 Dragon Quest Your Story I have to admit, I'm very surprised we finally got this movie in English. Even more so that Netflix picked it up for their service. I mean, look at that. Dragon Quest, a Netflix original film. I would never have expected this to happen. This is honestly huge. The movie was announced and released last year in Japan for a limited time in theaters and I've been heavily anticipating the moment I'd be able to watch it finally. And here it is. Does it live up to my expectations? Let's find out. So this animated film was announced as an adaptation of the very amazing Dragon Quest 5, which is my favorite game of all time and widely considered a national treasure in Japan. The original game was a coming-of-age story where you control a hero from childhood to adulthood and see them grow. I always thought that if a Dragon Quest movie was ever made they should adapt DQ5 because it has superior to the story and characters are. It's really a great story. The real question is, how well does this game adapt to the big screen? Well, for the most part, I enjoy the movie. I'm really glad this film exists. It's a video game movie that is very faithful to its source material. It maintains a lot of the charm of Dragon Quest, has great action sequences, really nice looking animation, and it delivers the story to a more mainstream movie going audience. Like the animation, the animation looks so nice, especially the monsters which are extremely faithful to Toriyama's designs. Also this movie is dubbed in English, which I never thought would happen. The voice acting is actually good and the film utilizes all the various words and names from the game's localization, which I was happy about. It shows some care for the Western DQ fans as well. It even uses the original soundtrack from the games. You feel very nostalgic hearing these redone versions of classic DQ themes at certain points. It's really great, although one complaint about the sound is the music sometimes is a little too loud and drowns out some of the dialogue. Anyway, this film tells a classic story, although not perfectly. It has its fair share of issues, a lot of issues honestly. Like I said, I like the movie a lot. I've watched it several times already, but it is far from perfect. My main complaint that everything points back to is that I feel like this film is a lot less enjoyable if you don't already know Dragon Quest V. It is very clearly meant for the fans to enjoy. It's a nostalgia trip for people who have beaten DQ V and this is very apparent to me. There's a ton of references to the games for fans of spot, but besides that, the plot itself has some serious gaps that you need to play the original game to fill in, and I have an issue with that. You see, they were cramming a story told through dozens of hours in the original game into a film that's only an hour and a half long, and you can feel how rushed the story is as a result. Like I mentioned earlier, the story of Dragon Quest V has a portion where the main protagonist is a child, and during this portion you develop a connection to the protagonist who in this film is named Luca, his father Pancras, and his childhood friend Bianca. Sadly, the childhood portion of this movie goes by extremely fast and is already over within 8 minutes, which I thought was way too fast. And in these 8 minutes, a lot of the plot points that become very important later on in the film are just quickly glossed over in a 16-bit style intro where Luca meets Bianca, his saver cub Percy, and where they find a golden orb in a haunted dungeon. But if you're not paying close attention, you can easily miss all these important plot details and later parts of the movie won't make sense. The rest of the childhood portion feels very rushed. The scene pacing is extremely fast and I really don't think they give the audience enough time to process what's going on. I just kept thinking while watching this part of the movie, man, if I didn't already play the game I would be so lost right now. And that's honestly a problem. If you ask me, a good film adaptation should never require knowing the source material to understand a story. You should never have to read a novel or comic book to enjoy a film, and the same should be said about of video game movies. This film makes the mistake of assuming every person watching it is already a fan of Dragon Quest, and that hurts the film a lot. Going back to the pacing, it's just not good. It feels like everything is just rushing to fit the whole story into that one and a half hour and it shows often throughout the film. I think this movie could have been much better if it was 40 minutes longer than what it is. Oftentimes throughout the film, characters would be talking with run-on sentences with no natural pauses and scenes would transition into each other immediately with no indication of the passage of time, and I can see this confusing a lot of people in the beginning of the movie. The intro is just not very well done, and if there were a lot more time, I'm sure it could have been much better. With the pacing being the way it is, it's kind of hard to develop an attachment to these characters. I just think that some of the more emotional moments in the intro could have been more impactful if it wasn't a total of 8 minutes long. This overly fast pacing slows down more for the middle chunk of the film, and they did a good job of changing some details about the story so that everything could be fit into one movie. Dr. Agon is introduced much earlier in the story with an actual unique design this time around. He doesn't look like a generic bartender anymore. There's also no more Xenithian armor or shield. Luca is only looking for the Xenithian sword in the film so he can save his mother from the forces of evil, which I fully understand. It makes the plot much easier to follow this way. They introduce Bianca and Nira, Luca's two love interests just minutes apart from each other. Sorry Deborah fans, she's not here. And also Luca is now part Xenithian, which offers an explanation as to why people think you might be the heavenly hero. Side note, I thought it was neat how they changed the lore so that Xenithians have gold colored eyes, which was how they identified Luca as one. I just thought that worked really well. They also completely skip over the Kingdom of God the storyline. Luca never returns to his home kingdom to reclaim his throne, so this entire part of the story is just not there. I don't have a huge issue with that since the main plot points in DQ5 are still intact. But anyway, back to Nira and Bianca. This is probably the most interesting part of the film where Luca misses women who are his childhood friends and has to decide who he really loves and wants to spend his life with. Though like I mentioned earlier, the childhood portion was so bare bones that we as the audience don't really know either of them at all and you can't really understand his feelings much at all. Luca immediately recognizes Nira in the film from his childhood, but we as the audience have never seen her before and have no idea how he knows her and this does make the story a bit confusing to me I think. The audience is clearly meant to be more drawn towards Bianca I feel. In the movie she's very confident, tough, tomboyish, aggressive. She's also very supportive of Luca's choice despite her own feelings for him. This is a very good character honestly. I'm really happy with how they represent her and also how they represented Luca's struggle to choose. However, the childhood intro section having only briefly mentioned her makes their reunion a lot less impactful than it should have been. Honestly if they had taken more time with the childhood portion of the film to introduce these two characters to him, I feel like the movie overall would have benefited from that. Other than that, the pacing was actually quite good during this part of the film. The rest of the film out of this part is very enjoyable. There's plenty of great action sequences and another time skip that I feel transitions very well. The film handles certain plot points from the game very, very well. Throughout the whole film, Luca was led to believe that he was the heavenly hero destined to wield his Inithian sword, but when he finally tries unsheathing it, he can't and his whole world just comes crashing down like that. It really makes you feel his disappointment I have to say. I overall liked a lot of the directions this movie took, while some others are just odd. I don't know why, but in the film Luca only has one child of Bianca, his son Alice, and in the game he had a daughter too who played a supporting role. I'm not sure why they cut her out from the movie, I don't think that would have overcomplicated things to include her. I mentioned earlier that the animation in this movie is great and it really is a nice looking animated film. The environments, lighting, and scenes look fantastic, but where the film really shines is bringing the monsters of Dragon Quest to life. They all just look so good and really capture Toriyama's designs, it's really nice. The humans look good as well, though I have some issues with some janky body movement coming from the characters. It's something you have to look for to notice, but at times the film looks 10 years behind other animated films these days, despite how nice the environments and characters look. Going back to the action sequences, there are some badass fights in this movie. The fight choreography is really well done, and the fights don't drag on too long either. The fight with Bjorn in the Behemoth is really cool, and a scene when the heavenly hero Alice run sheets the Zenithian sword is really awesome. I really liked the final fight with Bishop Ladia as well. There was a lot of weight to it, it was a pretty epic battle where Prince Harry returns to bring the forces of Coburg to help out fighting the forces of evil while Luca fights Ladia. There's a lot going on on the screen and it's really epic looking. Exactly the kind of fight to close off a Dragon Quest movie. It's what happens after this battle where things get really interesting though, and I don't necessarily mean that in a good way. The ending of Dragon Quest, your story. The twist ending everyone has been talking about since the movie came out. The ending that some people say ruined the entire movie for them. Let's talk about it. After defeating Bishop Ladia, our hero finds out that it's already too late, and by absorbing the Zenithian power from Luca's dead mother, kinda weird, he manages to open the gates to Naderia, summoning the evil Grandmaster Nymzo to destroy the world. I'll admit I was really looking forward to seeing how Nymzo would look in the movie. They were hyping him up so much throughout the film and now we'd finally see him. Only that didn't happen. What we got instead was the weirdest, most unexpected thing that could have possibly happened. Bear with me for a second. So what descends from the gate to Naderia, after all this throws the Zenithian sword into it, is a creepy computer virus monster who freezes the world. He explains that everything that has happened up until now wasn't real, and get this, Luca is living in a video game, plot twist. People joke about the Dragon Quest V here having the absolute worst life, and here he is finding out that his entire life is a lie, and all the years he lived was actually just a few hours of someone playing a virtual reality simulation based on Dragon Quest V at a mall kiosk. This part of the film shatters the fourth wall. The virus begins to destroy the world and he explains that this world was meant to cash in on people's nostalgia for Dragon Quest V and that he was created by a genius hacker who hates Dragon Quest and made him to destroy the game. Grow up loser is what this hacker said. After this, Luca basically chooses to resist and fight back, then all of a sudden, Guterude, his slime companion starts talking with a deep voice saying that he's actually an antivirus program and he gives Luca a vaccine to defeat the virus and it looks like Erdrick's sword and at this point I'm just like, what is going on? Is this real? This is such a strange thing for them to do and I can fully see why this has caused so much controversy in the community. Japanese audiences hated this movie when it came out because of the scene and I understand that. This film really doesn't go anywhere with this either. We never find out who this genius hacker is. The virus just dies and the day is saved. I guess the hacker is supposed to represent people who don't like DQ, like the haters or something like that which is very on the nose thing for them to do in this movie. But I get what they were trying to do at this point. Basically, this part of the movie was meant to sort of speak to the fans of Dragon Quest saying, these characters are real to me, these adventures will always stay with me and I'm sure some people might feel a strong reaction to this kind of message that you're never too old to like DQ and that the adventure always stays with you, especially people who grew up with the games. I went on Twitter and asked everyone what they thought and some people said that they liked it for these reasons while some others said they ruined the entire movie for them. Me on the other hand, oh boy, I did not like this ending and yeah, I think it kind of ruins the movie overall. I found it to be very pandering to fans of the series. It really fell flat with what I was trying to do and had no subtlety at all the way I saw it. This part of the film felt like a commercial for the Dragon Quest series in what was supposed to be a honest retelling of DQ5's story and this scene is exactly why video game movies are looked down upon as being just glorified commercials. I don't need the movie telling me that Dragon Quest is a great game series with a great story. It can do that just by delivering a good story. The film should not be patting itself on the back the way it's doing here. It's literally just saying Dragon Quest is awesome, it's the best game series ever. I mean it is but this is not the place to say that and you can see why I think this is kind of ending is pandering and insulting to its audience. Now some people might really like this ending because of how it came out of nowhere and delivered this twist. Some people might prefer something weird like this to wrap up the story rather than a fight with a big bad and a typical fantasy ending. I personally would have just preferred to see the Nimzo fight with its two forms and have the movie close out normally. I don't know let me know what you think in the comments I guess. So in conclusion what do I think about this film? I watched this movie hoping for a good strong story that is focused and delivers DQ5's message in a concise manner but this is far from what we got. Dragon Quest Your Story is a decent animated film that looks very nice and captures a lot of the magic of the Dragon Quest series. It delivers the classic story of Dragon Quest V from Super Famicom with all its characters to a new movie going audience and for the most part compresses a lot of the plot into one and a half hours. It's a fun movie and because of that I really find it to be a shame that the experience is ruined by its extremely rushed pacing at certain points and is a mission of important plot details and of course that weird ending. This movie could have been half an hour longer and it would have been much better. Heck this story could have been split into two movies if they tried. The pacing wouldn't have been as bad and they'd be able to include the entire child portion of the story too. That's honestly what they should have done if you ask me. Instead they crammed this movie into one and a half hours and this shows a lot. It really is not enough time to tell this story and the entire movie feels to blow from that. There are certain things that could have done to make it work like include flashbacks or illusions to previous events throughout the story but it ends up feeling like an incomplete story if you haven't played the games. Overall it's a fun movie to watch if you're a Dragon Quest fan. If you aren't a fan of Dragon Quest or games in general I think there's still some enjoyment to be had though I can't imagine being able to keep up with the story at all for the first half of the film if you're not a fan of DQ already. I'd recommend just getting Dragon Quest V for your mobile phone and playing through that instead. This is far from the ideal way to experience DQ V's story for the first time. In the end it's a video game movie and that's exactly what you should be expecting. I've seen much more offensive video game movies. This is hardly the worst one out there. It's far from perfect but it's still worth a watch.