Dragon Quest 5

[Dracos]

In the days of yore, a brilliant marketing expert decided that America was unprofitable.  Talking to his shadowy masters, he convinced them that their games would have a higher profit margin selling only in Japan.  They, listening, took their next game, a tale of a young boy becoming a great prophet and the adventures he'd witness, and never ever released it over here.

And so Final Fantasy took over uncontested as the dominant RPG on consoles in America while Dragon Quest 5 continued to build the fervor in Japan for the games that would dare to ask: "Congratulations!  You're a father!" "Yes/No?"

Anyhow, Dragon Quest 5 was the leap of the DQ series from the Nintendo Entertainment system to the Super Nintendo Entertainment system.  It brought in a nice streamlining of the traditional menu by providing a 'do what is appropriate' button that allows players to simply ignore the menus a good deal of the time.  Contrary to the earlier DQ games, this one heavily focused around monsters.  You play a good deal of the game by yourself as a monster training, gathering monsters to your stable and training them to help you in battle.  Most players will find that they end up with more monsters by the end of the game as options than actual humans.  This is somewhat a pain in the fact it'd be nice to have a better developed human cast (Almost the entirety of the human cast is your family) but at the same time it gives a pretty solid guarentee that about any time you can count on having backup characters that won't leave for any story based reason.

The graphics are a level above the previous eras graphics, but not particularly awe inspiring.  They are Akira Toriyama's usual fare, well detailed, cute or horrifying, and very colorful.

The music is okay, not Koichi Sugiyama's best work, but hardly his worst.

The real unique aspect of the game is it really covers a decent timeframe, following the hero from being a kid, to a slave, to a monster trainer, to a married man, to the father of the legendary hero.  Even without the hero ever speaking, it goes over a fairly large amount of on screen development.  Not an awesome game, but cool if you have the free time to play it.

Dracos

[Ragnar]

http://www.dejap.com/

These guys have a completed translation patch, if'n you be the type of person to do that kind of thing. Not that there's anything wrong with it.