Dragon Quest V: Hand of the Heavenly Bride

About Dragon Quest V: Hand of the Heavenly Bride

Dragon Quest V (1992) is Chunsoft and Enix's Super Famicom role-playing game spanning about thirty years of one hero's life, the first in the series to let defeated monsters join the party, and Japan's best-selling game of 1992.

Dragon Quest V: Hand of the Heavenly Bride in Depth

The game uses the series' familiar systems, with experience levels, first-person turn-based battles and weapons and armour, but adds monster taming: after a battle, a defeated monster may ask to join the Hero if the party is strong enough, and recruited monsters fight and level up like human characters. Forty monsters can join in the Super Famicom version. A wagon from Dragon Quest IV holds party members not in the field, the tactics system returns with the option to control allies manually throughout, and up to three characters fight at once. After the ending, the series' first bonus dungeon opens.

The story follows the Hero for some thirty years, from his birth onwards. As a six-year-old he travels with his father Pankraz, until Pankraz is killed by Ladja of the Order of Zugzwang, a religious group serving dark forces, and the Hero and Prince Harry are sold into slavery to build a great temple. Escaping ten years later, he sets out to learn his father's secrets and find his mother, Madalena, said to have died after his birth. He must choose a bride, his childhood friend Bianca or the gentle Nera; becomes king of Gotha; is turned to stone for eight years; and discovers that the Legendary Hero his father sought is his own son.

Making Dragon Quest V: Hand of the Heavenly Bride

As with the rest of the series, Yuji Horii wrote the scenario, Akira Toriyama drew the art, given outlined sprites for a manga look, and Koichi Sugiyama composed the music. As the first mainline Dragon Quest on the Super Famicom, it had much improved graphics and sound, and it was Chunsoft's last game in the series before the studio turned to its own projects. It was released in Japan in 1992 with 300,000 pre-orders.

It was Japan's top-selling game from October to November 1992 and the best-selling home game of the year, pushing up demand and prices for the Super Famicom, and by 1993 had sold 2.8 million cartridges in Japan. Famitsu gave it 36 out of 40, one of its three highest-rated games of 1992, and Gamasutra later praised its coming-of-age story as never "executed so magnificently". Its monster recruiting influenced later games and the Dragon Quest Monsters series. Remakes followed on the PlayStation 2 in 2004 and the DS in 2008, which added a third bride, Debora, whom Horii called a character "nobody in their right mind would pick!"