YMMV / Dragon Quest V

• Alternative Character Interpretation: Is Debora really as shallow and deluded about her own beauty as she acts? If not, just how much of her behavior is a front?
• Base-Breaking Character: Sancho. There are those who love him for being a loyal and genuinely nice uncle figure for the protagonist and how he goes through a lot as a side character. Others view him as an Ethnic Scrappy due to his exaggerated Spanish Funetik Aksent.
• Breather Boss: Grandmaster Nimzo, at least in comparison to other final bosses in the franchise. However, he was made harder in the DS version due to players having access to 4 party members instead of merely three.
• Complacent Gaming Syndrome: Of all the monsters you can recruit into your party, the Slime Knight is easily the most common one to see people going after, due to it being a fantastic physical attacker with healing magic that's also able to take a punch, on top of being able to obtain one as soon as monster taming becomes available.
• Complete Monster:
  • Grandmaster Nimzo is the ruler of Nadiria and the leader of the Order of Zugzwang who is imprisoned within Nadiria. To be freed and take over the world, Nimzo would found the order and had his minions kidnap people from across the world to build a temple of him, having them work constantly and under constant abuse at the hands of slave drivers. When the temple is completed, Nimzo either removed the souls of the slaves to become mindless worshipers of him or left them to be eaten by monsters.
  • Nintendo DS remake: Bishop Ladja becomes utterly vile here. In his first scene, he brutally beats the hero and Harry—who are six years old at the time—to within an inch of their lives, laughing sadistically all the while. Then, when the hero's father, Pankraz, arrives to save the day, he threatens to murder the hero if Pankraz tries to fight back against his enforcers. After the enforcers are done beating him, Ladja coldly finishes off the dying Pankraz with a giant fireball, then carts the hero and Harry off to a brutal slave labor camp for over ten years. He kills off one person ahead of him, King Korol, for the power. Finally, he makes sure to wait until the main character reunites with his mother after over 18 years apart to kill said mother, just for maximum emotional impact.
• Demonic Spiders: Beastmasters and Fire Eaters/Ice Breakers ^note  Bloodbonnets and Goobonces . The latter two come in large groups, have high agility and ridiculously strong attacks that could leave your party in serious trouble. Beastmasters can summon a lot of these, and WORSE, if a Beastmaster defends instead of attacking, another Beastmaster shows up right then and there, and unlike most reinforcements, has an instant turn.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • The only reason why Ladja becomes so much more important in the remake is because of how popular he was.
  • Dwight "Da White" Dwarf also goes from a memorable Warmup Boss from the beginning of the game to a full fledged party member.
  • Prince Harry is also very popular for a Guest-Star Party Member, with many wanting to see a version where he permanently joins the team. His massive amounts of Character Development after the first time-skip is a factor to this especially how much of a Nice Guy he has become and is very supportive of the Hero.
  • Tuppence goes from a completely random recruitable generic soldier with weird hair to a wisecracking Casanova Wannabe.
  • Pankraz is also one, mostly for being one of the best fathers ever and a badass at that.
• Fan-Preferred Couple: Many of the remake's players picked Deborah as the protagonist's wife for her looks, Hidden Heart of Gold (which becomes more obvious late in the game in party conversations) and for having some of the funniest dialogue in the game (such as when she tells the priest blessing their wedding to hurry up with his speech).
• Fridge Brilliance:
  • Why did Nera's father have such a hard Engagement Challenge? Because he was expecting Bjorn the Behemoose to break free from its within their lifetime and it would go for their family first. Someone strong had to be able to protect the family.
  • Attempting to read signs and books in the first arc points out that the hero can't read, but he can as of the second arc. When did he learn? Harry taught him during their 10 years as slaves.
• Game-Breaker:
  • In the SNES version, it was apparently possible to hit nothing but criticals and automatically recruit any suitable monster, by giving your hero very specific items (and nothing else, reducing his combat ability). Somewhat lessened by the fact that one of the items is only available very late-game.
  • Several recruitable monsters are encountered early in the second generation who are Disc One Nukes and remain viable party members up to the 3rd generation: The Slime Knight and in the DS remake onwards, the Jailcat from ''Dragon Quest VIII.
• Hilarious in Hindsight:
  • One of the nuns in the Heaven's Above Abbey tells the player "I'm sure there will never again come a time when you are forced to submit to the will of another." Marry Debora, and this is exactly what happens to the hero.
  • In the 1997 manga adaptation, the Hero's daughter is named Sora (or "Sky"). This is five years before fellow Square Enix property Kingdom Hearts was released, where that name belonged not to a girl, but rather to a boy with the Keyblade. Furthermore, both are eventually revealed to be The Unchosen Ones of their respective destinies. Do note that the manga was created over a decade before the DS remake, where she and her brother Ten (or "Heaven") had their Canon Names changed to "Madchen" and "Parry".
  • A villain who's responsible for the death of the Hero's father ^note  At least at first and has 2 flunkies also based on Gozuki & Mezuki would later debut in a game released exactly 2 months, 1 day, and a 1 year after the PS2 remake was released in Japan.
• Ho Yay:
  • Sancho really, really admires Pankraz. (Although he fully supports Pankraz's marriage to Mada.)
  • To a lesser extent, a few fans believe The Hero and Prince Harry's close friendship after the timeskip verges on this at times.
• Iron Woobie: The Hero. He gets Player Punched a lot. A lot. In no short order: he's forced to watch his father die right before his eyes, gets Made a Slave for 10 years of his life, watches his wife get kidnapped, and gets petrified for another 8 years by Ladja. He goes through quite the Trauma Conga Line, but he never once even considers giving up.
• Jerkass Dissonance: Debora is considered a popular option to choose as bride despite being more abrasive in comparison to Bianca and her own sister Nera.
• Love to Hate: Ladja. He's a very entertaining villain, even if his actions are despicable as hell.
• Memetic Molester: Kon the Knight is made into a rapist in many, many hentai doujinshi.
• Moral Event Horizon: Bishop Ladja uses the hero as a human shield in order to prevent his father Pankraz from fighting back against his flunkies Kon and Slon, incinerates him with a fireball after said flunkies had already beaten him to within an inch of his life, and then carts the hero and Harry off to a slave camp for the Order of Zugzwang for ten years. Several years later, Madchen, who wants humans and her beloved monsters to learn how to live together, comes upon Ladja, learns what he did to her grandfather, and deems some monsters are plainly evil and cannot be redeemed.
• Never Live It Down: Bianca is most frequently remembered for reminding the Hero when they went on a ghost hunting trip.
• Player Punch: Everything Bishop Ladja does. To wit: Using the hero as a human shield in order to prevent Pankraz from fighting back against his flunkies, incinerating him with a fireball after said flunkies had already beaten him to within an inch of his life, carting the hero and Harry off to a slave camp for the Religion of Evil for ten years; and then, much later on, turning the hero and his wife into statues for eight/ten years (the hero was freed eight years later, and it took two more years to find the wife). In the remakes, he doesn't die at Talon Tower like he did in the SNES version. He goes on to show up near the start of the final dungeon, where he blasts Madalena — the hero's mother and the woman you've been looking for the entire game — with the same Giant Instant Death Fireball of Doom that killed Pankraz, within seconds of finally seeing her, forcing one more boss fight with him. Fortunately, this doesn't actually kill her. Unfortunately, Grandmaster Nimzo finishes the job.
• Porting Disaster: The Playstation 2 version is ordinarily not this trope, being a competent 3D remake of a beloved classic. However if you go searching for the right amount of glitches you'll find that the game is so incredibly broken that it's possible to skip 95% of the plot, walk past of the majority that isn't skipped, and "kill" the final boss by running away from him, since the game reads that as winning the battle. Since choosing who to marry is skipped, the game unsurprisingly defaults to Bianca.
• That One Boss: The Magmen who guard the Circle of Fire. There are three of them, and each of them has a fire breath attack which does very high damage and hits your whole party. If the player hasn't recruited some decent monsters it is extremely difficult to win because of the boss' sheer damage output.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Character: Ladja in the original game, with his initial Moral Event Horizon when he first appears seem like a great way to set him up as a major villain, but he ends up being nothing more than a flunky for King Korol, whose actions have far less of an emotional impact on the player. Thankfully, his role is expanded in the remake.
• Too Cool to Live: Pankraz. He was a really good guy overall, and cool and powerful to boot, and also a former king, as revealed during the middle of the game, so this was expected.
• The Woobie: This game is filled with characters you just want to comfort. The hero, Prince Harry post-breaking, Bianca, Nera and Debora as the bride, your pet sabrecat, Sancho, the twins... And that's without getting into all the NPCs you see broken and hurting throughout the game.

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