Dragon Quest: The Hand of the Heavenly Bride

[DANGERMAN]

or Dragon Quest V as it was.

I've only played about an hour, so in rpg terms I'm probably still well into the intro. In fact I'm a little kid at the minute and the box art shows you as a teenager, so I'm guessing there's a split at some point where you grow up.

Gameplay is just Dragon Quest, except maybe even more (how to say this without it sounding like a dig at it)... quirky. As you walk along you get into random fights, in these fights you get a first person view with the enemies all lined up, then you select attack/defend/magic/items/flee/etc. Thing is, if you're faced with say, 2 slimes and a rat, you can select to attack the rat or both the slimes i.e. it groups enemies of a similar type so you cant choose to attack a specific enemy. It's not a massive problem, but it does mean that your damage is more spread out over multiple turns.

I think it's probably because you're a kid early on, but you dont die when you're defeated, instead you keep everything you've earned and end up back at the town where you're told to go and rest. It's pretty good for easing you in, I doubt I'd have got through the first cave otherwise, but I still circled around near the town to get into fights (before going home and resting) to level up my second character.

The scripts really good too, I've come accross a character who talks like the count from Seseme street, and a guy I think is supposed to be spanish, but his accent is italian

I'm really enjoying it so far, I guess if you've played loads of DQ it's just more of the same, but I've only ever played 2 of them and never got all that far in either.

[DANGERMAN]

Got to say I'm really enjoying this, maybe even more than Chrono Trigger

I'm about 10 hours or so in now, I'm an adult and I can now capture monsters. TBH the monster catching is a bit of a mixed blessing, DQ5 is like Chrono Trigger in that your party is constantly changing, you spend a bit of time levelling people up and getting to know their character, then they leave and you're back to square one. Being able to use monsters (who ask to join you after the fight sometimes) means you can pad out your party early on, and it's not as though you have to constantly get rid of them like in the Shin Megami games, I've still got a Jail Cat who was in the first batch of monsters I aquired in my team, he's pretty handy too.

When monsters join you they likely wont obey you for a while (need to up their wisdom), again this is a pain and the worst for it is your own pet who just keeps defending when he should be attacking, but you can leave them out of your main party and they'll still gain experience as you fight. Everyone you sign starts at level one, some are more useful than others at this point, but you can buy weapons and armour for them to get them battle ready, and frequently having characters levelling up keeps things interesting.

Anyway I really recommend this, it still feels like i'm in the early stages, and the larger plot is being completed ignored as I wander from town to town, so maybe the narritive will need to pick up a bit later on, but if it's the kind of game that gets to 100 hours then it might be best to hold the proper story back a bit

[illdog]

I bought this of a mate who got two copies in the post, i really want to crack it open and have a go but i need to finish Apollo Justice (yea, still) and ChronoTrigger (yea, still) first.

U still playin this Benjito?

[DANGERMAN]

Yeah, I'm pretty near the end i think, although that could still be hours. I might try to get it done tonight then give it a year or so before playing another DQ game

It's not bad, in fact it starts off really good, it just turns into a bit of a chore when it gets convoluted or requires a bit of grinding

[DANGERMAN]

Finally finished this, I was expecting an arse kicking from the last boss, but it was more a battle of wills (i.e. it took about 45 minutes). It was quite tough getting to it though, again more to do with the length of the journey than any particular fight being too hard, would have been nice to have a save point somewhere along the way.

I know I've bitched about it elsewhere, but I have enjoyed it, it's just a little too long for itself. But then that's what some people will love about it

[Maf]

Hey

 

So I tried this game years ago and distinctly remember getting my shit pushed in at the haunted mansion right at the beginning and giving up pretty much immediately (It’s a hour or so in)

 

But, having been a recent DQ convert and remember people speaking highly of this one, and after all it’s been a very long time and I’ve got better at games so I thought I would give it another go and what do you know, I still got my shit pushed in. 

 

There’s a staged fight early in the mansion that it turns out you’re supposed to lose. Pretty sure originally I didn’t know that, got beat down, and gave up. Today I got beat down again realised I was meant to lose so kept going. Got a couple of fights in and got fucking smashed by a group of enemies. Like obliterated. I was mad! But I ain’t stress. 

 

Mostly because it provided me with my 3rd favourite new DQ enemy 

 

 

He is called Wax Murderer. 

 

Look at this fucking guy.

 

Anyway, I was like fuck it. I’m just going to have to grind it out. So I literally spent 40 or so minutes levelling up outside the mansion just so I could fight what was in it. Then I spent roughly the same amount of time grinding in the mansion to a point where I was winning fights reliably. Even after the levelling up outside upon entry I was still finishing fight but my characters were crawling away from them. 

 

After a few rinse and repeats I went back to town and realised I had also got cash so I bought all the best weapons and armour and just creamed everybody. Oh, it was so fun. Fuck your ghosts. 

 

Anyway, after nearly 3 hours play time it turns out DQ5 is really fucking good. I now have a Golden Orb, a pet Sabrecat, a full silver tea pot set I don’t know what to do with, and I met a girl ghost in a basement and she took me to Faerie Land. 

 

Wax Murderer oh my god that is so good! 

 

[DANGERMAN]

What a game. The best Dragon Quest and one of my favourite games OF ALL TIME 

[Maf]

5 hours in and have just had the time skip. Not much to talk about gameplay wise, so far so DQ. But the story does things in real interesting ways in which I wouldn’t expect. The way they show you how Pankraz dies, the reveal he leaves you with, wondering what that means in reference to the name of the game. 

 

DQ9 is very vague in my memory and DQ11 has some ad and serious parts, but I didn’t realise DQ could get as ‘dark’ as this (lightened by the graphics and stuff but still engaging) 

 

I do not trust these nuns 

[Maf]

@DANGERMAN So it turns out this game has a monster catching system in it. Is this relevant at all and needs to be played properly or are monsters there just to fill out the party when characters are unavailable?

[DANGERMAN]

It's not the whole game iirc but it's worth trying to get some better ones. If I remember right I had the cat with me for hours, I can't remember if that had the heal spell, if it did then that'll be why

[Maf]

So turns out you should always trust the nuns. 

 

After escaping slavery with Prince Harry we pottered around a bit to find out that Coburg, Harry’s old kingdom, had become despotic and mean because RPG’s, and somehow Harry’s half brother sitting on the throne couldn’t tell the difference or didn’t notice that a monster pretending to be his mum threw his real mum in the dungeons. And the only way to know the mum in the dungeon was the real one outside of obviousness was to get a magic mirror that reveals the real self. 

 

I had had to go to a tower cleverly called Tower Abovital But couldn’t get access because only monks can get in. So I wandered around for ages exploring all the different towns in both their day time and night time states to look for a monk/monks and came up empty handed. Eventually I went back to the church with the nuns to save and heal and just as I was about to consult Google I randomly spoke to a nun next to a pipe organ and she said? “Oh you mean the Tower down the road? Yeah, only we can get in there”

 

Jeez. I will say in randomly wandering around I did ‘catch’ lots of monsters and beat a couple of Metal Slimes so that was cool. 

 

Anyway, long story short. Got the mirror, beat the monster queen and am about to get access to a boat and the rest of the map. But saved it for now and will come back to it later.

 

It’s tropey as shit and I might sound like I’m being sarcastic but still loving this game. It’s so fun. 

[Maf]

[Maf]

Embarrassingly I’ve had to go to Google twice now for answers where I got stuck on how to progress the story. The first was when you meet up with Sabre. Sabre is clearly the main character’s monster from when he was a kid, and the fact it can’t be killed, but I could run away from it, and it ‘keeps trying to remember something’, obviously I had to use an item but I had no idea what it is. Turns out I had to use the bow Bianca gave Sabre 5 years ago. Sorry, but I don’t recall that nuance to the story at all. I tried some other items in my inventory but just not that one.

 

The second one is really quickly after and in the town of Monteforester or whatever it’s called. Essentially the answer is you have to talk to 3 particular NPC’s in order to activate a cutscene, and I talked to everybody over and over and even though all the NPC’s are standing next to each other, I don’t know how I was supposed to know that. I tried the usual JRPG of solution of just talk to everybody until something happens or someone says something obvious, but as far as I can tell there was nothing pointing to talking to people in order (And I even did talk to all of them over and over as well, just not in the particular order it wanted). 

 

I’m going to have to try do better, I don’t remember the last time I had to consult a guide for just trying to get through a game ?

[Maf]

So I just got to the choice of which girl to marry and jeez la weez 

 

I picked to marry Debora because it seems liked the worst possible choice and I wanted to see how the game reacted to it, and it does what it said it would do and I ended up marrying her and she’s now in my party. Nuts.

 

Luckily before getting married I saved in the two other slots so I can see how it plays out if you pick the other girls to marry.  

 

I want to go back to the other save slots and still marry the other girls but I think the impact of this choice is not going to reveal itself with just making the choice, if I had to guess I think you have to play a lot of the game to see the impact of what it means to pick one over the other. 

 

Can anyone shed some light on what effect this has on the story without spoilers? Is this permanent, does it change things only in the short term, or does it change the ending, or what? I think ideally I would like to play the game with Bianca because she’s the childhood friend and it makes the most sense (And I promised her dad). But I’ll just keep rolling like this if it doesn’t end up mattering? 

[DANGERMAN]

I honestly can't remember, I'd forgot this was even a thing

[Maf]

This game is fucking nuts!

 

After all the, executed well, but super run of the mill story stuff in the first half of the game the second time skip and everything that leads in to it and out of it is crazy!  

 

Also Sanchez is fast becoming my favourite JRPG character for a long time!

 

 

This game, dude. I can’t wait to see where it goes next. Looks like the party members are about to be really fleshed out as well. 

 

I was really enjoying this game up to this point, but I think I’m starting to see why people walk away from this with really high praise 

[Maf]

I got back in to this last night after not playing it for nearly a month and it’s been really cool. I spent the first hour or so levelling up my children because they were level 5. Thankfully I quickly found a place where there were Liquid Metal Slimes so even though a few escaped after a while the kids were level 25-ish and we were ready to go find Bianca. 

 

I couldn’t remember why exactly but I knew I had to head north and after a bit found a place called Lofty Peaks and found a Magic Key (Which I’ve barely been able to use), a flying carpet (More on that in a sec), and some more story about how the worlds connect and why the monsters kidnapped the hero’s mum. 

 

Then it got a bit bad in that old JRPG way where you just run around randomly trying to find the next thing. The Magic Key hasn’t provided any help in story progress so far and the Magic Carpet, well, if you puzzle it out by looking at the map and places you haven’t had access to, then you do what I did and you figure out, oh, the carpet will get me here and I haven’t explored here yet so here we go. But that took a long time and wasn’t that fun. I also had to consult the fortune teller who told me I was supposed to find a tall tower so with that information and the Carpet I found what I needed and have made progress. 

 

I didn’t really like that, but the exploring did lead me to a lot of very mysterious locations that I don’t know what to do with and even an optional boss that, I wouldn’t say destroyed me, but was very convincing that I could not win that fight. So I’ll come back later. 

 

Overall though this game is bad ass and I’m still really enjoying it. I have acquired a lot of weapons and items now that say they do things in battle if you “use” them and not just equip them like regular weapons so I might take some time out soon and just go through my inventory and work out if anything I have has special properties that will reveal or be the key to unlocking secrets because when it comes to sidequest and whatnot I haven’t found anything, I don’t think, which makes me feel bad at the game. 

 

Also, I guess this is just a regular DQ question, but how do people use seeds? Like seeds that boost your HP stat, or an Attack stat, etc. Do you use them on characters that have weaker stats to balance them out or do you use them on characters that are already strong in those areas to make them even better?

[DANGERMAN]

I tend to keep hold of them for ages, not for any reason it just happens. Then I either spread them around fairly evenly or put them where people need help

[Maf]

I played a few hours of this today and accomplished quite a bit.

• Went back in time
• Raised an underwater city
• Got a flying castle
• I mean I can literally pilot the castle around the map
• Beat Demon Bishop Ladja which was a really hard fight
• Ressurected a dragon god
• Found Bianca (Hero’s wife) who is currently a statue
• Currently trying to storm a castle so I can free Bianca 

For a large part of the game I was slightly over levelled so I had to play a bit smart but was generally pretty good. But then there was a really big bit of the game that became very fetch quest-y, which has been my least liked bit of the game so far, but once I was finally on track I now think I’m a tiny bit underlevelled. Especially since I went from one dungeon, which was pretty tough, to this next dungeon (Last bullet point) and feel like it kicked me in the nuts pretty good. 

 

There is an enemy called a Soulspawn which has a particularly annoying tactic of ‘mimicking’ the party leaders voice and getting all my team to change their tactics. They die pretty quickly but then it becomes this really drawn out thing because everyone starts defending, or buffing or doing pretty much everything but killing the enemies. 

 

I still haven’t found any metal weapons yet that I can use to go grind metal slimes to get tougher. 

 

But yes, now out of the mire of the fetch quest and guessing what story check thing I had to do to activate the next one I’m back on the road and loving the game again