Drgaon Quest 5: Hand of the Heavenly Bride for the Nintendo DS released on July 17^th has been proven to have anti-piracy measures that prevent bootleg copies of the game from working properly. As reported by Yahoo Japan, game characters in the opening scene will be caught in a never ending boat ride instead of progressing forward in the game.

Japanese message boards began to light up on July 16^th as gamers began to wonder why their characters were still on the same boat one hour after getting on it. Rumours Square-Enix had implemented a “Copy Guard” began to circulate along with the logical theories such as a programming bug. The Anti-piracy theory was confirmed by Square-Enix public relations, “If gamers are playing a pirated copy the ship from the opening scene will never reach port. This is an Anti-piracy measure we decided to implement.”. A quick scan of the Japanese message boards reveal firmware and cheat code based solutions have apparently already been developed that allow gamers to get past the anti-piracy measures.

The form of piracy these measures are designed to combat are the Nintendo DS ROM Cartridges such as the R4 that allow gamers to load ROM files of their favorite games downloaded from the internet. The ROM cartridge fools the Nintendo DS into believing a real cartridge has been plugged in to the DS and are only limited by memory capacity in terms of how many games can be loaded. These ROM cartridges are being discreetly sold in Akihabara to this day despite Nintendo’s best efforts to crack down on these products.