The groundbreaking Dragon Quest V turns 30 today. Now that JRPGs and Dragon Quest as a series are bigger than ever over here, it's time to give this game a chance to shine in North America.
released there the next year, on the aging NES, looking ancient in comparison in a number of ways.would also show up internationally, again in 1992, but it was still over two-and-a-half years on from its Japanese release and was once again on the NES, which wasn’t any younger in October than it had been in July: it sold just 80,000 copies in North America, despite 3.1 million sales in Japan alone.
Now you’re suddenly in charge of everywhere you’re doing after being shown the ropes over the first few hours of the game. New systems emerge—you now can recruit monsters to battle alongside you, which also means you can collect a small army of them to swap in and out depending on your needs—and you’ll find yourself meeting prospective wives, who double as prospective mothers of your children.
, a producer for Enix of America in the early ‘90s, he recalled that it was deemed “ too expensive” by Enix of Japan to localizeDragon Warrior Vin Japan, but the closure of Enix of America kept that from occurring, despite it, per Jerauld, actually being localized and ready to go.
It won’t—can’t—because the moment where it could have been the game that helped make Dragon Quest hugely popular in North America, too, is now three decades past. JRPGs are having a renaissance, but other than in select cases, they aren’t the system-moving titles they were in the heyday of both Square and Enix. Still, there’s hope.