Remakes are a good thing generally as they give a chance to play some games that were never released in your territory. The case in point being Dragon Quest V, which was released on the SNES in 1992. There’s little chance you played it unless you did something dodgy with a ROM and sat with a translation guide, and probably yet another guide so you didn’t miss anything.. More fool you if you did, all you had to do was wait 17 years to play it properly.

Graphically it’s much improved because the DS is a good bit more powerful than the SNES and having two screens means you get to see a lot more of the towns and dungeons than you usually would, which helps when you’re on a treasure hunt. There was more than one occasion when the top screen revealed a room that went previously unexplored because it wasn’t on the bottom screen.
As it’s a remake, the gameplay is very simple and as it’s a JRPG, it’s pretty much what you’d expect from the genre. Two things you mightn’t expect are both the walking speed of your character and the encounter rate – both are incredibly high. Your little hero, who is only a kid when he starts out, zooms along at a fantastic rate which would be brilliant and get you through dungeons very quickly if it weren’t for the constant random battles.

It can get a bit infuriating when you’re being held up by yet another fight especially when you’re inches away from a treasure chest but if you do a little grinding at the start of the game and save up your money for some decent weaponry – I.E. the boomerang - then you can get through the battles easily, all the while earning experience. Leveling up is pleasantly frequent, adding to your strength stat which in turn lets you kill enemies quicker. Occasionally your character or teammates will learn a new skill which usually improves your battle skills a lot.

Story wise there’s a lot going on. You see your hero’s birth, and his childhood before something terrible happens and it fast forwards to when you’re all grown up. It’s an interesting device which adds to the charm of the tale and your involvement with the character, even though he never says a thing, which is on par with the other Dragon Quest games.

At this point we’d just like to remind you that unlike a lot of RPGs, when you die it’s not game over as you’ll appear at your last save point with all the experience and items you earned, but, you’ll lose some of your money. Don’t do as we did and turn the DS off in disgust and shame because you’d just died and then lose the last three hours of your game. That was annoying, but our own stupid fault.

It’s actually quite surprising that Dragon Quest V is that old because it’s very charming, accessible and good fun to play. Maybe that’s the power of the remake.