DESCRIPTION

CAST

ANIME AdventureDragon Quest: Dai no Daibouken

REVIEWS

• 

  RamielHunter

  20/100
  If you decide to watch this movie turn it off before the last 20 minutes.

  Dragon Quest V is one of my favorite games and one of the best JRPGs ever made. Dragon Quest as a series is deeply beloved by fans around the world and holds so much value to many many people. Dragon Quest V in particular has had a deep emotional impact on myself and countless other fans and will hold a special place in our hearts for the rest of time. When I first saw the trailers for this movie I was completely overjoyed at the possibility of an adaptation like this with gorgeous visuals and a way to capture the deeply moving story of DQV. For a long time I waited and waited for the release, but I was less than satisfied with the "finished product" that I eventually viewed. This movie is an absolute disgrace to the source material and is a complete waste of the time and budget spent on it. They cut out some of the most important and engaging content from the source material which I can forgive as it is an adaptation and not everything gets to make the cut. What I cannot forgive is when the entire third of the opening for the original game is completely reduced to text at the beginning of the movie. Entire major plot points and story beats are completely altered if not dropped to what becomes a substantially less fulfilling experience. WIth the gripes I've listed so far I'd honestly see myself giving it maybe a 4 or 5 out of 10. What then reduces my score all the way to a lowly 2 out of 10 is the absolutely batshit insane joke they call the end of the movie. It is almost completely incomprehensible how a short 10 minute twist at the end of a movie can completely remove any value the movie itself had. Even trying to put the anger and frustration I have towards the ending of the movie in to words is infuriating. This is bar none not just one of the worst adaptations of a video game into a movie but one of the worst video game movies I have ever seen in my life. These criticisms and complaints may sound like the whining of an ungrateful fanboy which I will admit is not entirely untrue. I will not try to pretend I do not have a bias against this movie on principle of what it is adapting. That being said I can assure you that if you yourself watch this movie and do not find yourself completely appalled at the ending of this movie I will personally congratulate you and apologize for my insensate whining at something a normal person would probably consider a fine movie. I cannot stress this enough please if you are unfamiliar with the source material just play the game instead and if you are a fan of the source material and insist you want to watch this movie despite the alterations, turn it off before the last 20 minutes your life will be better that way. I absolutely do not recommend this to anyone who is able to process story telling in visual mediums. If you can't and you just like looking at pretty images moving on the screen then hey maybe this is the movie for you.

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• 

  Lutzayy

  68/100
  Dragon Quest: Your Story celebrates fans of the franchise. It's best you remember this.

  Dragon Quest: Your (Actual) Story

  Imported from my Letterboxd.
  If you're interested to see my other takes, please consider checking out my Letterboxd profile!
  https://letterboxd.com/Lutzayy/

  Now, Dragon Quest: Your Story...
  What an interesting experience. Catharsis, and confusion, and anxiety over how i actually think about this movie all in one. I saw this back in February, the morning it came out, eager to see what it was like.
  I'm a fan of the franchise, and I'm well aware of the size and scale of Dragon Quest V. Condensing a 100 hour game that covers the protagonist's life into almost 2 hours is... An ambitious task, and it certainly hasn't pleased all fans, though this can be attributed to many, many reasons. I mean, it has a 4/10 on imdb in Japan... That's very rough.

  I feel, despite this, that the plot works well enough despite such restrictions, though a lot of emotional value from the game is lost, and pacing is a really big issue here. Dragon Quest is known for getting you invested in its cast (in the games that don't make you hire party members, at least), and it's pretty hard to care for any particular character. We lose most of the childhood introductory segment from V, shown through a montage rendered in its NES form, and it's still treated as a major element that you need to know to understand how Luka relates to Bianca, and Nera. I wouldn't have mind if they framed the story differently to accomodate for these cuts, which is easy to do given how there are a few different perspectives in this movie (from the game itself).

  And then there's the ending, which is so notoriously unnecessary and basically ruins the movie in its last 10 minutes. Perhaps this is a case of the journey being better than the destination? It depends on your opinion of it, and I would suggest knowing what happens before watching the movie. Personally, I am still able to appreciate the movie regardless. I love Dragon Quest, and seeing it this way is still cathartic for me, and it should be for other DQ fans. Hearing Sugiyama's score, regardless of my opinion of the man himself, on screen is so amazing. Even if some battle tracks shouldn't be in this movie as they're from different games, this game is clearly a celebration of the franchise overall so I don't mind it.

  The movie is still so beautiful, in its environments, lighting, animation, and even the models despite not being faithful to Toriyama's designs. There's still so much enjoyment and fun for anyone, even more for fans of the franchise. I really want to watch this again.

  But I would also recommend getting DQV itself, on the App Store, for a better experience overall. Please give Dragon Quest some love, It's an unforgettable series.

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• 

  Juliko25

  69/100
  Take away the Dragon Quest name and the twist ending, and it's a fun if fairly stock standard kids fantasy movie.

  My history with Dragon Quest is...non-existent. I only played some of the GameBoy Color games as a kid, but even then, I never completed them because they were hard. But Dragon Quest is a pretty popular game series in Japan, with the most recent game, Echoes of an Elusive Age, being released on the Switch with glowing critical reception. So when it was announced that a movie was being made, based on what many consider to be the best game in the series, Dragon Quest 5, people were ecstatic...until they saw the very end of the movie, which had a very strange plot twist put in that was so out of place and came out of nowhere that after the fact, reviews poured in that lambasted the movie for it. Even people in Japan hated it, feeling like it was a huge cop-out. As of now, Your Story is on Netflix, and I just finished watching it. What do I think of it? Well...I honestly don't feel it's as bad as people are making it out to be, but even without the twist, the movie still has a lot of problems.

  The story focuses on a young man named Luca, who is the son of a famed hero named Pankraz. After his mother is kidnapped by the evil Bishop Ladja, he and his father attempt to save her, but Ladja kills Pankraz and takes Luca and his friend Harry to be slave labor. When he and Harry escape a decade later, Luca decides to return home and find answers. There's a legend about a hero being able to wield a magical sword, and his father left a final message in his diary, thinking that Luca might just be that hero. Armed with this knowledge, and joined by a saber cat and a friendly slime, Luca embarks on a worldwide quest to find the magic sword, stop Ladja from summoning an evil being named Nimzo, save his mother, and by extension, the world.

  Overall, if I were to use one word to describe this movie, it would be overstuffed. Being that Your Story is adapted from a video game that can be about 20-30 hours long, it's inevitable that a lot would get lost in the transition from game to movie, since that's plagued video game movies for years. However, Your Story is clearly trying to adapt as much material as possible within a one hour and forty-five minute time frame, but at the expense of pacing. The pacing in this movie is very fast, so you'll never feel bored, as there's always something going on. However, some segments, which should have been more fleshed out in order to make us care about the characters, such as Luca and Bianca's entire childhood together, aren't given any focus at all, so when we actually meet those characters, the audience is confused as to why she's so important and why they should even care about her or her relationship with Luca. It doesn't help that the very beginning of the movie just blatantly uses footage from the game to set up said relationship and just glaze over the events that led to the entire plot, which to me is just lazy. Honestly, that part bothered me more than the plot twist, because using game footage in favor of, you know, doing your own interpretation of the beginning of the game with your own fingerprints just makes you seem lazy and insecure. The game footage was completely unnecessary, because the creators could have used that time to show Luca being born into the world and flesh out his character more.

  It's especially insulting from an animation standpoint, because in all honesty, the CG animation here is absolutely stunning. Like, practically Pixar-level quality. I've never seen a CG anime movie that looked this amazing before now. This makes Land of the Lustrous look like Rapsittie Street Kids. The textures and overall look of the movie are amazing to look at, with the environments all rendered in exquisite detail. If you didn't know any better, you'd think the environments were live-action. The human characters actually look like people, and not like polygonish-looking humans with weird faces and awkward mouth movements. One other thing people didn't like about the movie was that Akira Toriyama's designs weren't used in the movie. To be honest, I don't really mind, mainly because I figure his style would be really hard to animate, especially in a CGI movie, so I think the animators dodged a bullet on that one. I also really like that the animation doesn't skimp on really small details, like the scars and scratches people get on their bodies when they're fighting monsters, the texture and myriad of strands in someone's hair, or the translucence of a slime's body. Those little things really make the setting and the animation feel much more alive. The actual character motion is just as amazing, and every movement is fluid and smooth, with little to no sluggishness or choppy frames. Seriously, Japan really set a new standard for CG movies, and considering their CG movies tend to have a bad rep, they should really learn from Your Story.

  The soundtrack is pretty great too, with big, epic orchestral pieces that really make you feel like you're on an adventure to save the world. From what I've heard, these are redone versions of pieces from the game soundtrack, and I think they've been rendered pretty well here. However, in light of some really disgusting things fans have learned about Koichi Sugiyama and his political views, that's the only thing I'm going to say about the soundtrack. I like the music, but I don't like the composer as a person. But that's neither here nor there, so I won't waste time dwelling on it.

  Because of the movie's brisk pacing and its attempts to tell a huge story in a limited format, the characters don't get the development and fleshing out that they deserve. As a result, they all come off as bland archetypes that we've seen in a million other fantasy movies of this caliber before. Luca's the idealistic hero, Bianca is the tomboyish childhood friend, Nera is the friendly princess, Ladja is yet another Saturday morning cartoon villain who is just evil for the sake of it, so on and so forth. I'm sure they got a lot more depth and development in the game, but again, I haven't played the game, so I can only judge them based on how the movie portrays them. Honestly, Ladja was just terrible. He was just a stereotypically evil villain who's there to just laugh all the time and be a dick to the hero. Nimzo was basically a non-entity as a character, and he only appears for a few minutes and that's it.

  The story itself isn't really anything special. It's just another sword hero saving the world plot, only he gets married and has a kid later on. That's not a spoiler, by the way. The game does this, too. As for the controversial twist in the movie...well, I agree that it did come out of nowhere and seem lazy in concept, but I don't hate it nearly as much as other people do. Don't get me wrong, I do hate the twist, but considering the movie's other problems, the twist is only a small part of a very flawed product overall. Honestly, I thought the Ni no Kuni movie's final twist was much worse, more out of place, and much more mean spirited. Do I feel like Your Story could have benefitted from leaving this twist out? Absolutely. It would have just been another fantasy movie if it did so, but I'm okay with that. From what I heard, the creators meant for this movie to be a love letter to fans of the franchise, so the twist was put in there to appeal to them specifically. But when you put it like that, you wind up alienating audiences who have never played Dragon Quest, me being one of those people, when the movie could have done just fine without it. Sometimes trying to add in a bunch of out of nowhere twists can hurt a product rather than make it better (Looking at you, Guilty Crown). They say less is more, after all.

  Do I think Your Story is bad? Actually, no, I don't. True, there are a ton of other movies that are way better, but for what it is, it's a fairly decent, if very flawed and bumpy fantasy romp. But unless you're a diehard Dragon Quest fan, I doubt it'll appeal to you specifically.

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