Dragon Quest Retrospective: The Dragon Quest V Multiverse

“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.” –from the Dragon Quest V Retrospective

But Thou Must is a trope that has come up multiple times in the Dragon Quest franchise.  It is, in fact, Princess Gwaelin in the very first game that gave the trope its name.  “But Thou Must” refers to a choice within a game where the player quickly realizes there is only one correct answer, despite supposedly having the freedom to pick the other.  Gwaelin asks if you love her and if you say you don’t, even if you have good reason to, she’ll say “But thou must!” and then repeat the question until you say yes, if only to shut her up.

There are other times in the series where players are given a dialogue choice, but the games only continue once the correct answer is chosen.

I don’t know how Dragon Quest V was promoted in Japan, but I can imagine there were more than a few players who were used to But Thou Must decisions and had come to expect them.  The game also goes to great lengths to drive home the notion that, when the main character of the game is going to get married, the correct answer is to marry Bianca.  It just makes the most narrative sense, so of course it’s the But Thou Must choice, right?

 

Flora/Nera’s Story

It turns out that if players deliberately choose the wrong answer to see what happens, the game lets them and keeps going.  Flora (retranslated as Nera in the DS version) is the daughter of Master Ludman and his plan is to marry her off to a strong, adventuring type of person.  Flora doesn’t want to, though.  She wants to marry for love, and there’s a character who has known her since his own childhood.  As I mentioned in the Retrospective, this is another case of a side story whose characters’ adventure through life is similar to the main character’s, whom I named Tyger.  It’s interesting to see how Tyger’s life might’ve turned out if his situation had been different.  I don’t think that Bianca would’ve been married off in a similar manner, but seeing how Andy feels for Flora, it’s easy to see what Tyger lost by being enslaved for a decade.

The thing about choosing Flora is that it feels like Tyger is making a business transaction.  It’s like when Xanatos asks Fox to marry him in Gargoyles and he approaches it from a position of logic and not emotion, making it sound like another one of his famous Xanatos Gambits.  He even states that he’s sure they love each other as much as people like them are capable.

Choosing Flora is encouraged by Master Ludman since he’s offering the Zenithian Shield to go along with her, and Tyger’s quest is to gather these pieces of equipment so that when he finds the Legendary Hero, they can save the world and hopefully help him find his mother, a quest his father had been on when he was killed.  Before making the choice, Tyger has no reason to suspect that if he were to choose Bianca, he’ll still get the Shield.  It’s possible, then, that players might assume that choosing Flora is the actual correct choice, but if that’s the case, Tyger doesn’t know her from Adam (doesn’t know her from Eve, I guess?) and has absolutely no history with her.  He probably already knows all of Bianca’s embarrassing secrets, and she knows all of his.  If he were to marry Flora and then travel the world with her, both she and Tyger would be finding out new things about each other and maybe experiencing a kind of buyer’s remorse regarding the wedding.

But in this alternate universe, Tyger chooses Flora, thinking it’s the right thing to do in the world’s time of crisis.  He needs that Shield and Bianca has been encouraging him to do this, basically telling him that she’s willing to set aside her own happiness for the sake of the world.  I don’t like that Bianca loses out, for she’s clearly holding a torch for Tyger.  She even says, upon her reunion with him, that she always knew he was still alive somewhere.  The poor girl’s pining for him and he chooses Flora.

The story itself doesn’t change all that much from Bianca’s, and Flora goes through everything Bianca did.  The only real differences are a few stats, some spells, and the colour of Tyger’s offspring’s hair.  Apparently, both Bianca and Flora have dominant hair genes.

It doesn’t matter who Tyger picks, both will collapse twice on the way to his ancestral home, the kingdom of Granvania (renamed in the DS version as Gotha).  Both will end up giving birth in Granvania and both will be kidnapped right after the birth.

Both will also be turned to stone by the game’s villains.  It’s likely that, if you’re playing this game for the first time, you’ll probably choose Bianca to marry, not knowing how the story goes… which means that not only does choosing Flora turn the wedding into a business transaction, you already know what’s going to happen and are already aware that she’s going to be damseled later on in the game by being turned into a statue.  By the time you’re ready to choose Flora, you’ll be preparing her to be literally objectified.

I realize there are some players who do choose Flora first, but it just doesn’t feel like the correct answer the first time around, so I am well aware that I’m operating under the assumption that Flora will always be chosen second.

The biggest difference between choosing Bianca and choosing Flora comes in the DS version of the game.  With its party chat feature, players can interact with their new wives and they each have different personalities.  Bianca struck me as a humble, kind and generous character when I married her for my Retrospective.  That said, if you got her angry, she proved herself a woman of action, even as a young child when she and Tyger went and beat up some ghosts in order to save a kitten from being bullied.  Flora, meanwhile, benefits a lot more from the Party Chat feature, given how little history Tyger has with her up until the wedding.  Still, with how kind Flora also is, it doesn’t feel like there’s a lot of difference in the character you choose and it just depends on whether you think marrying her is the only way to save the world.

She only spends about three to five hours or so in the party, depending on how long it takes to go from marrying her to the birth of your twins, and then the rest of the game follows the same story as if you married Bianca.  You’re a nameless statue in a garden on an isolated island owned by a rich man, one who is more than happy to get rid of you after suffering misfortune.  Your son and daughter rescue you after eight years and then the three of you (plus your sabrecat in the DS version, which I imagine a large majority of players choose as their fourth; I’m making all the assumptions today!) attempt to restore Zenithia, find your wife (also a statue) and then descend into Nadiria since your son is the Legendary Hero.

It’s very possible the game believes in nurture and not nature because your son and daughter turn out the same no matter who their mother is.  It’s probably easier to write just one version of them rather than come up with several, especially when it comes to party chat.

Playing the game again with Flora as my wife drives home the notion that the game really is the most perfect of the main series Dragon Quest games that Chunsoft developed.  There seems to be a style to these five titles, where the world is perfectly crafted to serve the story.  These are games that don’t always follow the pattern I’ve seen in JRPGs where every town has a problem and so you have to go into a nearby dungeon to solve the problem.  Way back in Dragon Quest II, for example, the first part of the quest involves tracking down one of your cousins as he attempts to track you down.  This quest takes you to several castles and to only one dungeon before you finally meet up with him.

In Dragon Quest V, Tyger hears about a castle where the Zenithian Helmet happens to be, visits it and finds that the helmet is indeed there, but it is being closely guarded until the Legendary Hero shows up, since he’s the only one who can wear it.  Rather than give Tyger a problem to solve and reward him with the helmet, it’s free so long as the Legendary Hero arrives to claim it.  There are no problems to solve, there’s no trust to gain, it’s just a place someone can go and get a free helmet as long as he’s allowed by God.

Later on in the game, Tyger arrives at the palace of the fairies and instead of being given a test or something, some kind of dungeon to run, he’s just allowed to go back in time and swap orbs.  The game knows how to pace itself so that players will accomplish a lot more things in a shorter time frame.  If they’re lost and trying to find their way around – exploration and serendipity are something which the Dragon Quest series encourages – the overworld is enough of a dungeon by itself for them to level up a bit, they don’t need any extra dungeons on top of that.  If every single part of the plot required a dungeon to dive into, the game would either be another fifteen to twenty hours at the very least, or would be a lot less complex.

Ultimately, not a lot changes by accepting Flora as your bride.  But then, the fact that this is one of the earliest examples of choosing a party member to recruit, I can understand why the story wouldn’t change to a significant degree.  This is something that not a lot of people did at the time, so it makes sense to start small.  That, or maybe there might not have been enough space left on the cartridge for optional areas exclusive to one or the other bride.  I’m not sure, I’m just guessing.

The success of Dragon Quest V led to the creation of even more ambitious games from Enix, like Star Ocean and its sequels.  Perhaps that’s why the movie… no, I’m getting ahead of myself.  I have another alternate universe to visit first before I tackle the movie.

 

Debora’s Story

The DS version of the game, titled Dragon Quest V: Hand of the Heavenly Bride, tries to offer a bit more context to the player regarding Master Ludman’s daughter Flora.  Here renamed Nera, she’s first seen at the very start of the game, boarding the ship that Papas, renamed Pankraz, disembarks with his son.  Nera’s boarding with her father, renamed Rodrigo Briscoletti.  In this way, Tyger apparently meets Nera when they were very young, but this doesn’t help give the two any more of a history.  They just meet in passing, they don’t go on an adventure together like Tyger and Bianca do.

The DS version also gives players a third option, for in this version, Mr. Briscoletti has a second daughter, Debora.  Debora is pretty rough around the edges and is very dominant.  She knows what she wants and won’t accept any bullshit.  In fact, when Tyger’s about to choose whether to marry Bianca or Nera (by the way, Bianca’s the only one who hasn’t been renamed on the DS), Debora enters the room and basically orders Tyger to marry her.  She’s taken a fascination to this mysterious adventurer she knows nothing about and is eager to learn more.  What better way to find out than to marry him?

And so she stands there, wild of hair and strong of spirit and Tyger must’ve been charmed by her attitude because he chooses her!  Everyone in town has told him he’d be crazy to do so, but the whole quest to track down a Legendary Hero is crazy, right?  Why not bring someone like Debora along with him?  She seems eager to see the world with someone like him at her side.

She’d better be prepared to learn the ropes of adventuring very quickly.  While playing the game again on the DS, I’ve been left with the impression that it’s much more difficult to complete, possibly to offset the increase of party members from three in the original version to four on the DS.  I’ve been getting the impression that enemies hit harder, but it’s possible that I’ve also been rushing through the game since I already know where to go, having played with both Bianca and Nera as my wives.  This is exactly why players who are familiar with Final Fantasy will often have to grind a bit outside Elfheim.  You’re not supposed to go directly there, you’re supposed to explore first so that by the time you reach Elfheim, the enemies there don’t slaughter you.

So how does Debora’s character differ from Nera and Bianca?  She’s much more dominant and assertive, telling Tyger, “I don’t take kindly to being told what to do.  That’s my job.”  She basically wants a man to boss around.

It’s going to piss her off so much when she gets turned to stone.

The DS version also comes with a brand new casino game called Treasures and Trapdoors, or “T ‘n’ T” for short, and is played by exchanging a ticket for a chance at great prizes.  If you can get to the end of the board and land precisely on the Finish square within a specific number of turns, you get some pretty good prizes, depending on the board.  These prizes are awarded only once, so after you beat one of the T ‘n’ T boards, there’s no real point in playing it again unless you want any of the other random prizes or gold that can be won on various squares.

Of course T ‘n’ T wouldn’t be a casino game without some aspect of gambling.  There are squares on the board that will reduce your gold if you land on them and there’s even one that can add or subtract a point from one of your stats, depending on the roll of a die.  The number of tickets that can be found in the world are finite, but not only did I keep on winning extra tickets on the third board, there’s a free pass available late in the game that lets you play T ‘n’ T forever.  I’m fully prepared to say that it’s very possible, but time consuming, to farm for extra stat points this way.  All you have to do is reset the game if you lose a stat point instead of gain it.  It may be faster than farming seeds in the long run, considering their super low drop rate.

I’ve found, when playing the DS version, Tyger’s movement speed is faster than in the SNES version (I say SNES version, but I really mean Super Famicom), which really helps when getting around dungeons and towns.  Speaking of dungeons, I appreciate how more modern design aesthetics have been brought into the DS remakes.  On the SNES, the series was still using the idea of exploring dungeons in small chunks, separating a labyrinth into a series of rooms, so to speak.  Transitioning from one “room” to the next brought with it an increased chance of an encounter on that particular step.  The DS version redesigns these so that there are far less screen transitions from one part of the dungeon to the next, often times showing the entire floor of the dungeon at once, making it a lot easier to navigate.  A few times, the game even joins together the multiple floors of a dungeon into one room that loads all at once, allowing players to speedily go up and down a tower at ease.  This makes finding Dr. Agon’s dragon essence a lot easier than in the SNES version.

Just like with Nera, Debora’s story doesn’t last for very long.  She follows the same basic plot as the other two brides, mostly because the story is set in stone (ha!) and must be followed in a specific manner.  I do wonder if it’s possible that events could’ve been changed a little depending on who Tyger chooses, but I guess that’s not how the developers wanted to make their game.  So even though Debora is much more headstrong and demanding of her husband than Nera or Bianca are, she’ll still find herself pregnant with Tyger’s twins and experience the same fainting spells that the other two brides do.  She still gives birth to twins and apparently her attitude doesn’t rub off on Rusty or Sara since they’re the same as they are in the other two alternate timelines.  She’s still turned into a stone statue and lost for a decade, and Tyger desperately wants to find her.  Despite that he has the least amount of personal history with her and spontaneously decides to marry her when he’s supposed to decide between Nera and Bianca, I guess they get to know each other on the road and neither of them experience regret at rushing into marriage after not even so much as a first date.  And clearly they have sex, since Rusty and Sara still get born.  I wonder how much of that is Tyger’s doing and how much of that is Debora.  She does act like she wears the pants in their relationship, and presumably that extends towards sex, too.

It’s just a figure of speech, of course they wouldn’t be wearing pants during sex.

Another way in which the game forces the narrative to be exactly the same is that no matter who Tyger chooses to marry, they’re an orphan who was taken in by their father and raised as if they were his own daughter.  Nera and Debora are truly sisters, both taken in at the same time by Mr. Briscoletti, and the game doesn’t say whether Bianca could be related to them or not.  Still, the heritage of the three brides, when combined with Tyger’s own unique heritage, will form the Legendary Hero no matter which of them he chooses.  It’s almost like whatever mysterious forces guide the world of Dragon Quest made sure to seed the world with several contingency plans for defeating the darkness of Nadiria.

It doesn’t feel quite like a business transaction when choosing Debora, since marrying her isn’t even an option being offered by Mr. Briscoletti, but you can ask it of him anyway.  His main goal is to get Nera married off, but he’s very easy going and is willing to allow for Tyger to marry whoever his heart desires.  I guess if he doesn’t choose Nera, that’s proof enough that it’s his heart and not his head talking, since choosing Nera is presented as an opportunity to save the world with the Zenithian Helm, and choosing anyone else could be seen as choosing true love instead of giving up his happiness for the good of the world.

That may be one of the reasons why Debora doesn’t try to force him to give up his quest.  I’ve heard of wives forcing their husbands to stop going to their favourite sports bar and seeing their friends, but Debora seems to look forward to getting out of Mostroferrato and seeing the world.  That, and I guess she sees the value in saving the world from those that would seek to destroy it.

It’s also pretty interesting that the game makes Debora the most physically-focused fighter of the brides.  I think because of that and what she says to Tyger over the course of the adventure, the game is trying to make it feel like she’s one of those housewives with a nasty expression gained by sucking lemons, her hair in curlers, perpetually wearing a green facial mask and swinging a rolling pin around. However, if she were truly like that, she wouldn’t just decide to go with Tyger on his quest to save the world.

The truth is, she’s very intrigued by Tyger because she knows nothing about him other than he’s a strong adventurer.  She says she doesn’t want to marry a good for nothing layabout, and although she claims this is just because she wants him to be her slave, I think she actually finds herself attracted to him and is using aggression to mask her true feelings.  If she was as aggressive as she claims, valuing complete obedience over everything else, she either would’ve made him stay home with her, or she would’ve made all the travel decisions.  Instead, she’s bossy up to the point where she makes sure Tyger pampers her, but she still follows him to the ends of the earth.  She even tells him it’s her dream to travel the world, but then she lets him choose the destination.  I do refuse to believe that she has a bigger heart than Bianca, but I think she still has a really big heart.

I can’t help but use Cruella de Vil from Dodie Smith’s novel The Hundred and One Dalmatians as a comparison.  Cruella is just as over the top in her personality, but whereas Debora pretends to be the kind of housewife I outlined above, Cruella really does look like she sucks on lemons, if the illustrations by Michael Dooling are anything to go by.  She’s a devil woman who has complete and utter dominance over her husband, even forcing him to take her last name.  Debora, on the other hand, doesn’t make that demand of Tyger.  In fact, even if she were to insist on keeping her last name, I’m willing to bet she would hyphenate, adding Tyger’s last name to her own.

For the player, the biggest appeal to marrying Debora is for the comedic lines she’s given.  As opposed to the more traditional wives that Nera and Bianca become, Debora is still very much her own person, and the party chat feature really reflects that.  It’s a shame that the story progresses like it does.  I would’ve loved to have played through an entire game full of Debora one liners.

Alas, it doesn’t take long to sail south from Mostroferrato, find out the Zenithian Helm doesn’t fit Tyger, set off for Gotha, cross the mountains, give birth to twins and get kidnapped thanks to an evil chancellor.  As I’ve already stated, the game doesn’t have a lot of padding.  There are dungeons scattered around the world, but Chunsoft really resisted the urge to pump the game full of them.

It’s too bad that Chunsoft would stop developing games in the main Dragon Quest series after this.  It would’ve been interesting to see how the series would’ve continue to develop with them at the helm.  The stories they could’ve told would’ve been amazing.

But speaking of, there is one more story to be told in the world of Dragon Quest V.

 

Your Story

“That’s how it happens to be this time around.”
“This time?”

In 2019, Netflix of Japan debuted a film titled Dragon Quest: Your Story, and it was uploaded internationally in early 2020.  Based on the story of Dragon Quest V, Your Story tells the tale of Luca Gotha, the main character of the game which I have been referring to as Tyger throughout both this article and the original Retrospective from earlier this month.

Fair warning, this is going to talk about the entire movie, as a means of comparing it to the way the original game plays out, and will contain details which will count as major spoilers.  Even if you already know the game, you still need this spoiler warning and no, at this point in the article, I won’t explain why.  I fear that even putting a spoiler warning up might count as a spoiler, since if you’re familiar with the game but haven’t seen the movie, now you’ll be expecting something to be different.  But if I don’t put a spoiler warning, then when you do get to the spoiler, you’ll wish I had warned you.

The movie opens with a short compilation of in game scenes from the original SNES release, then transitions to 3D as it continues to present key scenes from Luca’s childhood prior to his enslavement in sort of a montage manner.  The major events all happen, like Prince Harry’s kidnapping and the rescue of Purrcy the sabrecat (I’ve always felt like Purrcy was the worst of all the names I could choose for him) but smaller details like how Harry’s kidnapping take place are altered in order to speed things up.

The movie opts to condense the story quite a bit in order to try to deliver a more cinematic experience.  Dr. Agon, a character that doesn’t appear until later in the game, shows up to aid Harry and Luca as soon as they escape slavery.  He also doesn’t sound like Ned Flanders in this version, which I am eternally grateful for.  Luca parts ways with Harry at the gates to Coburg rather than traveling into the kingdom with him to solve the problem with the false queen.  Instead of finding his father’s diary in his hometown’s cave, Luca finds it in a hidden room at his old house and also runs into his father’s friend Sancho there.  Both Pankraz and Sancho are convinced that Luca is the Legendary Hero who can wield the Zenithian Sword, but those of us who have played the game know better.

It feels a bit like the movie is only made for fans of the game.  Luca’s reunion with Purrcy won’t mean anything to a casual viewer since they won’t realize the two ever got separated, and that’s just for example.  Prince Harry is a major character in the game and his story arc is masterfully presented there, but he’s barely in the movie.  The way I see it, the movie has two things it could’ve done with Harry.  It could’ve made him Luca’s constant human companion so that his presence in the film wouldn’t be a waste of time.  Or, it could’ve cut him out entirely and made for a little bit more of an efficient film.  For how rushed it already feels, wasting a bit of that time on saying goodbye to Harry at the gate of Coburg is unnecessary fan service.

Eventually, Luca arrives in Mostroferrato and finds himself reunited with his childhood friend… Nera.  It’s almost like she’s supposed to fill in for both herself and Bianca in the movie, if not for the fact that Bianca also shows up.  Bjørn the Behemoose fills in for the trial of the two rings, and Bianca helps Luca defeat him.  Defeat here means friendship, and Bjørn pledges his loyalty to the hero.

The defeat of Bjørn also wins Luca the hand of Nera in marriage.  The movie makes such a big deal of Nera being a friend from Luca’s youth and someone who he shares a significant bond with, as if to help give context to his impending wedding to her  Bianca even helps him with his marriage proposal.  However, it is revealed to Luca due to a magic potion that his future is with Bianca and not Nera, so he breaks his engagement with the one and proposes to the other.

The movie continues with Bianca giving birth to their son Alis (their daughter is conspicuously absent) and Luca choosing to continue his quest in order to make the world safe for his son.  No sooner does he decide this when Luca’s enemies attack Whealbrook, take Bianca and turn Luca to stone.

It turns out that Bianca is Zenithian and can help Ladja open the gate, but she proves too combative and is also turned to stone.

Rather than being sold, Luca is left at the site of his transformation and the years pass.  Eventually, Alis finds a staff that has the power to reverse petrification and rescues his father.  Alis arms himself with the Zenithian Sword and he and Luca go to visit Dr. Agon in order to find the Zenithian Dragon.  Surprise, Dr. Agon is the Zenithian Dragon!  However, the orb that he needs in order to turn back was destroyed by Ladja eight years prior.  In other words, the movie combines the Dragon Orb and Golden Orb, and removes Zenithia entirely.

Many aspects of the film are glossed over in order to limit its run time.  I worry that this means the only ones who can appreciate the film are fans of the game.  Certain iconic scenes are still shown, but a lot of the game is left on the cutting room floor in order to make room for those scenes in the movie.

Eventually, the final battle happens and just when it looks like the forces of good have won, time suddenly stops and a computer virus arrives.  Instead of Nimzo, package contained Nimda.  Would not buy again.

Now that the virus posing as Nimzo’s active, he starts deleting everything and reveals to the hero the truth of the world.  Everything’s just a game, and it’s time for Luca to return to reality.  It turns out that the main character is a human who is playing the Dragon Quest Experience, an AI version of Dragon Quest V, his memories temporarily suppressed in order to fully experience the story as the main character.

Not only that, but Gootrude, the slime who accompanies Luca on his quest is actually an antivirus program.  Luca tells the virus that the Dragon Quest games may only be software, but that doesn’t make them any less real and he defeats it with his newly acquired Antiviral Sword, which takes the form of Erdrick’s sword from the original trilogy.

After the final battle, and with everything restored, Luca realizes that the game is about to end and he’ll have to leave everything behind and return to the real world, but at least he’ll always remember everything that happened.

“Your Story” indeed.

The first time I watched this movie, I knew there was a big twist at the end that fans of the game did not approve of, but I’d suspected it was something simple like maybe Luca would turn out to be the Legendary Hero.  I was not expecting at all that the movie would turn out to be a Star Oceaning of Dragon Quest V.  The big plot twist of Star Ocean: Til The End of Time, revealed about 80% of the way through, is that it’s a video game.  I don’t know why, but it seems fitting that the Dragon Quest movie drinks from the same well, since this is what Square-Enix does now, I guess.  It’s not enough to simply make a new version of something, they feel like they have to alter the original story to a point where meta-narratives start to form.  Instead of being a faithful retelling of the original Dragon Quest V, this movie is actually about someone playing a virtual reality version of the game and doesn’t tell the viewer until the very end.

It could’ve been worse, it could’ve been the Final Fantasy VII remake, which deviates from the original history of the game and despite the presence of ghostly beings trying to repair the damage the remake inflicts upon the original story, the main characters are tricked into defeating these ghosts and it’s assumed that this means the next parts of the remake may deviate significantly from the original story.  It almost makes me wonder if the plot to the remake was written to deliberately trigger the fans who have been demanding such a game for years.

I don’t know if there’s a vocal group of fans who have been demanding a Dragon Quest movie based on the games, but judging by the ending of the movie, I wonder if the same thing is in play here, too.  The computer virus telling Luca to wake up to reality feels not only like the villain is speaking to him, but to the viewer as well.  He’s the most meta villain I’ve ever seen in a movie such as this and my attitude towards him is… well, I have nothing I can say other than a very, very crude “What the fuck?”  I mean, sure, the signs are there.  The movie does start out with the original SNES version of the game, includes very subtle clues that the story isn’t progressing in its original form, and yet it still feels like a broken promise, like we’re sold one thing and given another.

It makes me wonder how the final episode of the new version of Dragon Quest: The Adventure of Dai is going to turn out.  Dai is going to find himself suddenly on the Holodeck of the Enterprise, with Moriarty appearing to let him know he’s actually Wesley Crusher and he’s been trapped in the Dragon Quest holodeck program for a few days, but now he can escape back into reality.  This actually happens in a Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode where the crew of the space station are accidentally incorporated into a spy holonovel, complete with their original selves being temporarily overwritten and so Bashir can’t risk any of them dying until the problem is solved and all his friends are returned to normal.

There’s even an episode of The Adventure of Dai airing three weeks from now called “The Secret of Dai”.  I’m calling it now, Holodeck program.

I think the “you’re playing a video game” twist works better in an original story than it does in a movie that’s based on a game that doesn’t end with that kind of twist.  But then, I guess that’s the problem.  They can’t just leave well enough alone and tell the original story, they still have to somehow remind us that it’s a video game.

Your Story could’ve been the best video game movie of all time but instead it’s a bit too quickly paced (it’s what happens when you turn a SNES RPG into a movie with a run time under two hours, so I don’t blame them) and it deviates from the original story quite a bit at the very end.  Until the arrival of the computer virus turns it into an episode of a science fiction anthology series, the changes made to the plot help translate an interactive story into a non-interactive medium.  Even if it’s rushed in places, Your Story is ruthlessly efficient.  MacGuffins are combined and most of the dungeons are removed, but Luca’s childhood is barely shown, as is his time as a slave.  Many characters are removed and the movie actually presents the choice of brides in a manner I kind of like, but the ending reminds us that it’s just a game and if I wanted to watch someone else enjoy it, I’d watch a Let’s Play.