I’d been wanting to play Dragon Quest VII since 2013, but people kept talking me out of it. They said it was slow, they said it was repetitive, they said nothing happened in the game for the first 40 hours. They were right. But they were warning me from the perspective of someone who thinks RPGs should be finished once they are started. Since my gaming resolution for 2018 is “It is enough to play a little bit of a game,” isn’t this the perfect year to experience what DQ7 has to offer?
Well even if you say it’s not, I’ve already started it and played 14 hours and 51 minutes, so it’s too late to offer your opinion. Just sit back and root for me as I play until I can’t play any more and then move on. But to be honest, I’m having a really good time with Dragon Quest 7, so I don’t see myself quitting for the next little while. I mean, why should I?
The nice thing about Dragon Quest is you know exactly what you’re getting into when you start. The battle systems are largely the same, the enemies, the leveling system, the saving system, the maps, the town and castle layouts. It’s not the kind of game you play when you want something new. And I’ve been complaining for a while that I don’t want to deal with complicated game mechanics or reams and reams of story so TBH this is the perfect game for me. I really like it.
Uhh, should I explain the story? It’s been so long since I wrote a post I’ve forgotten how I normally do it. There’s not much of a story any way. Long, long ago 99% of the world was sealed away in darkness. Now the hero and his friends are collecting Fragments of the world map and putting them together to restore the world to its former state. That’s why the 3DS version has the subtitle “Fragments of the Forgotten Past.” The main character and his friends gather fragments and unlock an island, help solve its problems, gather more fragments and unlock another island, and on and on for the past 14 hours I’ve been playing. Very simple stuff, though some of the problems you deal with don’t have very happy resolutions. You won’t be getting your “Happily ever after” fix here, no sirree.
Battle system is Press A to win, with the occasional hard boss battle. Usually JRPGs let you go on in that vein for a while then drop That One Boss on you halfway through, but it’s been smooth sailing so far. Enemies and chests give good amounts of cash so you don’t have to grind to buy equipment either. There only one problem: the encounter rate is HIGH! Not as bad as Dragon Quest 6, but still way up there. And the Holy Waters, they do nothing! If anything gets me to drop this game, it will be the monsters. They’re not impossible to dodge but they’re everywhere, and they spawn immediately you get out of a battle instead of giving you like a 5-second breather or something. Arrgh, so frustrating.
Characters… Maribel needs to die. She’s not cute, she’s not funny and she runs out of MP too quickly to be useful in battle. Ruff is cute. I like the wolf. Kiefer is just kinda there. Kinda ugly for a prince too, but that’s what I get for playing too many otome games. The localization is excellent and my party always has a lot to say about every little thing. The nice thing about the itinerant nature of DQ7 is that you get to meet a lot of different villagers and NPCs as you travel around, so there are a lot of characters. Nobody too interesting yet, but a nice mix of characters and settings. I like it. I’m always low-key excited to see who I’ll be meeting next, which is a good thing.
TL;DR – I’ll be playing Dragon Quest VII for the next couple of days/weeks. I really like it but I’m not expecting too much. I don’t have any games lined up after this (or rather I have way too many so I’m overwhelmed) so I’ll just take each day one game at a time.
It will get more complicated once you unlock the Job System. That vignette was also the first one that annoyed me, because it was the first harder task and the first one that seemed to last short of forever to resolve.
I also hated the two childhood friends pretty much from the word Go tbh. And yes, the Encounters are kind of annoying. I really don’t understand changing them to visible ones, if the corridors are so narrow and they respawn so fast, that you might as well have still Random Encounters every three steps to begin with.
Looking forward to hear more about how you like it tho – and possibly sour on it 😀
Haven’t soured yet even though I unlocked jobs about two hours ago. I actually low-key hate job systems in RPGs, but it’s not so bad here since you keep your levels and many of your skills when you switch.