Dragon Quest V: Hand Of The Heavenly Bride - The RPG Bucket List Review
Generations apart.
Square and Enix, and their combined form, are both known for making a lot of remakes of their star franchises, both Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy. Multiple remakes were made for the original Playstation, in that weird time where there were still a lot of pixelated titles while the polygonal era was starting to be explored. Dragon Quest V: Hand Of The Heavenly Bride is one such title that received a remake, this time for the Playstation 2, the only remake that I can see for that console within this series.
Released only seven months before the mainline release of Dragon Quest VIII: Journey Of The Cursed King, I can only assume that Dragon Quest V used the same engine and was released to celebrate one of the series bigger hits while hyping up the Japanese audience for the new game coming that same year.
Back in 2008, when Square Enix was in the process of creating remakes for the Nintendo DS, the decision was made to retroactively apply subtitles to all of the games that released without one. Dragon Quest V has the retroactive subtitle Hand Of The Heavenly Bride. But why was this subtitle chosen twenty years after it’s release?
Well, let’s find out…
Son, Father, Husband
Dragon Quest V starts as a lot of typical fantasy led JRPGs do, a child following their father and then adventuring on their own, trying to find out who they are as a person in a dangerous world where setting foot in a cave or outside of their village gates means a battle of life and death. But quickly this diverges into something that had me feeling a ton of feelings that I don’t normally… In order to continue, I need to bring out Steve the Spoiler Squirrel.
Typically, in a JRPG, we are familiar with the idea that we start as an innocuous protagonist, we start a slightly well meaning adventure to right some form of wrong or to achieve a life long goal. However, that’s not the case within Dragon Quest V. We start out by following our father, until he died, and told to save our father, fair enough, standard fare. But very shortly after our Father dies, the screen fades to back and we’re told the time has skipped by 8 years. In the blink of an eye, we’ve gone from an eight year old kid, to a sixteen year old who has been enslaved by the Big Bad, Lord Gema.
We find that the game brings us back on track for a while, until we try to equip the Heavenly Helm, a throwback from the previous game in which the legendary hero of Dragon Quest IV was able to defeat it’s own Big Bad by equipping the Zenithian Armor. Imagine our shock when we try to equip the helm only to be told it can only be equipped by the next Legendary Hero. It’s not often that I play a JRPG and where there is a prophecised Hero, that it also turns out that that hero is not me. I spent a while wracking my brain trying to think of whom the Legendary Hero could be, assuming that I’d met them before, but only coming to a dead end.
Despite how I personally feel about such things, our Hero is asked to retrieve two rings from dungeons in order to marry a Lord’s daughter. It’s not exactly my cup of tea, but it appeared that this was the main quest, so I had no other option than to follow it through. I’m coincidentally joined by Bianca, a friend my eight year old self had made and liberated a mansion of it’s ghosts. When giving the rings back to the Lord, he gives me a choice: marry his daughter, or marry Bianca.
Such a choice is so fundamentally important that this game was given a subtitle that revolves solely around this decision, Dragon Quest V: Hand of the Heavenly Bride. I’m very much a person who values a lot of player agency, as the Dragon Quest games that I’ve been playing so far don’t have a lot of player agency, what with them being released over thirty years ago, I value this decision so much. Ultimately, I end up with a wife who follows me around and then two kids who either have blonde or blue hair. The illusion of choice is something that doesn’t ultimately matter a lot, but in this particular instance, it gave me a connection. Choosing to marry Bianca allowed me to become invested in her, feel sad when she was kidnapped and overawed when my teenaged kids found me again.
Sadly, this is the only choice to make within the game that makes any real difference, and things play out like we would expect them to. Our son turns out to be the Legendary Hero and he is able to wield the Zenithian armor and we go find the Big Bad as a family and we’re able to kill God like we’re expected to. I found myself wishing that I was playing a secondary role where elsewhere a Legendary Hero was having his own quest and we were able to meet them, provide the equipment and watch them defeat Lord Gema. The idea that we’re just a helper to the prophecised one is intriguing to me, and I wish that this had been fleshed out so much more than it had.
While the illusion of choice is something that got me very excited, a game that’s over thirty years old is going to have a lot of limitations, especially considering this was the first DQ game released for the SNES. It does occur to me that the trope of The Chosen One is something the is still being used to this very day, especially during my currently ongoing playthrough of Final Fantasy XVI. It’s just that I find myself yearning for something slightly different that breaks the mold.
Recruitment Centre
While the main crux of the combat of Dragon Quest V remains the same as previous iterations, there’s one main difference that changes the whole game, and that is monster recruitment. Shortly into the story, we’re able to buy a horse and wagon, and we’re then told that sometimes after defeating a monster in battle, they may ask to join the party. There’s no way to guarantee a monster will join after battle, purely down to chance, so a less versatile version of the capture mechanic from Pokémon.
Naturally, I wanted to catch as many monsters as possible. I never said no to any monster joining, and I would keep a full wagon to get residual experience from battles. As these monsters joined, they could be equipped like any other party member, however, quite soon something else occurred that changed the game. These monsters all had skills they could use, but mostly didn’t require the spending of any MP.
One of my main complaints with the Dragon Quest series so far has been that unless magic is being used, there’s no weapon skills that can be used to make combat more varied. The offensive combat is either Attack or Magic. There’s no middle ground. The monster combat allowed more versatility, and I’m sure that if I had more time and inclination, I could have maximised their capabilities more than I actually did. I abused a Slime Knight as he was the only monster I recruited that had access to healing magic, which allowed me to have 3 healers in my party for the final boss fight.
Considering how the next game in the series was also released on the SNES, I don’t really have that much high hopes for there to be a big change in the combat system, and while I do enjoy the combat, I’m missing some variation to keep me interested in the grind.
Hero’s Moving Castle
As mentioned in my review of Dragon Quest IV, I said that I was hoping for more weird vehicles to use to get around the world, and that if a game gave me a magic carpet, I’d love it forever. At the time, I genuinely had no idea that my wish was going to be granted in Dragon Quest V. Taking the form of a low level flying mount, that wasn’t able to fly over mountains or rocky shores, the magic carpet allowed a faster travel around the world compared to the ship.
My expectations were smashed when later at the very end of the game, I was given command of the floating castle of Zenithia. I was actually able to fly the castle around the whole world map. It was so funny and weird that I was given this ability, compared to just being given an airship that thousands of other games have given me in the past. I loved the weirdness and how different this was for me.
As the game that I played was the Playstation 2 edition of DQV, this meant the game was built from the ground up. There was no pixel art in this title, just a full 3D game made, and it bears repeating that no other Dragon Quest title was actually remade for the Playstation 2. I have to say, the art of the whole game was absolutely incredible. As someone who was a teenager during the PS2 era, this brought back so many memories.
One tiny little flourish I loved and showed how much love was put into the game was the reaction of critical hits in combat. When an enemy died, the model would fall backwards and then disappear, but if an enemy died to a critical hit, the enemy model would be propelled further back. It’s a small tiny thing, but it made such a big difference. They did that for every single model in the game, and while it’s not a big game in relative terms to 2024 gigabyte sizes, that must have taken the developers a long time to do.
In Conclusion…
When setting out to play Dragon Quest V: Hand Of The Heavenly Bride, I assumed I was just in for another Dragon Quest with a similar story as the previous entries. However, I was bowled away by how the choices of the game allowed me to get so invested. Invested in a way that I haven’t been in games that were released over thirty years later.
From the beautiful low poly visuals to the music and the slight player agency provided, there’s nothing I could say in this whole review that could do this game justice. For these reasons, I can only give Dragon Quest V: Hand Of The Heavenly Bride five thumbs ups.
Up Next!
We’re officially though our Dragon Quest series playthrough! I’m so psyched about this. I tried to start Dragon Quest VI but I ran out of time before Final Fantasy XVI released on PC, and that has just dominated my time. I feel like I’m almost near the end of that game though, and I definitely have feelings about it. I might try to smash out Dragon Quest VI before Metaphor: ReFantazio is released, but if not, it’s going to be a long while, as I’ve just seen that Metaphor’s playtime is on par with Persona 5, which is daunting to say the least…