Trivia / Dragon Quest V

• Ascended Fanon:
  • Some dialogue and bookcases reference Dragon Quest IV despite Word of God saying they weren't intended to be linear sequels. Despite even in the original the Disk One Big Bad from DQIV is the Superboss at the end of the Bonus Dungeon, and Zenithia, Zenith Dragon, and the Zenithian Sword all carry over from Dragon Quest IV.
  • At one point in the game you run into a scholar who's studying evolution. He calls himself a psarologist. Psaro was the Big Bad of the fourth game and was searching for the Secret of Evolution.
  • The DS remake of DQVI has an NPC in Reaper's Peak explicitly state that DQIV is the near future of the same world, and DQV is the far future of it, and the Zenith Dragon hatches from its egg in the ending of that game.
• Fan Translation: Prior to the Nintendo DS Remake this was the only way to play Dragon Quest V in English. In 2002, the final SNES translation patch was released and received with much joy, and in 2010, what many thought to be impossible happened: the PS2 version got a complete translation patch, an achievement to be proud and thankful of, due how ungodly hard and time consuming is to translate and patch a PS2 game. No wonder Dragon Quest V for PS2 remains as one of the very few, and well known, originally Japan Only PS2 games to ever be graced with a translation patch.
• No Export for You: The original SNES version didn't get an overseas release, due at least in part to the fact that the game's programming was such a mess that it wasn't considered to be worth the effort and money to localize it for a market to which the Dragon Quest series was still relatively obscure. At that point in time, Dragon Quest had consistently floundered in competition against Final Fantasy overseas, while in Japan, it triumphed over Final Fantasy quite a lot. Then comes the PS2 Remake. While the franchise had managed to gain some ground outside Japan at this point, the PS2 remake of Dragon Quest V still didn't get an international release. Only in 2008 could the rest of the world (legally) enjoy Dragon Quest V in non-Japanese languages with the release of its Nintendo DS remake.
• Remade for the Export: The Nintendo DS remake was the first version to be released outside of Japan.
• Urban Legend of Zelda:
  • A popular rumor among Japanese players at the time of the game's release was that Estark would join the player's party if he was defeated within a certain number of turns. While this isn't true, it eventually led to two cases of Ascended Fanon of sorts, with the Superboss of Dragon Quest VI teaming up with the heroes if defeated quickly enough and Estark's son Starkers becoming a recruitable character after Estark is defeated in remakes of the game.
  • For many years there was a persistent rumor on the internet that on original game on the Super Nintendo (which never made it out of Japan), that if the player chose "wrongly" in the Love Triangle by marrying Nera instead of Bianca, various characters would be hit with Diabolus ex Machina — Bianca's ill father will succumb to Death by Despair, Bianca herself would be forced to eke out a living as an abused barmaid, Nera's Unlucky Childhood Friend Crispin would be miserable, and that Nera is near-useless in battle on top of this (Can't level up past LV 10 and is uncontrollable during the second generation in the SFC Version). This myth went un-busted until September 2014, when Dragon's Den, the largest English-language Dragon Quest fan site, tracked down a video of a play-through where the player marries Nera and none of this happens. Dragon's Den proceeded to trace the source of the rumor and found it originated as a dark joke in one of the first online FAQs for the game, which predates even the first fan translation; since this FAQ was many Western players' first experience with DQV, it was taken at face value, and thus nobody married Nera to verify the claim for years.

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