Dragon Quest V and the End of a 17-Year Journey
(Fleshing out an old story here, so apologies if you've heard parts of it before. Some of it is new, though.)

Dragon Quest V is out in English this week, and I feel like I have to blog about it. (Yes, I know I haven't properly blogged in months, but thankfully it's because work has been keeping me very busy. More on that later.) Apologies for the forthcoming self-indulgent blog post, but self-indulgence is ultimately what blogs are about, right? :)

As some of you probably know, I've been a huge Dragon Quest fan (or Dragon Warrior, back in the day) for many years. I played the four NES games religiously (I maxed my entire party to level 99 in both III and IV -- I have no idea what I was thinking back then), and when it came time for part V on the Super NES, I just couldn't wait for the US release -- I had to get my hands on the Japanese version now. So I somehow scrounged up around $100 (that was a lot for a 17-year old back then!), called up the Die Hard Game Club (yes, that Die Hard Game Club), and ordered myself a copy. This was in November 1992. I had played import games before -- fate determined that I had a local video store that rented out Famicom games with Honeybee adapters when I was like 13, so I was already familiar with the import "scene" -- but Dragon Quest V was the first import I'd actually purchased and made my own. Needless to say, I was excited! But I was also fearful, because the only Japanese I knew at the time was quite literally the katakana character "su" (ス). (It's the first and last character of the Japanese name for "Super Mario Bros.", so I figured it must have something to do with the letter "s". Haha.)

Anyway, I went to the bookstore and picked up a little Webster's Japanese-English pocket dictionary, and I came back determined to get through this game come hell or high water. I ripped out the little hiragana and katakana charts (the two simple forms of the Japanese alphabet) from the back of the dictionary and taped them to the desk in front of me, busted out a notepad so I could write down anything and everything I wanted to remember, and went to work on the game. Somewhere back home I still have dozens of pages of notes -- shop lists in every town, lists of all the equipment, items, spells, monsters and such I encountered, a transcription of Papas (now Pankraz)'s letter to the hero so I could figure out what the heck he was saying, and so on. It was pretty crazy. :)

I played the game regularly for a few months (it was a slow process, what with all that writing). At one point I'd gotten stuck trying to figure out what to do next, so I called Enix's hint line at the time hoping they might have actually played the game and could offer help. To my surprise, the game counselor there -- Rob Jerauld -- was playing too, and helped me through it. We ended up talking a few times over the ensuing weeks, and at one point he actually called *me* for help when I'd surpassed him (definitely a highlight of my kid gaming career -- having a game counselor call me for help, haha). Eventually I finished the game and figured I'd sit back and wait for the English version to come out. Little did I know I'd be waiting 17 years...

(Funny side note: a couple of times when I'd called Enix back then, another counselor named Jake would answer the phone instead. Seemed like a cool guy, always enthusiastic and helpful. Eight years later, I would meet this guy randomly at a gaming meet-up in a bar in Tokyo, and he's now one of my closest friends in the world. Life is so bizarre.)

So, getting back to my little DQV love-in, the point of all this is that something really fortunate happened while I was playing the game: My fandom for the series led to me learning how to read and write hiragana and katakana -- almost by accident -- during the course of my playthrough. I never set out to learn Japanese -- I just wanted to play the game. :) But what happened was, my eyes were opened to the concept of learning a foreign language (I'd never really considered it before -- I snoozed my way through six years of Spanish in school and don't remember much more than a couple of greetings and a stupid song about donkeys and toothaches), and I began to take interest in the Japanese language and Japanese culture. I eventually got a job in the game industry, and...well, there's a whole lot of detail I could blabber on about between that point and today, but the point of all this is that basically, playing Dragon Quest V in Japanese ultimately led me to where I am now -- living and working in Japan (for eight years now), co-running a Japanese game localization company (ahem, go buy Fire Emblem: Shadow Dragon or preorder Star Ocean: The Last Hope today!), and basically living out that little 17-year-old game nerd's dream. If I had to trace it all back to one defining point in my life, I'd say it was probably the day I decided to import Dragon Quest V. :)

I guess this post is my way of saying thanks. I've written about my love affair with DQV before in past blogs (last one was in 2004, I think), but never in this much detail. And now that the game is finally available in English, it just seemed like a good time to celebrate. Much like the kid protagonist in DQV whose entire life unfolds throughout the course of the game, I feel like one chapter of my own journey can finally be put to bed now, and it's a really great feeling. :)

Ah, but first, I guess I should complete the game in English, huh?