Nera’s Dress from Dragon Quest V: Hand of the Heavenly Bride

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Brian got Dragon Quest V: Hand of the Heavenly Bride a little while back, and we traded off turns playing it for weeks. In terms of overall plot it’s pulled straight from the big book of RPG cliches – evil dude wants to take over! only the legendary hero can defeat him! queens are kidnapped! – but there’s two things that really make it great. One is “party talk,” where in different situations (entering a new town or dungeon level, for example, or after talking to most NPCs) you can talk to the characters that are in your group. The amount of dialogue this game must have is staggering – imagine writing a different response for all those different characters! It’s amusing because a lot of the time it’s stuff that you, the player, are probably thinking, so hearing it from another character in their own voice can be a little startling. It really helps make the characters real, too, when they have their own takes on situations or wonder about things that you might not even have noticed. That leads into the other thing that makes the game great: the generation system. You start out as a little kid, then time skips forward and you play as an adult, getting married, and then time skips forward again and your children are old enough to go adventuring with you. So it’s not like your character is accompanied by some random red mage, fighter and white mage: you’re almost always with friends, often with family, and they always have some interesting thing to say. For someone like me, who likes story and character interaction better than battle systems and so on, the game was great fun.

In the DS version of the game, you have the option to marry three women: Bianca, your childhood friend, Nera, the kind and gentle daughter of a rich family, and Deborah, Nera’s haughty and blunt sister. The game pushes you to choose Bianca (you have adventures with her in your childhoods, Nera has another guy that loves her, heck, in the old versions of the game if you didn’t choose Bianca her father died) but you can choose any of them. So I did choose Bianca my first time around, but Nera definitely has the prettier dress, and anyways she’s more my type, if I was a male RPG hero. (Although I suspect that playing the game with Deborah around to talk to is the most fun.)

9 thoughts on “Nera’s Dress from Dragon Quest V: Hand of the Heavenly Bride

  1. oh… ok thanks : )
    I just finished one of my own paper dolls!! Her name is Siri, and she has brown curly hair, and blue eyes. She is very pretty, but not as pretty as your paper dolls!!

  2. You’re right, Diana, it does look kind of indefinably classical. No one else in the game dresses like that, so who knows what the inspiration was…

    Congratulations on finishing your paperdoll, Monica! If you ever scan her, I’d love to see her :)

  3. Wow! You play Earthbound, and Mother 3? And Professor Layton?! Awesome! I love the takes you’ve done on these outfits. If you are ever in the mood for it, more games outfits would be greatly enjoyed!!

  4. Wow! You play Earthbound? And Mother 3, and Professor Layton? I love the takes you’ve done on these outfits. Any more would be greatly enjoyed!!

  5. Really old thread, I know…but just thought I’d correct something.
    Bianca’s dad doesn’t die in any version regardless of whether or not you marry her. That was just a rumor that became so common place that everyone thought it was true. As for how I know this? Well, I married Flora/Nera in the SNES version and revisited Bianca and her father in both the second and third generation and he was still alive (he’s also alive in the epilogue). I’ve also read a lot of other accounts where people married Flora/Nera in all versions of the game and Bianca’s father never dies. So, if you want to marry Flora/Nera feel free to marry her because it doesn’t mean that you’re dooming Bianca to a life of misery.

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