After last week’s cliffhanger I’m sure that it’s pretty easy to guess that Dan’s wife, Debora has been kidnapped. Way less predictable, the infants were left unharmed and within the walls of the castle. It initially seemed odd to me that such a mistake would be made by the villains, but then again, traveling or abducting someone with infants in tow seems a lot harder and like it might be easier to get noticed. Also obvious was the chancellor’s involvement in the plot. Yuji Horii’s narrative stance on traitors seems to be a bit on the disapproving side, as the monsters double-crossed the chancellor and left him for dead in a rural cathedral. His last moments were spent begging the hero for forgiveness.
His wife still in danger, Dan didn’t have much time to dilly-dally, so he quickly headed into the dungeon to confront her captors. The scene at the top of the dungeon is where things get hairy yet again. One of your father’s murderers, Kon the Knight stands atop holding poor Debora hostage. A battle ensues, but Dan is unable to damage Kon on his own. He posesses a shield that prevents any significant damage to his person. It’s yet another unwinnable battle, which started to bring back those feelings of hopelessness and vulnerability that I felt when Pankraz was murdered before Dan’s young eyes. Once again, Horii does something big here by forcing you to stay alive and fight Kon without losing the unwinnable battle. It’s important to see that Dan, the hero, is no longer as weak as he once was. The defeat that he suffered directly at Kon’s hands cannot be replicated, but neither can Dan prevail against this sturdy foe. It’s a stalemate (you know I had to do something with the chess-influenced titles of the antagonists in this game!)
Just when things are looking most dire, Debora intervenes in the fight, lowering Kon’s shield with some mysterious power she posesses. In yet another brilliant Horii moment, Dan is shown that no matter how much he has grown in strength since he lost Pankraz, he is not alone and the strength of his family is a force that cannot be reckoned with. By leaning on his wife, Dan and his merry band of monsters are finally able to defeat Kon and complete 1/3 of the vengeance for the murder of his father, but things are never as easy as they seem.
Bishop Ladja shows his ugly mug again to make Dan’s life miserable yet again. We learn that Debora’s power is the result of her blood line. She is a direct descendant of an ancient hero. Waitaminute…she’s the hero of legend? Talk about turning convention on its head. The joyful rescue and reunion is tragically cut short when Ladja’s magic transforms both Debora and Dan into statues. There is yet another cruel caveat to this cruel result, both Dan and Debora are fully aware of their surroundings. It’s not a Sleeping Beauty-type affair where they are unconscious throughout this whole ordeal. They are being forced to watch the end of the world by Bishop Ladja’s cruel hands.
After losing his mother to a kidnapping, being forced to watch as his father was brutally murdered in front of his eyes, and being forced into slavery, now Dan, a recent father of twins and more or less a newlywed finds himself a self-aware statue on the auction block of some strange amphitheater. The two guys selling the statues found Dan and Deb at the top of the tower where they fought and brought them here to turn a buck. Dan is purchased for 20,000 gold and sold and separated from his wife. Players are treated to a hint of what is to happen to Deb as one of the sellers has “other plans” for her.
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If you couldn’t already guess, a midwife/doctor type confirmed that Debora was not only pregnant, but quite far along. It brings up the tricky point of time in these video games. What seemed like hours traveling around the world map in my control must have been nine months, because Deb is apparently ready to pop. It makes sense, considering the scale of the map and the modes of transportation, but without an outright statement of “Nine Months Later” (too obvious), I find myself pulled out of the narrative a bit. Speaking of getting pulled out of his narrative, Dan is summoned down to see King Albert, prematurely ending the joyous discovery.
Expecting a fight for the throne, I went downstairs to go talk to Uncle Albert. Horii goes ahead and defies some expectation by having King Albert all but pay me as he tries to abdicate the throne. He goes ahead and plays right into narrative tropes by having the chancellor, the real head of this mostly puppet government, scheme to delay my ascension by requiring me to complete a meaningless task required of royals before obtaining the crown. My suspicions were confirmed when Dan learned that the guards were under strict orders to reveal to no one that he was the son of Pankraz.
The task was fairly mindless and easy and, predictably, Dan was jumped by some hired hitmen who were easily dispatched. Expecting more trouble, both Dan and I are surprised when our return was not met with more assassins, but there was no time to get into royal business upon Dan’s return, because Debora started to go into labor.
In a delightful callback, Yuji Horii calls back to the very first scene of Dragon Quest V by forcing Dan to pace around the throne room awaiting news of the children. Every detail was identical, down to the ticking clock in the background, only this time it was less of a cutscene and more of an interactive experience. Your mileage may vary, but as a helpless bystander forced to walk around in circles awaiting an event that I, the player, had no control over, I admit to feeling anxious and powerless as I hoped for the best, but feared for the worst, since the Chancellor was still lurking around. At last, tension broke as the good news was rushed downstairs. Dan was a father…twice over. Twins!
The callback continued as Dan rushed up to the royal bedroom and was greeted by the sight of his wife and children. The conversation naturally led to names for the children and, once again, I was able to pick names. Having missed the chance to name my pet sabrecat after my buddy Min, I briefly considered naming either of the kids after him, since Min is an acceptable name for both men and women, but since I was in Florida with my younger brother at the time, I went with David for Dan’s son and Rebeca for the daughter. Just like in the cartoons, Dave resembled his father pretty strongly while Rebeca looked a lot like Deb. Not that this is all that hard, since most Toriyama art looks very similar, but it works in this situation. The boxart seems to imply that the twins would be blonde instead of having black hair if Bianca ended up wedded to Dan, so there’s one change that I spotted from the marriage decision.
With the childbearing out of the way, nothing could stand in the way of Dan’s coronation, so the ceremony proceeded and the main character’s robes transitioned from purple to red for the occasion. I noticed at this point that it was rather telling of Dan to be wearing purple, a color associated with royalty, the whole game. It’s this kind of attention to detail that I’m sure was not an accident based on what I know about Japanese game design.
What’s a good coronation ceremony without a huge party? Surely no harm could come with every man, woman, and child incapacitated from alcohol and fatigue overnight in the stronghold of a recently wronged Chancellor. I’m sure that part X will just be the blissful end of this tale…
It doesn’t take a genius to guess that Debora’s probably pregnant. I may have mentioned this before, but at any point in Dragon Quest V, the player can choose to have the main character chat with the members of his party. Dan spoke with Debora and she all but confirmed her impending motherhood with a “You know…I might be…never mind, let’s go.”
Further travels to Gotha are marked with few noteworthy events. Now that Dan is rather close to Gotha, he hears from the populace about the king Panrkaz whose travels took him away from his kingdom for near twelve years now. No one seems to know he’s dead. Dan’s mother even makes an appearance in some of the dialogue as some townspeople remark on Dan’s resemblance to Madalena. The recently married Dan is also offered marriage advice by some of the NPCs he speaks with, just to hammer home that family theme.
Dan finally arrives in Gotha only to be turned away at the gates. It’s not the most glamorous of homecomings and it makes me suspicious of treachery in the throne room. Lucky for Dan, there was a house adjacent to the castle. Even luckier, the house belonged to the ever faithful Sancho. I’ve mentioned Sancho a few times in passing throughout my narrative summary, but now it’s time to devote a little more time to this loyal friend. I was prepared to wonder why the localization team bothered to name the jolly companion Sancho, but it turns out that his actual Japanese name does phonetically translate to Sancho. It’s clear that Yuji Horii is trying to made a reference to Don Quixote’s loyal squire Sancho Panza. Thanks to this clear reference to Spanish literature, the localization team decided to give all of Sancho’s dialogue a written Spanish accent. I know they mean no harm with it, so I’m not really offended, especially as I consider that various regions and characters throughout Dragon Quest V’s world have their own respective accents to them. It’s just an odd localization quirk that some hate and I don’t particularly mind. I’m sure that some of the characters in the Dragon Quest universe do have distinct ways of speaking and this seems like an attempt to translate that intent.
Sancho might not be blood family to Dan, but his utter devotion to the royal family and elder status allows him to take on a fatherly role to the hero. If Yuji Horii did intend to create an extended family metaphor with his party and wagon systems, Sancho fits into it perfectly.
It turns out that meeting back up with Sancho was just the key to getting into the castle that we needed. After getting into the castle, Dan learns that his uncle Albert is running the show. Given the rather unfriendly greeting that he received the night before, I’m not certain of what’s going to happen here. Will Albert betray his blood to retain the throne? Is Dan going to have a face-off against his last remaining family? The tension (from my end) behind the meeting is interrupted by yet another collapse by Debora. It’s becoming pretty clear that something may be up with her and it could be a very bad time for it, depending on what Dan’s uncle does.
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I like being surprised by a narrative. Too often, especially when it comes to video games, it’s always the same predictable plot twists and points. This was a point where Dan, the player, and Dan, the character, were both stunned at a convention being broken. It seems that Dan is most definitely not the hero of legend. The Zenithian helmet doesn’t fit Dan and Cleohatra is not willing to just loan it to him with the hopes that he’ll eventually run into the hero of legend. She sends Dan off to his previously unknown hometown of Gotha with the intent to track down the leads that Pankraz was following.
While we’re on the topic of defied expectations, there’s was an event along the route to Gotha that I found particularly telling of Horii’s style. Along the path, there was a cave containing a very suspicious old woman. Every statement she makes ends with a suspicious cackle and she seems to want Dan to stay the night. Knowing danger when I see it, I declined her offer at first, fearing for the safety of my party. Then I thought about this feature and made Dan accept this old witch’s hospitatlity to see just what might happen. Cut to a scene where Dan and Debora are sleeping in the same room and Deb complains to Dan about hearing strange noises upstairs. Dan has the option of going to check it out. Knowing that something was clearly amiss, I ordered Dan to get up and check on just what that old woman was doing, but he was paralyzed in place! Things were looking bad, I mean, Dan takes a detour on his way to Gotha and is about to find himself killed. The old woman walked downstairs and crept up to the hero. It turned out that she was simply enhancing Dan’s equipment and he received a +1 permanent strength enhancement. She just paralyzed Dan and Debora so that they would sleep through the night and not have fitful sleep.
It’s totally obvious, in retrospect, that nothing bad would have happened to Dan as a result of simply trusting someone suspicious. Horii is not the kind of guy to just screw over a player for doing something nice, so it makes perfect sense that your actions reward you. The question of whether or not it’s okay to outright punish a player for making a choice so tangential to the main game mechanics or story is bigger than this tiny DQV feature, but I think it bears thinking about. The player does not want to feel like he/she has been unfairly penalized, but I think it would be a fine choice for a notorious trickster, like Kojima, to force upon his unsuspecting audience.
The characterization of Debora also became a point for me. At one point along the path, it seemed like she said something rather nice to me. Quite frankly, the last thing I’d want in this game would be for her to become some sort of weak-kneed woman who is head-over-heels in love with Dan. If I wanted that, I would have had Dan marry Bianca. I’m really hoping that consistency and quality are Horii’s priorities over pandering to male sexist ideas about what a woman should act like. Marrying a Briscoletti continues to be a financially sound decision, as I received another gift on the way to Gotha. In other Debora-related story developments, our arrival in Batenberg was immediately followed by Deb fainting.
There’s a rather interesting mechanic in play with Dragon Quest V and, while it wasn’t pioneered in Dragon Quest V, I think that it fits in well with the family theme of DQV. After Dan became an adult, he acquires a horse named Dusty and a wagon. This wagon holds the hero’s excess party when he doesn’t have them in the fighting party. The end result is that Dan has the fighting party and a backup party present in battles. He can swap fighters whenever he needs to within any battle that the wagon is present in. The wagon, logically, is only present in outdoor battles or battles in locations where a wagon would fit in the corridors with you.
Anyway, back to my point, the wagon emphasizes the broad themes present in the game. While the narrative has Dan literally creating a new family, this mechanic, combined with the monster recruitment, is also like creating a family with a fighting unit. It’s heavily reminiscent of the Oregon Trail to me. Dan, his real family, and his extended family all travel to their destination together and, at any point on the world map or in a town/dungeon/temple, Dan can hit a button to talk to the members of his party to get their input on current events.
Horii also has some fun with the wagon mechanic in the random battles. The Dragon Quest series’ iconic enemy is the slime. It’s usually the first enemy you encounter and the easiest one, at that. At around this point in the game I started seeing huge crowds of slimes at once, which was an odd occurrence considering what part of the world map I was on. It got interesting when all of the slimes started coming together to create…a King Slime! This new abomination was a much larger slime that could take some hits, unlike his constituent parts. The King Slime has an interesting attack whereupon he charges the wagon. The result is that the wagon goes flying away and the fighting party becomes your only pool of fighters to draw from.
Another neat little touch that Yuji Horii added to the game has to do with your choice of wife. Bianca, who, as I’ve discussed before, seems to be the canonical choice for a wife, is rather poor. Her father lives alone in a small town and her mother died in her youth. The Briscolettis, on the other hand, are rich and influential. So when Dan arrived in Helunaptra, I was surprised and quite pleased to see a representative from the Briscoletti family when he gave Dan a chest containing 2000 gold as a gift from his father-in-law.
Dan went to Helunaptra to retrieve the Zenithian Helmet and hears from the citizens that the Zenithian hero of legend will save Helunaptra and the world. Naturally, this will be Dan. Gotta get that helmet to finish off my quest. Just got to go talk to the queen of Helunaptra, Cleohatra. So this little kingdom Helunaptra (sounds kind of like helmet) is ruled by Cleohatra. Very clever localization team. Good stuff. Time to go see the helmet. Will it be stolen? Will it be fake? Will she make Dan do something before she gives it to him? Find out next time!
As if to drive home the need for a companion, Dan is now left completely alone on his quest thanks to Harry’s departure. This next part of the game features Dan coming in contact with his childhood sabrecat pet Leo, but this part of the game is, quite frankly, dull to me, despite the themes of friendship and family, since Leo is has been dutifully searching for Dan and joins his team only once he is shown Bianca’s ribbon.
Leo recruited, the real meat of the story begins when the hero hears of a potential location for the Zenithian Shield, the city of Mostroferrato, which is far less intimidating than it sounds. Mostroferrato is home to the Briscoletti family whose patriarch, Rodrigo, is supposedly searching for a suitor for his daughter Nera. The good news: Rodrigo owns the Zenithian Shield. The bad news: he will only give it to the man deemed worthy enough to pass his trials and marry his daughter. Rodrigo’s two trials are fairly standard RPG fare; namely, Dan must retrieve the Circle of Fire and the Circle of Water to serve as the rings for the wedding.
Between this point in the game and the part of the questline involving the Circle of Water, Dan comes into contact with three important women. If you hadn’t guessed, these are his prospective wives. The first is Nera, one of Rodrigo’s daughters and a serene, beautiful girl. She is clearly a catch, but there’s one slight caveat. A man in Mostroferrato, Crispin, is clearly in love with Nera and he is Dan’s prime competitor in this event. I can’t exactly remember, but I think that Nera may even have feeling for Crispin as well. This isn’t an ideal situation.
Dan’s second choice comes in the chance reunion with Bianca en route to collecting the Circle of Water. She joins up with Dan to fetch the ring and she’s clearly in love with Dan. Unlike Nera, she is far less sophisticated with a common lineage, almost no money, and the localization team chose to give her a bit of an accent to further hammer home her “peasant” status, at least compared to Nera. I like to think that the game subtly nudges the player toward marrying Bianca. The box art features Bianca along with blonde children (Nera has black hair) and Bianca is unsubtly head over heels with Dan. Combined with the preexisting competition for Nera, I bet Yuji Horii assumed that most players would choose Bianca on their first playthrough especially due to his narrative nudging encouraging that choice.
The final choice for Dan is actually a DS-remake exclusive. Debora is Nera’s sister and, thus, another Briscoletti daughter. She is rude, domineering, heartless, and an all around terror to be around. In an interview for the DS remake, Yuji Horii described Debora as a girl “nobody in their right mind would pick!” Naturally, Dan chose to marry Debora when the time to choose between the three women was upon him. I realized that this would cause my experience to be subtly different from the most common SNES or PS2 experiences back in the day, but I just couldn’t help doing what I was clearly not supposed to do.
Yuji Horii has been known to say that Dragon Quest V is his favorite of the series. I think this is a function of just how affecting the story he chose to tell really is for the player. I’m not exaggerating when I say that turning down Bianca, watching her take the rejection with sad pride, and listening to her wish Dan and Debora happiness in their marriage was a difficult thing for me to experience. I was so invested in Dan’s life and the world of DQV that I felt like I had broken that poor pixelated girl’s heart.
The question of Debora was also very intriguing to me here. Horii created a wife for Dan that was absolutely unlikeable, yet I wondered if he would go the clichéd route and have her completely soften up thanks to Dan’s love. Plenty an anime and video game have taken these normally confident, mean, and strong-willed women and put forth what I feel to be a subtly sexist message that “wild” women will be tamed through domesticity. Given the skill with which Horii has woven the narrative so far, I put my money on him not trivializing Debora and keeping her character suitably abrasive to Dan throughout the entire game.
Anyway, so Dan has himself a lavish wedding thanks to the Briscoletti affluence aboard Rodrigo’s casino ship. Harry and his wife Maria attend along with the Briscolettis, Bianca, and the Mostroferrato townspeople. Debora and Dan enjoy their first night together, Dan gets himself the Zenithian Shield, and then it’s back to the quest. Naturally, Dan wouldn’t want to expose his wife to such danger…wait, Debora has announced that there’s no way Dan is leaving without her. He’s also pretty much supposed to cater to her every need. It’s time for the newly formed family to continue Dan’s quest to find his mother.
Pankraz is dead. Madalena is alive.
Prince Harry and Dan are still in Ladja’s clutches. What sinister plan does he have for the poor boys? The story continues ten years later. Dan and Harry were sold into slavery and have been spending the past ten years building a temple for some cult. At this point I started to realize that Dan’s life pretty much sucks. Harry fills Dan in on the details of the past ten years and it seems that it’s been pretty bleak. The guards all seem to imply that once the temple is completed (soon) there will be a slave massacre. Still, Dan and Harry don’t make much trouble…until Maria gets herself in trouble with some of the guards. Dan and Harry have too much honor to allow her to be abused, so they get into a scuffle with the guards and end up killing them. It turns out that one of the other, nicer guards is Maria’s brother and he knows that death for all three slaves will be the inevitable result of Dan and Harry’s insubordination, so he allows Dan, Harry, and Maria to escape from the temple in a barrel.
The three arrive at Heaven’s Above Abbey, thankfully safe despite their ocean journey. Certain things start to happen at this stage in the game to emphasize the new theme of the second part of the game. Harry seems to express feelings for Maria and the various people you speak to in the world will comment to the player about the virtues and joys of marriage. Random NPCs will tell Dan that he should be thinking about settling down. Dan and Harry are on a mission though, so they decide to head for their hometowns.
In an unsurprisingly depressing turn of events, it turns out that Whealbrook has been destroyed. The reason: Prince Harry’s disappearance caused the Queen of Coburg to unleash her wrath against the city, destroying the whole place. Is Sancho gone? Who knows…Dan’s house was burnt down years ago. He does find out that Panrkaz left something important in the nearby cave, so he heads down there to discover what’s up down there.
It turns out that Pankraz was searching for the Legendary Hero in order to venture into Nadiria, the dark realm. The hero needs the Zenithian equipment, which Pankraz was also searching for. So far he’s only obtained the sword, which he leaves for the hero. Dan and Harry head for Coburg after learning what they need to go. Who are we kidding though, Dan is totally the Legendary Hero. Why are we still searching?
Long story short, the Queen is an impostor and since Prince Harry disappeared, Wilbur became king. Wilbur is clearly being manipulated by the devious Queen. Harry and Dan reveal that she’s a monster and kill her. Harry finally declares his love for Maria and marries her. The game seriously starts assaulting Dan with the marriage message. Harry thinks that all this wandering leads to no good and he just wants to live his life as the adviser to his brother Wilbur. You know that you can’t do that, so you continue on without Harry, your sole companion for the past ten years. The game is trying to tell you something here as it forces you to transition from the person you were most close to. As a grown man, shouldn’t you be finding a wife?
When we last left Dan and Pankraz, they had just showed up in Coburg to be bodyguards for Prince Henry. It seems there’s some strife within the castle, as the king has two heirs and the queen clearly favors one son over the other. It’s some serious Jacob and Esau-type stuff and an example of a family gone horribly wrong. The princes are either apathetic (Wilbur) or total jerkfaces (Harry), but it doesn’t really matter anyway, we’ve gotta guard Harry after all.
While “playing” with Harry (he just acts like a jerk and tricks Dan), Harry gets kidnapped from his secret passageway, forcing Dan and Pankraz to chase after him in a panic. Well, to be fair, Pankraz tells Dan to stay put and goes searching for Harry, but at this point Dan isn’t about to just sit idly on the wayside. He’s got Leo in his party, after all, and he can fight too.
Chasing after Harry leads Dan to some ruins that he successfully navigates as he meets back up with his dear old dad. Pankraz joins the party as you tear on through the dungeon. You encounter Harry, Pankraz goes off to clear the way, but Dan and Harry are intercepted on their way out by the Bishop Ladja, Slon the Rook, and Kon the Knight. This is yet another moment where the game uses its mechanics to express a feeling of helplessness, because Bishop Ladja is one tough son of a gun! You can only watch as the Bishop absolutely destroys Harry, Leo, and Dan’s HP and the battle inevitably ends with your destruction. That’s when the great Pankraz shows up to save the day. Except that Ladja has the kids held hostage. He will kill us if Pankraz tries to interfere. In a strange twist of honor, Ladja promises not to harm the children if Pankraz surrenders. His love for Dan is too great, so he surrenders and we’re treated to more video game storytelling.
There are a few major video game deaths that are hailed as heartbreaking or emotionally affecting. The murder of Aeris, the endings of Ico and Shadow of the Colossus, and the ending of Metal Gear Solid 3 (I was inches away from crying, it’s ridiculous) all come to mind. I think that if Dragon Quest V had come out on the SNES stateside we would have the death of Pankraz to add to that list. The helplessness of the Ladja battle was enough for one days worth of intensity, but now Horii does it again, and with the benefit of the battle screen, not as an in-game cutscene, as a Ladja orders Slon and Kon to kill Pankraz. This doesn’t end quickly, Pankraz is very strong, as you might remember. This means that you, the player, have to watch Slon and Kon slowly whittle away Pankraz’s health as he stoically takes it all. Each turn has a little something to say about Pankraz’s pain or his suffering. It’s agonizing because you can see how ridiculously easy it would be for Pankraz to just start fighting back. Eventually the Great Pankraz falls. His last words: Dan’s mother is still alive. He’s been searching for her all this time. Ladja sends a fireball at Pankraz, incinerating him and leaving charred ground where he once stood. He then turns his attention back upon the player. He’s got other plans for you.
To be continued…
When we last left off, young Dan had arrived on land in Littlehaven after dreaming that his father was a king. Exciting! Except Pankraz seems to just be a wanderer, but a well-respected guy. Almost everyone Dan can talk to seems to think that Pankraz is the finest specimen of a man they’ve ever met and that he’s bound to grow up to be as great as his old man. As Dan continued to wander around, he eventually found his way outside of the city and onto the world map. Here he got into his first random encounter with monsters! Before Dan even has a chance to get worried, Pankraz shows up to save the day and WRECK SOME MONSTERS. Holy cow, Pankraz is a tough guy. Nothing seems to faze him and he mows through monsters with ease. If Dan starts to dip in HP, Pankraz will heal him up. He takes control and walks Dan back over to his hometown, Whealbrook.
Anyone who has played an RPG before knows that he will eventually be as much of a bad ass as Pankraz currently is. They understand that all it takes is some serious grinding and eventually they will be plenty strong. It might not be so clear to them that Yuji Horii is taking this obvious gameplay mechanic and using it to convey a specific artistic point. You see, the difficulty with art in video gaming is that developers seem to forget what tools they have available in their repertoire. There’s not just storytelling or music or art; there’s also mehanics. Kojima is a developer who gets this. All you need to do is see how he toys with the gamer with his post-modern conventions to convey his point. Just think about the ending to Metal Gear Solid 3. The player, as Snake, had to physically choose to kill The Boss. It wasn’t a cutscene. You had to pull the trigger on your mentor so that, assuming you were fully invested in the game, you too would feel the anguish and weight of the decision to kill her to progress the plot. It’s stuff like this that truly brings games to artistic levels. What Yuji Horii is doing with these Pankraz-assisted battles is showing the player what his potential is based on the experience system. You fight alongside your father, whom everyone says you resemble and comments that you might grow up to be like, and see that, heck, with a little bit of experience I might grow up to be just like my dad. It’s really clever when you stop to think about it.
Also clever: Since you are a young lad, your world is colored by this fact. Walk Dan up to a sign and press the action button and he gets a message that reads something like “Dan tries to read the sign, but he can’t read.” Brilliant.
I’m not going to go over every event in DQV, just things that stand out to me or major plot points. In Whealbrook Dan meets a girl named Bianca and does some questing with her in two different cities and gets a Golden orb. Importance can be derived from this meeting, so I mention it. Bianca will probably reappear later as will the sabrecat I affectionately named Leo, just based on how the game treated those two things.
In our next part, Dan and Pankraz arrive in Coburg for some bodyguard duty.
Like I said I might do before, here’s a rundown of a game I’m playing to try and encourage me to make significant progress. Unfortunately, even if there were commercial DS capture devices available, I don’t really have the cash to spare for them anyway, so we’ll start our look in with words and I might snap some ugly iPhone shots if I really want to hurt your eyes. As a final warning, I’m going to be getting into plot points. Leave if you don’t want to read SPOILERS
This game hammers home the theme of family pretty heavily and it makes me wonder what might have been going on in Yuji Horii’s life to inspire him to create this deeply touching game. DQV opens with a fairly standard black background name entry screen as you choose the name of your hero. The next scene is of a throne room. There’s only one conclusion you can draw at this point, the guy pacing in front of the throne is the king. He seems stressed and he’s pacing. His name is Pankraz. Sancho shows up and summons Pankraz down to see his wife, Madalena. Her son lies on the bed beside her and they deliberate over a name. Pankraz thinks Madason would be a brilliant name for the boy, because he’s not very creative and thinks that since he’s Madalena’s son, he should apparently be saddled with what sounds like a woman’s name. Madalena thinks that perhaps he should be named Dan. Pankraz reluctantly agrees and holds Dan up, Lion King-style, to proclaim that his son will henceforth be known as Dan. Crisis: Madalena begins to cough; something is wrong with her. The screen irises on Pankraz and the new baby boy. Dan begins to cry.
Cue heroic music and iconic Dragon Quest logo over a castle in the sky.
If you’re only just now getting to DQV, as I am, this opening is awfully remniscent of Fallout 3. Consider the identical elements: you are born in the opening scene, there is a name decision to be made, and some sort of tragic accident seems to befall your mother. I think there’s a pretty strong reason for both of these games to begin almost identically and it stems from simple human behavior. There are fairly established notions of the kind of relationship that a single parent, especially a single father has with his offspring. It’s either the whole abusive, resentful, alcoholic view, which would be useless in this case, or the close, caring setup that we get in both of these games. What it says to the player is: these men are your only strength left in this world. You’d better try to do right by them. In Fallout 3, your motivations are driven by your need to find your father and, once you do and he is killed, to continue his life’s work to restore water to the Capital Wastelands.
DQV does things a little differently. Immediately following the title splash, you see yourself in what looks like a bed in a ship. You can tell that it is you in the bed, because the man in the wild purple robes is the very same one portrayed on the Toriyama-drawn boxart. You tell your father that you dreamed he was a king and he laughs it off. As you walk around the ship, you learn a two things:
1. Your dad, Pankraz, is the man 2. You guys travel. A lot.
The ship lands in Littlehaven and you’re told to go play. At this point, you’re level 1 and you’re just supposed to go wander around and hit up the world map. Here’s where I’ll leave my observations for today and we’ll talk some more about stuff next time.
(NOTE: I’d be remiss in not mentioning that this feature was at least partially inspired by the ABDN DQV review by Tim Rogers)
