Caution: If you haven't played it yet, this post contains spoilers for Dragon Quest V.

The mid-to-late 1990s and early 2000s were a tough time to be a Dragon Quest fan living in America. The venerable Japanese RPG series was (and still is) popular to the point of ubiquity in its home country, but lackluster sales for the first four games (all released for the NES under the Dragon Warrior moniker) combined with the shuttering of publisher Enix's North American branch in 1995 meant that American gamers never got English-language localizations of the series' Super Nintendo games.

That's a real shame, too, because Dragon Quest V and VI are two of the strongest entries in a franchise that hits more often than it misses—it's the fifth entry that I want to draw your attention to. Before it was finally released by Square Enix on the Nintendo DS in early 2009, the only way to play Dragon Quest V was to learn to read Japanese, or to play one of the fan translations of the game that cropped up on the Internet in the early 2000s—this is how I was introduced to what remains one of my favorite games, and an excellent example of what an old-school role-playing game can be.

This time, it's personal

Japanese RPGs don't do things by halves. Video games in general have a tendency toward save-the-world boilerplate storylines, but other genres don't have a patch on the JRPG. You're always a ragtag band of misfits, and the fate of the world always hangs in the balance—that's also true in Dragon Quest V, but the game's story is much more personal than that.

Previous Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy games began with a young hero (or heroes) setting out on a dangerous quest, often infused with forced epic-ness from the outset—normally a king would tell you that the world needed saving and that you were the one to do it and sent you on your merry way. Dragon Quest V begins with your father pacing the room impatiently, eagerly awaiting your birth.

Flash forward a few years, but not all the way to adulthood. You spend the first few hours of the game as a young child, following your dad around while he has adventures that are neither explained to you at the time nor shown onscreen. Rather than working toward the world's salvation, you spend your childhood having kid-sized adventures: exploring a local cave, sneaking out with friends at night, and generally whooping monsters while your well-meaning but oft-distracted father is looking the other way.

The first sign of world-saving comes when your father, on his deathbed, tells you that he's been searching for a legendary hero, but even against this new heightened backdrop the game's story stays squarely focused on the hero: over the course of the game, you gr ow into adulthood, get married, and have your own children. By the time the game is done, your kids are just a bit older than you were in the early hours of the game, and your wife and kids don't just stay at home. They're all valuable members of your party, and in a small but neatly genre-bending twist, your character isn't actually the legendary hero your dad was looking for—it's actually your son.

The genius of Dragon Quest V's story is that even though you're saving the world, you're given unusually personal reasons for doing so. You need to find the Legendary Hero, but along the way you also need to avenge your father, save your wife, protect your kids, and find out just what happened to your mom. A story that easily could have been as generic as they come becomes a neatly circular tale about growing up and coming into your own, and it was all the more impressive for taking place against a dated-even-for-the-time 16-bit backdrop.

Ahead of its time, despite being a bit behind the times

Dragon Quest is known for its vigorous adherence to traditions and conventions, and the fifth entry in the series looks much like the first. You've got a top-down view, sprites with personality but limited animations, and a simple first-person perspective to the battle sequences. The DS remake (and gorgeous Japan-only PS2 remake) at least added monster animations, but in the SNES version you were still battling static sprites that didn't look all that different from their 8-bit predecessors. The nested, text-based menu system is also an archaic mess, and the DS's touchscreen is sadly under-utilized in the remake. Whether you find these anachronisms charming or lazy will depend on your sensitivity to nostalgia.

For a game that's so aggressively old school in many of its trappings, Dragon Quest V pioneered a surprising number of conventions we now take for granted. When you get married, you're asked to choose between a rich man's daughter and a childhood friend—a branching path that subtly effects how the rest of the story plays out. Games like Mass Effect and Skyrim offer infinitely more sophisticated paths your character can take, but Dragon Quest V plants some of those seeds. Your digital wife also gets pregnant and gives birth years before sim games like Natsume's Harvest Moon would make this a lynchpin of their gameplay (not that the conception is shown onscreen or anything).

The more far-reaching innovation involves monster catching. For the first time, the player could tame a large section of Dragon Quest's colorful Akira Toriyama-designed bestiary, and those monsters could participate in battle, level up, and be equipped with new weapons and armor just as would any member of your party. The original SNES game offered only about 65 monsters to capture, but this one gameplay mechanic—which is introduced quite a few hours into the game and isn't even integral to finishing it, since you're given plenty of human characters to use in your party—launched many successful franchises that took the idea and ran with it.

Pokemon, released four years after Dragon Quest in 1996, is the biggest and most obvious example, but any of the monster catching games that followed in its wake have their roots in Dragon Quest V. Indeed, in the wake of Pokemon's success Enix (and, later, Square Enix) began the Dragon Quest Monsters series, its own dedicated monster-catching spin-off games that incorporate some of Pokemon's ideas but also add many of Dragon Quest's unique herbs and spices for a much different feel.

It's possible that a new player approaching Dragon Quest V today would be turned off by how old some of it feels—even the DS remake retains the terrible menus of the original, and the graphics are a blend of 2D sprites and 3D backgrounds that don't always gel. For all of that, it remains one of my favorite games (and one of the best in the franchise) because the more intimate story and blend of genres that made it feel unique next to its contemporaries also help to keep it fresh and varied compared to the overblown, overly linear latter-day Final Fantasy games of recent years. Its relative simplicity also makes it more approachable than other games with an old-school bent, specifically those from Japanese developer Atlus. It's an old game, but it has aged gracefully, an it's just as worthy of your attention now as it was back in 1992.