location of their village turns out to be somewhere players can fly to. With the Golden Orb having been destroyed by the evil general Gema, Tyger must pick up a new orb from the fairies. He visits the same hidden elf village he did from his childhood and Lady Powan grants him a special flute that will allow him to enter the hidden palace of the fairies in order to speak with the queen and acquire a new Golden Orb. Sadly, the fairies no longer possess the ability to make orbs with the power to levitate the Zenithian Castle. They can make an orb but not one with any kind of power. They do have some interesting paintings, though, ones that let you see a specific moment in time…

This part of the quest is one of the main reasons why Dragon Quest V is seen as one of the greatest games of all time, since its plot is so tightly woven. The quest to find a new orb could’ve just been another fetch quest, but instead it ties into several of the player’s own adventures early in the game. Tyger indebts himself to the elves so they help him not only find an orb, but recover the original. The orb itself falls from the sky and lands in the castle he and Bianca are ridding of ghosts at just the right time for them to pick it up, which suggests that the castle falls from the sky during Tyger’s childhood, and that the kidnapping of Martha is the very first event that kicks off the plot of the game.

And so when Tyger finds himself looking into the painting in the palace of the fairies and thinking back to his childhood, he suddenly finds himself back in Santa Rosa, much older. Although he can talk to his father, nothing he can say or do will prevent the tragedy of Papas’ death from taking place. Instead, he finds himself confronting a much younger version of Tyger, one carrying a brilliant golden orb around. The interaction from much earlier in the game makes a lot more sense now, for instead of giving back the original orb, an older and wiser Tyger gives back a fake orb so that it may instead be destroyed by Gema and the original returned to its rightful place in Zenithia. The time travel in Dragon Quest V is thus meant to be a predestination paradox, where Tyger closes the time loop by going back in time and performing the action that he remembers his older self doing, albeit with a bit more knowledge of the true significance of the moment he spent with his younger self.

Maybe he doesn’t need an adult after all.

With Zenithia in the sky once more, the next step is to restore the Zenithian Dragon’s power. There is a tower in the world that is only accessible after Zenithia is lifted from the lake and turned into an airship, where the power of the Zenithian Dragon is sealed away. It’s also where Tyger can get revenge on Gonz for his part in killing Papas, and then confront Gema, the boss of the tower.

Gema is an interesting exception to think about. Most bosses who leave characters alive after defeating them have somewhat of a weak reason to do so, if they have one at all. I’m going to bring up Maleficent from Kingdom Hearts III once more, and her notion that killing Sora isn’t worth the effort. If you are an evil being and you have the opportunity to kill someone who could stand in your way at a later time and that someone isn’t of immediate use to you, then you should kill them. Most of the time, when a boss is meant to come back again and again and even win a time or two, there’s a really flimsy reason behind why the boss doesn’t kill the hero. On the other hand, Final Fantasy IV has Golbez, who presumably is thrown for a loop when he realizes Cecil is his brother and thus can’t kill him during the one time when he could’ve easily gotten away with it. But as I said, Kingdom Hearts III has Maleficent, who didn’t have a reason to show herself to Sora at all and who didn’t even fight him. Her presence in the game is basically a reminder that her storyline is there playing out in the background while more important stuff happens.

Gades is a very good example of this concept both done right and wrong. Lufia & the Fortress of Doom uses the party’s first confrontation with him as a means to foreshadow Lufia’s secret identity, but Lufia II: Rise of the Sinistrals doesn’t give Gades a reason at all for leaving the party wiped out but alive at the end of their first battle. By the time of Lufia: The Legend Returns, Gades actually lets Wain and Seena live because Wain is apparently funny and entertaining.

Look. Villains. You do know these people are trying to stop you and your plan to take over/destroy the world, right? If I’m destined to stop you at some point in the future, you’re a fool if you decide to wait for me to get powerful enough to do so.

Getting back to Gema, I consider him an exception to the above rule because his purpose for keeping Tyger alive is so that the young boy can be forced into service as a slave to help build his temple. Gema could’ve deduced that the unique items Tyger is carrying at the time means that there’s something special about the boy, and also may have realized that Tyger, sharing some of Martha’s blood, has the potential to bring trouble to the forces of darkness, but I don’t think Gema has any way to foresee Tyger escaping and gaining the power he needs to defeat him.

With Gema’s defeat, Tyger has finally avenged the death of his father Papas. After acquiring the Dragon Orb, he’s able to restore the Zenithian Dragon from his powerless human disguise. The Dragon himself turns out to be the final method of transportation in the game, able to fly anywhere, even to the temple where Tyger was once a slave. The final piece of the Zenithian Armour is here as well as the statue of Bianca! In a tragic twist, Bianca cannot be restored by the staff that restored Tyger to life. Could it be that there’s a time limit when it comes to the reversal of long term status effects? Poor Bianca…

Somewhere deep in the temple is another tragedy. Joshua’s remains are found, where he was locked up in likely retaliation for aiding in the escape of three slaves. He basically gave up his own life in order to allow his sister to go free.

However, when Tyger defeats the temple’s high priest, Ivol, it looks like the world may be saved. Martha’s still missing, being held by Mildrath in the underworld, but the slaves (including Gigo) are free now, Papas’ death has been avenged and Tyger has also laid to rest his own personal plot threads, having shut down the temple he was a slave in for ten long years and bringing an end to an evil religious order worshiping a dark god from the underworld. Not only that, but Bianca returns to life once Ivol is gone, suggesting that maybe if there was a way Rusty and Sara could have picked up allies and found a way into the temple and killed Ivol, Tyger and Bianca might’ve been freed from their fate as statues without the need to go searching for them.

At this point, Tyger knows there’s one thing left for him to do, and that’s to go and rescue his mother. Although the world is saved and will likely forever be peaceful if he just stays put where he is and rule Granvania as its king, he knows there’s something he must do, both for his sake and for his father’s as well. Now that the Legendary Hero has been born, one which can enter the underworld, Tyger has to go and try to rescue Martha.

Rescuing her is no easy feat, but upon entering the underworld, Martha gifts her son a Sage’s Stone. Players should be familiar with this item from past games in the series: it’s a free party-wide healing item that can be used once per turn. At this point, Tyger and his family should have a lot of free healing. Mystic Armor is a piece of equipment that can be acquired with Small Medals, and by the time Tyger is able to go rescue Martha, he should have enough to afford it. It heals 30 HP per turn. That plus the Sword of Miracles means that his healing’s pretty much taken care of. My personal set-up had Tyger wearing both pieces of healing equipment, Rusty wielding the Staff of Benediction and Sara holding the Sage’s Stone. Very little outside of the final boss can do much to them, especially with Sara casting Bikill whenever she can, first on Tyger and then on Rusty. The Prayer Ring is also invaluable, giving Sara back some MP whenever she needs it. Thus their MP can be saved for unlucky mishaps, especially Rusty’s valuable Revive spell.

It is, however, not enough to save Martha, for as soon as Tyger finally finds her, Mildrath kills her. She is finally reunited with Papas, though, and thus she earns her own happy ending. But with no one left to hold Mildrath back, it’s up to Tyger and the rest of his living family to go put a stop to him once and for all.

And let me say, the final dungeon contains an interesting puzzle, one that actually makes players think. There’s a room with eight platforms that need to be moved around so that the entrance to the final boss’s room can be reached. Otherwise, the door is right above a pitfall that cannot be crossed.

Mildrath is also one of the toughest final bosses in the series to date. It’s no easy feat to defeat him, and it’s entirely possible to die even when level 40ish, which is where players will naturally find themselves upon reaching him. It takes liberal use of every piece of free healing in order to survive long enough to deal enough damage to kill him, and even then, he’ll heal himself up every so often, making it that much harder. Players need to learn his pattern, know when to do extra damage and when to play it safe, know when to reapply Bikill since he often removes all beneficial effects from the party, and when to take a break and heal up. But that said, it is possible to eventually defeat him once and for all, even through his healing and the massive damage he puts out.

The ending of the game is thus well earned as Tyger and his family are taken around the world by the Zenithian Dragon to talk to everyone they saved, as the series loves to have the characters do at the end of each game. Even Santa Rosa is shown to be restored back to what it once was, so Tyger can return to Granvania with the knowledge that he’s saved his home town. Martha and Papas look down upon their family, proud at what they’ve accomplished, and it’s even suggested that the Zenithian Castle has returned to its rightful place above the clouds. All is, as they say, right with the world.

That is, until next time. Unless next time is a prequel, in which case we can assume that the world remains peaceful forever.

Having been released in 1992, only two years into the life of the Super Famicon, Dragon Quest V is easily one of the best games to appear on the system. Whether it’s better than Final Fantasy IV or even Final Fantasy VI is a topic that fans may debate to this very day, but one thing is for certain: it’s easily the best Dragon Quest game to have released up to this point, leagues ahead of both the fourth and third games in the series.

And with how amazing this fifth entry in the series is, it’s a shame that not every game that was released after lived up to such lofty heights, but those are stories for another time.

 

 

Next time: The worst Final Fantasy of all time, or just the most misunderstood?