This game will make anyone a believer of the wonderful world of Dragon Quest. One of the greatest RPG storylines!
I really enjoyed playing Dragon Quest V. It is a great old school RPG with a gripping storyline. You start out the game playing the main character as a young boy following your father around the world. You go on a few adventures with your father going from town to town and eventually a castle helping out people. The storyline and character makeup is totally different than Dragon Quest IV (DQ IV).
You progress through the game in three different time periods as a young boy, a young adult, and as an adult. After you become a young man, some monsters that you beat in battle ask to join your team. You can collect only a certain number of monsters, but they are valuable allies to have throughout the game with their own individual strengths. You can carry extra monsters in your wagon or have the monster trainer keep track of them. The addition of the use of monsters was different than DQ IV.
The game had interesting mini games like slots, slime races, etc. that you could play in the casinos. I only played the board game because you got valuable items when you beat the board game and some good items along the way. You get tickets to play the board game from treasures, pots, etc. throughout the game. You had to buy tokens to play the other games in the casino.
The visual presentation of the game is smooth. The graphics are just sprite based 2D graphics, but they look crisp on the DS. They did a really good job with laying out the towns and dungeons using both the bottom and top screen on the DS. You don't use the stylus pen for anything in this game, but don't forget about the shoulder buttons which are used to rotate the camera. The graphics look the same as DQ IV.
I did not have any issues with the enemy difficulty levels, but I had some issues figuring out where to go next the further I got into the game. I got lost quite a few times trying to figure out where to go next. You can talk to some of the characters in your party, but they did not provide any hints on where to go next. Eventually you get two different types of ships to travel the oceans between the continents, magic power to warp between areas, and other helpful travel devices. The magic warp power was cool except it was hard to figure out which town you needed to go to next. They should have had the location on the map get highlighted, so you had an idea on where you were going. I did not memorize the names, but I had an idea on where in the world I needed to go to next.
This was a great game that was hard to put down. I would overly recommend it to any Dragon Quest fan and anyone else who enjoys a good RPG game. I would also recommend the game to anyone who is an Ichiro Suzuki (Seattle Mariners) baseball fan since he played the game when he was a kid on the Nintendo Famicom.