DQV: Beaten. Good game all-in-all, I wish more games extended over generations. Gets a thumbs up from me. Charged the final dungeon, and... it wasn't too bad. Especially thanks to Sage's Stone abuse (DQ3 had the sense to give you this only right before the final boss, basically). Also, DQV gets the "Wow, insulate is the most useful I've ever seen it" award. Almost all the big bosses later in the game have some sort of MT Fire / Ice move, and it's usually this move + bad luck that can cause you to wipe. Insulate defangs this massively, so Parry got used to casting Insulate at the beginning of all boss battles and after dispel waves. Not enough consistent double-acting from bosses, either, unlike DQ8 - lots seem to only double-act 50% of the time or so, which is deadly to them. Final party was Hero / Parry / Slime Knight / Madchen, with Saber the most commonly swapped in backrow member (which was still not THAT common).
My biggest mostly non-spoilery complaint about the game is villainy, or, more specifically, villainous motivations. Sure, the villains do some very bad things in the course of the game, but Wilbur's mother has issues I already mentioned (though she has motivation at least!), and the only other human villain in the game has no motivation given to him at all. The monstrous villains want to crush the world 'cause that's what they do. The way they play Ladja and Grandmaster Nimzo - the two biggest threats - isn't great either, mostly hyping their unstoppable power. Why is Nimzo getting more powerful? Who knows, but he is, oh noes, who can possibly do anything?! Ladja is better, he's definitely both pragmatic and a sadist, but still, meh. Dramatically, someone just being super-powerful isn't terribly interesting. As an utterly random example, Loki in Valkyrie Profile is your jealous / vengeful /tricky half-god who steals an artifact of incredible power to become super-powerful and mess the world up. He's hardly my favorite villain but he's doing something and is in the driver's seat for his own plot. Rather than saying "he's becoming more powerful!" show how he's becoming more powerful.
In spoilery complaints... The scene with Mada was a cheap trick to get sentiment. First, WTF lightning bolts of doom on her from Nimzo? If he can kill people from far away with his lightning bolts why doesn't he do it to YOUR party? They should have left it as Ladja doing the murder. Second why are the monsters even doing this?! Didn't they go to great trouble to kidnap her, and don't they still need her to open gates? Nimzo babbles something about how he's so awesomely powerful now he doesn't need Mada anymore. WTF? Either Nimzo is an idiot, or else your mother was an idiot when she told you not to bother coming to Nadira because she'd kill herself before opening the gates wide enough to let Nimzo through. I don't like either of these options. If Mada needed to die then so be it, but don't cheat me out of my big quest for such a bad reason. I'd much have preferred Mada helping you out in some great way, forcing Ladja to kill her, and then, say, Nimzo killing Ladja for destroying his only hope of escaping Nadira. Or otherwise getting mad and saying "Now the plan has been set back 100 years!" Eh. The point is, if you're going to kill a character, please think about how you're doing it a bit more.
Also mentioned this in chat but looked at some Youtube vids of the SNES version and oh lordy are the graphics bad. They look exactly like NES graphics! Complete with stolen sprites! I am not a graphics whore but come on. I checked the release date and 1992 was still kinda early in the SNES's history (year 2, basically) but not THAT early. What happened here, guys. (Wonder if DQV actually being a good game anyway + retro graphics might have been what set the Japanese DQ fans into the mind of "Dragon Quest must never ever change!" Whatever, the DS version actually looks good and has polish so whatever.)
Anyway, back to Legend of Zelda Twilight Princess: GameCube edition. Floating city dungeon next, mm.
