Dragon Quest V/YMMV

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• Alas, Poor Villain: Not so much in the original, but in the DS version, it's hard not to feel bad for the King Korol when Nimzo has Ladja execute him in an excessively brutal fashion.
• 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?
• 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.
• Complete Monster: Bishop Ladja
  • Ladja gets a hyper upgrade from regular boss to this in The Remake. Not only that he kills Pankraz, he is the responsible for turning you and your wife into statues, and killing of his colleague, King Karol, after he loses to the team.
  • He also puts you and harry, who are children at the time, into slavery right after using you as a barganing chip to keep Pankraz from attacking and lets his minons pummel Pankaraz a bit before killing him.
• 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.
• Good Bad Bugs/Porting Disaster: The Playstation 2 version 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 it, since the game reads that as winning the battle. Since choosing who to marry is skipped, the game unsurprisingly defaults to Bianca.
• Hilarious in Hindsight: One of the nuns in the Heaven's Above Abbey says, "I'm sure there will never again come a time when you are forced to submit to the will of another." Marry Debora, and you have this trope in spades.
• Ho Yay: Sancho really, really admires Pankraz.
  • To a lesser extent, 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. But he never once even considers giving up.
• Jerkass Dissonance: Debora is considered to be an Ensemble Darkhorse despite being abrasive in comparison to Bianca and her sister Nera.
• Love to Hate: Nadja.
• Memetic Badass: Pankraz.
• Memetic Molester: Bishop Ladja.
• Player Punch/Moral Event Horizon: Pretty much 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 another ten years.
  • In the DS version, 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 Mada--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.
• Purity Sue: In any other game, Nera would be this. Absolutely everyone she comes into contact with, including an abbey of nuns that mention they've learned more from her than she did from them, can't help but talk about how beautiful and pure she is. Despite this, the game heavily suggests you marry Bianca rather than Nera.
• 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.
• They Wasted a Perfectly Good Plot: Inverted. The game very obviously always intended for the Hero to marry Bianca... which raises the question of why it included any choice of potential bride at all.
• Too Cool to Live: Pankraz.
• Unfortunate Implications: The game text pretty much states that you're still a teenager by the time you become a father.
  • Of course, that kind of thing would hardly be as frowned upon in a medieval world such as the one in the game.
  • Sancho's heavily stereotyped accent in the DS translation is rather... unfortunate, particularly given his role.
  • You can equip your 8-year old daughter with a lacy bustier, a silk bustier, the dancer's costume, etc.
• 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.
• Woolseyism: Almost everything has been renamed in the English localization. If you don't dig the Punny Names and the Narm Charm of the localization, this game will be a Macekre for you. Especially if you've already played the much more faithful fan translation of the original SNES game.