RPG Jamboree: Dragon Quest V: Hand of the Heavenly Bride (DS)
Dragon Quest V: Hand of the Heavenly Bride is the adventure of a lifetime in quite a literal sense. Beginning as a young child taking his first steps into heroism, tracking him in his adulthood as he seeks both love and answers, and finally following his family as they seek to save the world, it’s an adventure spread out over multiple periods in a man’s life and yet surprisingly simple at the same time. This remake of a role-playing game that hadn’t been released outside of Japan before does have some marks of its Super Nintendo origins, but in a funny way, it also feels like a game that has gone on a similar adventure of its hero, born on the Super Famicom, improved with a PlayStation 2 port, and finalized in this Nintendo DS remake.
The adventure begins with a character you name yourself just a young boy traveling with his father, and in this world of magic and monsters, he quickly gets a craving for adventure as he goes out to help on some low stakes adventures fitting for a child in a fantasy world. He investigates a mansion haunted by spooky but not quite scary ghosts, helps a fairy kingdom reclaim the horn needed to call in spring, and otherwise battles mainly simple and silly characters like a dwarf who gets a runny nose after holing up in an ice castle. Eventually these whimsical adventures do come to an end as things take a turn for the more serious, although Dragon Quest V: Hand of the Heavenly Bride never gets too dark or dreary. Even the massive monstrous beings who threaten the world are cartoonish creatures who are impeccably animated, their two-dimensional sprites that stand across from you in battle unleashing attacks that move with remarkable fluidity and take into account the distance between the player and monster in regards to how large the approaching attack looks. A dash of delightful silliness never leaves the journey you’re on. There are places with names like Abovitall Tower, monsters like Gourdzilla and Urnexpected, and not only are there people with names like Count Uptaten, but many characters have unusual speaking quirks right down to many of the main villains speaking with poor grammar as if they were improperly translated.
The adventure as your hero hits adulthood expands to cover more of the world and start to focus in on the more pressing matters of the evil forces aiming to conquer it, but you also begin to tap into the game’s focus on a life well lived as soon you’ll be asked to pick from one of three brides and even start a family with them who will join you in the final jump forward time-wise. Getting a bride is less a matter of courtship and more a continued part of the plot where your character has decided to seek answers on their own past and collect items tied to a fabled legendary hero, but it does add some appreciated direction rather than passing from town to town with such basic goals and it starts to build up your adventuring party into something more robust. Initially and for quite a bit of the adventure, your hero will only be joined by one or two other human characters, and with their nature as a silent protagonist they don’t really interact too much with even their family technically. However, there is a good deal of your character being talked to, and there are a handful of characters like Prince Harry whose own lives are interesting to track as they age in tandem with you. It’s a small list unfortunately, but the party members you do briefly recruit are at least made more memorable thanks to the smart touch of letting you consult them outside of battle with a simple button press. When you enter new areas they’ll often have something to say, and perhaps more interestingly after almost any conversation with someone in the game’s small towns you’ll be able to quickly get the thoughts from your companion on what you just heard, no matter how mundane it might have been. This does do a good job of fleshing out your late game family since they don’t have as much plot space to speak up as the people you encounter a few times over the course of your life.
Considering how few human characters adventure with your hero you might be concerned about being overwhelmed as monster groups can be quite large, but even early on you have the ability to potentially recruit wild monsters to instead come adventuring with you. The recruitment process is entirely random and only certain creatures can join your side, but since you’ll often be either outright alone or only joined by one other normal character, there are many parts of the journey where you will likely make a little customizable team of monsters to fight alongside you. They take a bit to acclimate and actually obey orders, but soon you can start to figure out what you want your extra teammates to be. Monsters have different specialties like healing, high damage, or a wide range of abilities, and even when you do start to get more story characters on your side you can often choose whether or not you want to use them over your monsters. A wagon system even allows you to swap them out mid-battle and the rewards from beating monsters like experience for leveling up is distributed to everyone along with you. Perhaps the most intelligent part of this system though is that the hero themselves learns many of the best healing spells and learns many early on, meaning you can experiment more with group structure and you’ll be able to weather the many often random battles you’ll encounter on your adventure without having to make frequent trips to town to stock up or rest to recover at an inn.
Battles are pretty simple overall in Dragon Quest V: Hand of the Heavenly Bride though. These turn-based fights involve inputting a command per character and then both you and the opposition all execute attacks with speed determining priority, but for many encounters you won’t need to stray too far from picking a basic attack with the occasional heals to avoid death. Certain characters can justify slipping in some magical attacks but often won’t need to until boss battles where the strategy really gets to shine, the player needing to balance their life, support spells like increasing attack or defense, and damage dealing. One of perhaps the best ways the game keeps some danger present even in basic battles is how Dragon Quest V handles death. It is not easy to restore a character to life, the only way initially being to return to a town and pay a sometimes hefty fee at the church to get someone back on their feet. Dungeons can be rather deep, winding, and even feature unique dangers and small puzzles to overcome, so having someone die while you’re fairly far into one can be devastating, especially as the rest of the party tries to pick up the slack. When you do get revival items they remain incredibly rare so justifying their use can be hard and characters need to be specifically holding restorative items to even be able to use them mid-battle, and when you finally start getting revival spells late in the journey, they’re not guaranteed to work on every cast, meaning you might deplete your character’s limited magic power with no reward. Thus, survival is given a heavy emphasis and taking healing seriously means even if the random monsters you’re facing might not be too much to deal with on your own, you need to balance your resources or risk having things crumble into a dire situation that requires more thought to manage. A full on team death will boot you back to a church with half your total gold gone too, and with equipment being pricey enough that you will have to make choices on who gets it fairly often, this dance around the danger of death keeps the fights from ever fully losing their edge at even their most basic.
Generally though, there is a good handle on the difficulty level where you won’t be collapsing too often even if you engage with every monster that comes across your path. In fact, fighting most everything you encounter and only fleeing when things look dire will likely you keep fairly competitive with what you’re facing, the right amount of gold and experience being earned during your progress that you shouldn’t struggle too often. New characters and monsters do sometimes start off much weaker than they likely should be and might require a little extra battling to get them up to speed, but you can usually at least find something to do when they join, especially as the world begins to open up more. There are collectibles to find like Mini-Medals that can be traded in for unique and special gear, knickknacks that you can put in a museum to reflect on your adventure, a board game with its own set of rewards based on where you land and if you finish a board, and optional activities like hidden treasures and secret bosses. The music serves as a good accompaniment too, adventurous and composed with the same sort of light-hearted fantasy energy that permeates much of the experience while having an excellent mastery of musical swells to add bursts of life to moments both small and dramatic.
THE VERDICT: A good deal of love is put into areas like the music and battle animations in Dragon Quest V: Hand of the Heavenly Bride, taking a fairly straightforward RPG and giving it an infectious sort of delight. It’s unafraid to be silly with how things are named or how characters act but it never dips so far into the comedic that it turns this fantasy journey into a farce. The battle system won’t demand much attention despite things like the heavy consequences for death and the monster recruitment adding some interesting elements to how you approach it, and while the story taking place over the course of one man’s life is an interesting form of progressing the plot, it would be more interesting to see the world and more actual characters develop along with them. There is still an enjoyable journey with creative monster designs and dungeons to be found though, so it is easy to just follow where the game goes and smile at its eccentricities.
And so, I give Dragon Quest V: Hand of the Heavenly Bride for Nintendo DS…
A GOOD rating. It’s easy to find a warm spot in your heart for Dragon Quest V, some of its pun names charmingly corny but the world and adventure aren’t relying on comedy as a true fantasy epic is constructed with the interesting angle of it taking place across a few points of a single man’s life. Each of these has enough substance to it that it doesn’t feel like one part is just setting up for another and they do feel quite distinct. The limited cast does mean the reach of these changes over time isn’t always felt, many villages and areas feeling a lot like when you last saw them years ago, but it does enough with what it is willing to change that these time periods don’t feel like arbitrary distinctions. Allowing your party members to speak on so many things when traveling with you does a lot to round them out since your adventure is often one of overcoming monsters and dangerous locations rather than dealing with personal relationships, even your potential brides not spending too much time with you before the big day. The important thing is the game doesn’t feel shallow even when it’s moving you along from town to town for the typical parts of a world-saving quest. The battles fought along the way don’t feel hollow or too numerous either, the game taking death seriously as a true setback adding a spark of energy to basic encounters that make them more than holding down attack every time. The creatures who are out to get you are at least quite varied even in a single area and given second life in the recruitment system that gives you more control over how you fight when a skirmish does require some more attention.
The Dragon Quest franchise is often viewed as a sort of grandfather of Japanese role-playing games, and in some ways this feels like an archetypal Super Nintendo RPG which matches its original release. However, that isn’t to say it is plain, as some thought was definitely put into ideas like the monster recruitment to make this more than another medieval fantasy adventure where you fight monsters with blades and magic. It still doesn’t delve deep enough into its new concepts to truly draw out their potential, the battles needing more oomph so they could pull out more compelling strategic play. The balance is remarkably clean to ensure they aren’t mindless and carry you naturally through the game’s difficulty progression though, and the plot has interesting events even if they’re not too complex. The whimsical tone at parts perhaps demonstrates it best what this game is going for, it aiming not for a heady narrative or deeply strategic action but instead the kind of grand journey you’d be excited to go on. Dragon Quest V: Hand of the Heavenly Bride is a storybook life in an appealing world despite all the dangers you must rise up to face and the trials that must be overcome along the way.