Yuji-Horii

What a weekend! It started with a craving to see Inception on an IMAX screen and was filled with slime and questing. Some quick words on both. Inception I don’t think it has quite enough to supplant The Dark Knight as my favorite Nolan film, but it’s certainly up there with his best work. The less you know about Inception, the better. Seriously. I’ll have something more substantial up later, but for now I want to stay relatively spoiler free. All I’ll say is that Tom Hardy is now definitely on my radar, Ellen Page did precisely what I love in her movies without being a pretentious-seeming teen like in Juno, Joseph Gordon-Levitt was fantastic and hilarious in a role much better than in (500) Days of Summer, DiCaprio continues to impress with his post- Titanic roles, Marion Cotillard has, like Tom Hardy, become one of my new favorites, and Ken Watanabe was also fantastic, if unintelligible, in the movie. Special mention to Dileep Rao for bringing humor and eccentricity to an otherwise tiny role. His tiny quirks made Yusef a funny character to witness. ...

Dragon Quest is inexorably tied to the Japanese video game space. The series was the first big hit RPG and its core qualities, simplicity, relative ease, and lightheartedness touched that first generation and continue to bring the same degree of fondness with each installment. It is unquestionably the premiere mega-franchise of Japan. Somehow it just never caught on in the states. In the states we play Final Fantasy. ...

[caption id="" align=“aligncenter” width=“500” caption=“Some of Toriyama’s famous and iconic monster designs”][/caption] There are these little moments in Dragon Quest that are so lighthearted and ridiculous in the context of the tension of the narrative that I can’t help but laugh out loud. Tasked with re-entering the fairy kingdom to find a replacement Golden Orb, I noticed a cat outside a house. I don’t often talk to the animals in RPGs, but I’m sometimes struck with the desire to do so. This time the cat actually spoke. He told Dan that he was a magician disguised as a cat trying to get access to the fairy kingdom and asked Dan not to blow his cover. It’s tiny and insignificant, but it’s the little details like this that make me love Dragon Quest V. Yuji Horii is all about the small things. ...

After yet another long hiatus in this series, we continue where we left off: Dan, his children, and Sancho are en route to the hometown of Dan’s mother, Mada, but have decided to take a few detours along the way to see some of the people Dan hadn’t seen in the eight years he was a statue. At one point Dan went into an inn in Whealbrook and had a nice chat with an old lady. Incidentally, her only line of dialog was to tell me that whenever hard times struck, she was able to get by thanks to being able to watch her daughter grow up. I wanted to laugh at how pointed the comment was, but I found myself struck by how tragic it was that Dan was denied that simple pleasure. Here was Yuji Horii reminding me that family is something worth fighting for, especially considering that Dan had next to no childhood and didn’t get to raise his own children either. ...

Well I wrote this already once, but the internet managed to lose it thanks to some internet problems. So here we go again. When we last left Dan, his children and Sancho had just discovered his statued form face down, the world going to hell all around him. I can’t even imagine what it must have felt like for Dan to see Sancho roll up with what could only be his children eight years after their birth. ...

Life continues to be difficult for our intrepid hero, Dan. Quick recap: After killing one of his father’s murderers, Dan and his wife, Debora, were turned into living statues by another of Dan’s father’s murderers, Bishop Ladja. They were then found by treasure hunters and Dan was sold to the rather rich Porgie family. At this point, I don’t think his life could get much worse. Oh wait, how about if Dan had to spend the next eight years as a statue. That’s bad enough, but here’s the real kicker. Horii goes and twists the knife once it’s inside your heart with one simple twist. Mr. Porgie bought Dan for a reason. Dan is intended to be a good luck gift for his newborn son, Georgie. The emotional twist is that Dan is forced to watch Georgie grow up before his very eyes, in lieu of his own progeny. ...

After last week’s cliffhanger I’m sure that it’s pretty easy to guess that Dan’s wife, Debora has been kidnapped. Way less predictable, the infants were left unharmed and within the walls of the castle. It initially seemed odd to me that such a mistake would be made by the villains, but then again, traveling or abducting someone with infants in tow seems a lot harder and like it might be easier to get noticed. Also obvious was the chancellor’s involvement in the plot. Yuji Horii’s narrative stance on traitors seems to be a bit on the disapproving side, as the monsters double-crossed the chancellor and left him for dead in a rural cathedral. His last moments were spent begging the hero for forgiveness. ...

If you couldn’t already guess, a midwife/doctor type confirmed that Debora was not only pregnant, but quite far along. It brings up the tricky point of time in these video games. What seemed like hours traveling around the world map in my control must have been nine months, because Deb is apparently ready to pop. It makes sense, considering the scale of the map and the modes of transportation, but without an outright statement of “Nine Months Later” (too obvious), I find myself pulled out of the narrative a bit. Speaking of getting pulled out of his narrative, Dan is summoned down to see King Albert, prematurely ending the joyous discovery. ...

It doesn’t take a genius to guess that Debora’s probably pregnant. I may have mentioned this before, but at any point in Dragon Quest V, the player can choose to have the main character chat with the members of his party. Dan spoke with Debora and she all but confirmed her impending motherhood with a “You know…I might be…never mind, let’s go.” Further travels to Gotha are marked with few noteworthy events. Now that Dan is rather close to Gotha, he hears from the populace about the king Panrkaz whose travels took him away from his kingdom for near twelve years now. No one seems to know he’s dead. Dan’s mother even makes an appearance in some of the dialogue as some townspeople remark on Dan’s resemblance to Madalena. The recently married Dan is also offered marriage advice by some of the NPCs he speaks with, just to hammer home that family theme. ...

I like being surprised by a narrative. Too often, especially when it comes to video games, it’s always the same predictable plot twists and points. This was a point where Dan, the player, and Dan, the character, were both stunned at a convention being broken. It seems that Dan is most definitely not the hero of legend. The Zenithian helmet doesn’t fit Dan and Cleohatra is not willing to just loan it to him with the hopes that he’ll eventually run into the hero of legend. She sends Dan off to his previously unknown hometown of Gotha with the intent to track down the leads that Pankraz was following. ...