The Dragon Quest video game series is one of my all-time favourite when it comes to RPG's. I've spent hundreds if not thousands of hours playing the games and there is always something new to find in them due to the humongous amounts of worldbuilding and intriguing character dialogue. At the end of last year, year 2019, I heard about the upcoming animated TV series by Toei Animation and it got me wanting to replay some of the Dragon Quest games I never really bothered to finish, such as DQIX: Sentinels of the Starry Skies for Nintendo DS (I never finished the game because the game doesn't have any actual side characters even though those are one of the best aspect of Dragon Quest games. Very disappointing in that aspect but the game is entertaining for the first 10 or so hours).Akira Toriyama is such a legendary artist. He's the designer of all the Dragon Quest games, Chrono Trigger game and the Dragon Ball manga series. All three of these series Toriyama has designed are all known as masterpieces and there's no doubt his inclusion in the works is what elevates a basic form of art to become something more than just a decent RPG or a manga series. Dragon Quest XI is the latest one to come out in the game series and I've been blown away by Toriyama's character designs. The cast in XI is the best looking out of any series I've seen, not because of details in the art but understanding of what makes a character stand out. The designs aren't too busy looking and they aren't bland either. The perfect balance. Every time I think of a good JRPG I visualize Toriyama's designs first, rest after.
Anyway, enough of that. DQ: Your Story (2019) is a 3D movie based on the Dragon Quest franchise's fifth installation, Dragon Quest V: Hand of the Heavenly Bride. The film has been directed by Takashi Yamazaki who is also taking part in directing the next 3D Lupin the III movie. As I meantioned earlier I heard at the end of last year that a new Dragon Quest animated TV series is coming out in 2020 and literally yesterday heard that this film exists on Netflix so I thought this film was that 2D series, but now that I watched this and checked out the news of that animated series, that's actually another thing entirely called Dragon Quest: Dai no Daibouken that's airing this Fall. Not sure if it'll be added to Netflix's collection but I hope so.
Your Story tells the story of a Hero, the son of King Pankraz who knows how to use a sword in battle. The movie moves at a breakneck speed to explain the beginning of the story. We get to see all the young characters, Bianca (most famous waifu in Dragon Quest) and the Hero's prince friend who drops out of the film at around halfway mark. There's also some really cool directing being used in this movie to showcase the old 2D Dragon Quest 5 game being played before we move on to the actual 3D part of the movie. In the movie papa Pankraz soon falls to the hands of the evil demon lord and loses his life. The demon lord kidnaps the young hero and offers him to become a slave that works for him until the day he dies. The Hero and his friend prince spent 10 years as slaves until they make their escape via a barrel and the help of a certain medicinal artist doctor.
Dragon Quest V is known to be one of those original JRPG's with a romance storyline, which is one of its strongest selling points. The idea is that at the end of the story you get to pic which character you want to marry, which is basically what Dragon Quest VIII: Journey of the Cursed King (Switch ver.) and Dragon Quest XI: Echoes of an Elusive Age (Switch ver.) have been doing nowadays.
The story of the movie thus moves from the escape situation to another town where a story arc takes place in which the Hero has to defeat a monster and get the holy sword that only the chosen one can wield. The price for defeating the monster is the hand of the princess of that kingdom, in other words the King promises to let the Hero marry the princess. The Hero manages to get the sword but he soon realizes that he's not the chosen one as the sword won't budge from the hilt.
Back at the kingdom, the Hero meets up with his old friend Bianca. Bianca is now a beautiful young blonde woman that knows how to fight. Bianca helps the Hero to propose to the princess, which he does, but due to certain love potion plotline, the Hero wakes up in the middle of the night and realizes that he actually doesn't want to marry the princess - he wants to marry Bianca who has stayed back at the bar the whole night where they celebrated the upcoming wedding of the Hero and the princess of the kingdom. The hero proposes to Bianca instead and tells the King the truth. The King is a bit angry but accepts the Hero's will to marry someone else but they fabricate a reality in which the King is supposedly furious at the Hero for not marrying his daughter.
Bianca and the Hero live their lives happily until their new son is born. The holy sword the hero found at the kingdom is starting to shake lately and the Hero tells Bianca that he's going on a journey to find the chosen one who can wield the blade. The blade's purpose is to be able to defeat the evil demon lord that killed the Hero's father. We learn that the Hero's mother is also kept at bay by the Demon Lord who wants to use the mother's power to open a sacred gateway. Anyway, the hero comes in contact with the Demon Lord and gets defeated - and petrified; in other words, the Hero gets turned into a stone statue by the demon lord as the demon lord kidnaps Bianca. There's a creepy scene where the demon lord is touching the Hero and admiring how beautiful the stone statue looks.
The Demon Lord takes Bianca to where the Hero's mother is at. The mother has spent decades inside a barrier, in a coma, so that the demon lord would not get his hands on her. The demon lord reveals that Bianca and the Hero's mother share the same blood of special ancestors and that's why they're able to talk with each other. The demon lord then makes Bianca an offer: talk with the Hero's mother and make her get rid of the barrier, and after doing so the demon lord promises to let her go back to her living son. Bianca talks with the Hero's mother a bit by communicating by telepathy but she then starts to fight the demon lord and she also gets petrified and turned into a stone statue.
Eight years pass and a young boy finds a holy wand that he uses to free the Hero from being a stone statue. The Hero then realizes that the young boy is his and Bianca's son, who's somewhat grown up now. The two of them then decide to journey to where Bianca went to save her and the Hero's mother.
At the final valley we get to see the Hero's mother in her barrier and Bianca as a stone statue. The heroes save Bianca quickly with the wand but the mother asks them to leave as the demon lord has amassed a massive amount of power in the past eight years; power so massive that it's capable of destroying the entire world. The demon lord then manages to finally charge an attack powerful enough to destroy the barrier holding the Hero's mother, but after doing so, the mother dies in the hand of the Hero and the way to open the sacred gate is lost forever.
The hero then decides to pick his blade and fight the demon lord in an epic battle. We get to see Bianca, the Hero and their son throw a huge amount of spells that are used in the game series, all the way from Woosh to Kaswoosh (wind spell) to Frizzle and Kafrizzle (fire spells), and Thwack spells (insta-kill mechanism that has a low percentage of actually hitting and causing the insta-kill). The heroes get pushed into a corner and the Hero throws his son the holy sword by accident to realize that he's actually the chosen one to be able to use the sword. Later on the heroes manage to defeat the demon lord with their combined efforts but the movie changes there from how I as a watcher invisioned it to be like and we get to learn what Your Story title actually means for the film.
The truth of Your Story
It's revealed that the film is actually about a guy who has spent his life playing Dragon Quest V and he got into a simulation in which he himself becomes the Hero. The ending is supposed to show us what we as players of Dragon Quest want to experience pretty much and the powerful nostalgia that these games give us.
As a final battle there's a virus program in the simulation of Dragon Quest V and the virus attempts to erase the entire world. The player manages to defeat the virus with the help of a slime who's been with him since the beginning of the game. The player as the Hero then gets to the ending credit scenes and manages to finish the game before leaving the simulation. The end.
This movie is really well made. There is visible effort in everything from the animation to the script to the voice acting and the presentation, as a videogame adaptation it's amazing. Sadly as a movie it has its flaws. This film is literally made for Dragon Quest V fans. You're supposed to know the story inside-out to see the easter eggs and appreciate it. The pacing of the movie is hella fast, it just jumps far too much for anyone to really get into what's going on. The emotional scenes don't really hit but the implications of what this movie is (a nostalgic player simulation experience) is actually very emotional. The soundtrack used in the film was the symphonic suite of the Dragon Quest games which is amazing. From a visual standpoint this film is nigh flawless even if not Akira Toriyama style, it still manages to capture a lot of the original feel to it.
We sadly don't get to see Bianca's daughter in this movie and the final villain is kind of whatever, the dragon quest games always have these demon lords to defeat but what makes the games fantastic is the journey to the end, for example in Dragon Quest 8, the ruthless serial killer theme and the emotional value along with the heavy worldbuilding is what makes that game perfect. These demon lords are made for the games, not movies by any means. There's a lot I could say about this film still but I hope people just keep on supporting the series as always until we get more masterpiece games from this series. There are many series that get shafted as they get too popular, Sonic the Hedgehog being one of those examples, but Dragon Quest has never fallen off thus far and the amount of effort put into this movie or the entertainment value that's found in the Dragon Quest Builders spinoff games prove my point. Dragon Quest goes on very strong, and I expect it to get even better in the future.
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