Dragon Quest: Your Story is a full-length, beautifully animated movie that was released in Japan in 2019 that has now—seemingly out of nowhere—been released on Netflix along with a host of subtitles and dubs for different languages. Though years of terrible videogame adaptations would tell me otherwise, Dragon Quest: Your Story actually looks pretty darn fun.
If you're not already familiar with it, Your Story is an adaptation of Dragon Quest 5, which was originally released for the SNES all the way back in 1992. It's the story of a young boy (named Luca in the movie) who sets off on a grand adventure to uncover his father's mysterious past and save his mum from an evil wizard.
Originally released in Japan in 2019, Dragon Quest: Your Story received a lot of mixed reviews, largely thanks to a twist ending that deviates from DQ5. A lot of people seemingly hated it, but I've also seen a lot of people online talking about liking the ending. The other big criticism is how little the movie resembles Akira Toriyama's iconic artstyle that helped define the games.
I've only watched a few minutes so far, but I can definitely see the latter point. It's fun seeing all the familiar DQ monsters, and the animation is beautiful, but it would be easy to mistake this for any fantasy animated film, which is a shame. Still, it's rare that videogames are adapted so faithfully into film, so I'm excited to watch it all the same.
If you're a subscriber to Netflix, Dragon Quest: Your Story is available now.
