David Cohen

I adored this movie and yes I am a huge fan of the IP. I found myself smiling at all the different monsters, quest notes on the town board, and similar things. Sometimes I felt like it was a regular Dragon Quest JRPG style and other moments felt more like the Dragon Quest Heroes style. I did have minor gripes so I will discuss those now. 1.) I found the pacing/editing a bit off pace, like important parts of the story were rushed and others left on the cutting room floor. Dragon Quest games can last hundreds of hours so the stories are much more fleshed out and I felt like this movie as awesome as it was would have been a much better full length anime series with maybe 12+ 1hr episodes. 2.) There are so many cool spells/skills that were not included, I know, I know, $$$, but the work is already done, the spells, style, names, looks, effects, etc...already exist..its a matter of importing them over and getting the VA to yell Kasnooze!!! Zammle!!! Crack!!! Kacrack!!!! etc....they chose a small few and used them a fair amount, Id have loved to see a few more. Also I didnt see any "Skills/weapon skills" shy of the 1 the hero sword automatically used. 3.) I will rewatch in Japanese but I watched the English Dub, and even though I really enjoyed it and felt the actors did a great job there was one major issue that kinda made me sad. DQ Games are always both the Voice Acting and Text are always spoken or written (Ohh ya goah rite derr down dat wee path boyoh, [sorry my poor attempt to give visual refference]) in European Accented English, With mixes of British, Irish, Scottish, Spanish, French, German, etc....foriegn english accents add a huge amount of imersion for me and I adore all the personality quirks that come with the accents. Hearing the entire cast voiced in a standard American/Canadian style English (My English) made me kinda sad since I always look forward to the silly and endearing VA work the games always provide. Maybe its simply that fantasy to me should feel "old, mystic, ancient in a way. and European English accents always seem to provide that mind trick that works to hook me into the story. 4.) Last and most egregious to me was that there was no "Im not a bad slime" reference in the entire film. Booo!!! Hissss!!! Shame!!! Every DQ fan ever knows that your first interaction with a "Good" slime includes some dialogue that says exactly that. So much so that I see it constantly in anime and other games that are paying tribute to Dragon Quest will include that very refference in their manga, shows, games, etc...Oh and also the MC named the slime Gootred but then later called him Gootrood. So with all that said I did love this movie and I hope that we see much more and I cant wait for the anime reboot of the original DQ Hero "The Adventures of Dai" story I heared was coming and I hope we have many more generations of DQ games, movies, manga, merchandise ahead of us. Thanks for reading my review and have a Gooreat day!