My favorite game on the DS and probably the best RPG I've played. Really well done and executed story and gameplay. The music is amazing and memorable just as the other aspects of the game are.
My score is really more weighted heavily on both my personal preferences, as well as its relationship to other Dragon Quest games. So, if my score seems low, yes, I am in fact deluded and at least subjectively incorrect. This is the right of all critics!
If this game was being compared to almost any other JRPG, it'd be about a Star higher. Dragon Quest V, surely by the standards of the early 90s but still also in a way that has aged quite gracefully, has a narrative that is heroically ambitious. Even if you're mainly present for the most significant times of this character's life, you really do feel like you're playing someone's entire life up to adulthood. For this I have only praise for Dragon Quest V.
Where it loses me, and, I really cannot be more clear about this, is how that narrative structure gets in the way of the gameplay progression. This is a personal preference, but, I really dislike when RPGs switch up a roster of playable characters, especially when it does it a lot, and even more so when it seems to do it unpredictably. The way this happens in Dragon Quest V is artfully justified by the narrative, don't get me wrong! It's just that, I, personally, get so annoyed by this. And, I don't really love the monster collect-a-thon layer of it... you can't convince me that the monsters aren't just crappier versions of human characters.
So, do take my 3.5 star rating with a grain of salt. Dragon Quest V towers over many if not most other 16-bit RPGs, it just also feels like it went out of its way to annoy me, personally, over the long term course of its narrative and gameplay.
If this game was being compared to almost any other JRPG, it'd be about a Star higher. Dragon Quest V, surely by the standards of the early 90s but still also in a way that has aged quite gracefully, has a narrative that is heroically ambitious. Even if you're mainly present for the most significant times of this character's life, you really do feel like you're playing someone's entire life up to adulthood. For this I have only praise for Dragon Quest V.
Where it loses me, and, I really cannot be more clear about this, is how that narrative structure gets in the way of the gameplay progression. This is a personal preference, but, I really dislike when RPGs switch up a roster of playable characters, especially when it does it a lot, and even more so when it seems to do it unpredictably. The way this happens in Dragon Quest V is artfully justified by the narrative, don't get me wrong! It's just that, I, personally, get so annoyed by this. And, I don't really love the monster collect-a-thon layer of it... you can't convince me that the monsters aren't just crappier versions of human characters.
So, do take my 3.5 star rating with a grain of salt. Dragon Quest V towers over many if not most other 16-bit RPGs, it just also feels like it went out of its way to annoy me, personally, over the long term course of its narrative and gameplay.