There are these little moments in Dragon Quest that are so lighthearted and ridiculous in the context of the tension of the narrative that I can’t help but laugh out loud. Tasked with re-entering the fairy kingdom to find a replacement Golden Orb, I noticed a cat outside a house. I don’t often talk to the animals in RPGs, but I’m sometimes struck with the desire to do so. This time the cat actually spoke. He told Dan that he was a magician disguised as a cat trying to get access to the fairy kingdom and asked Dan not to blow his cover. It’s tiny and insignificant, but it’s the little details like this that make me love Dragon Quest V. Yuji Horii is all about the small things.
Dan met with the Fairy Queen with the intention of getting a new Golden Orb, but instead found out that their attempts to make a new one had failed. They could only make a worthless imitation. However, all was not lost. A magical plan was hatched that only Dan could undertake and complete. By using a magical painting, Dan was able to travel back in time to Whealbrook, where I realized that I was not paying enough attention in the early game at all. Why did I realize this? Because I suddenly remembered interacting with a man dressed rather like me in purple in Whealbrook before. This man asked to see Dan’s Golden Orb and gave him some words of encouragement. The cleverness of it was almost too much. Future Dan had come back in time and swapped the real Golden Orb with the fake Golden Bauble. Ladja failed at his mission: he actually destroyed a fake all those years ago.
Beyond that, it’s also neat to get to talk with other people in the past and learn how they felt about Dan and Pankraz. Dan could even go and talk to Pankraz himself and fail at trying to convince him not to go to Coburg. It’s a well thought out sequence that doesn’t feel that cheap for a time travel story. I just love how Dan takes the time to tell his past self to stay strong and hold on. I can’t even imagine what it would be like to meet my past self after enduring the great multitudes of pain and sorrow that Dan has endured. What did Dan from the past tell Future Dan in response? “I won’t give up no matter how hard it gets, just like you said”
Golden Orb in hand, Dan returns to Castle Zenithia and raises it back into the heavens, awakening the actual Zenithians living within the magical castle. These winged dudes inform Dan that his next task would be reviving the Zenithian Dragon, which involves going to the Talon Tower and meeting up with some old enemies bent on stopping Dan’s progress…
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