7th Dragon – I can’t believe I finished the whole thing!

And killed every single last dragon as well! And got NOTHING for all my trouble! My mind is just all kinds of boggled right now.

More than that, I’m just tired after killing 666 dragons and doing tons of sidequests over the course of about 70 hours. I had a good time, but now I just want to forget I ever played this game. I’m so tired. I’m going to lay all my frustrations on the line and then move on without a second thought.

What I liked about 7th Dragon

1. Relative freedom to go anywhere and do whatever you want
2. Resettable skill trees
3. Small number of job classes, but each class has several builds and no class is entirely useless.
4. Sidequests suck, but they’re optional so that’s good.
5. Subevents are optional too, but highly rewarding.
6. Hold A to fast-forward battles (not that fast, really. In fact they should have just made battles faster to begin with).
7. Decent music. I neither liked nor disliked the soundtrack.
8. Low-level party members are quick to level up. I could have switched out my entire party at the end if I’d wanted to.
9. Dungeons have shortcuts. It just sucks that you have to memorize the location of every single one. They should have auto-marked it on the dungeon map.
10. I actually didn’t find the character designs all that cute, but I appreciate the attempt.

What I wasn’t so crazy about

1. No reward for killing all 666 dragons except a stupid post-game dungeon ;___; I should have checked before starting. I could have finished this game in 50 hours or less!
2. Boring, perfunctory ending sequence. My guild goes out adventuring somewhere, the end. No kingdom for my troubles, no cash, no mansions, no nothing! Just a thank you and a good bye. This sucks.
3. Doing optional dungeons will make you overlevelled. If I’d known there was no point in killing everything I would have left them alone.
4. Being overlevelled will ruin half the fun of the game by making all battles including the final one a joke.
5. All the time I spent wiping out dragons made the game too long.
6. Not just long but also tedious, since I ended up using the same few moves over and over and over again. Like most dungeon crawlers, 7th Dragon is a test of patience and endurance rather than skill or strategy.
7. Stupidly high encounter rate and how much trouble you have to go through to avoid random battles.  I’ve already complained about this twice, but a thousand times wouldn’t be enough.
8. Weapon and item shops stopped updating about 40 hours in. I had over 450,000g and nothing to spend it on by the end of the game. Not that I needed anything, but it’s the principle of the thing.
9. Inconvenient transportation. Walking/running is too slow. Portals should have been in every single town, not at a few random places on the world map. The ship is fast, but dat encounter rate. Airship is slow, even with an upgrade. Every method is flawed.
10. No monster/item glossary. In a game where every other quest is “Bring 10 of X” and where you need item drops to unlock certain items and armor, it’s a real pain not knowing who drops what and where to find them.
11. Characters and NPCs look rather small on the screen.
12. Mining and foraging are almost completely useless.
13. No way to check what quests you are currently on once you leave town.
14. A little too much backtracking for my comfort. How many hundred times did I visit Kazan again?
15. No Auto-battle. This is one game that really needed it.
16. Furowaro! That is all.

The good parts were good enough to keep me playing, but since I got nothing worthwhile after all I put in, all I can see are the flaws now. I’m not sure I’d recommend it to any but the most patient and most hardcore of dungeon-crawler lovers. In spite of all the pain, however, I’d still like to try 7th Dragon 2020 on the PSP sometime. Not any time soon, though.

What’s next

Tales of Innocence. And I want to settle things with Suikoden II once and for all this month. But first, sleep and lots of it.

7th Dragon – 390 down, 276 more to go!

42 hours and 49 minutes. That’s roughly 9.2 dragons per hour, for anyone keeping score. I spent the past weekend in a state of mild addiction, but I’m all better now. *twitch* Yeah.

I ended up like this because shortly after I made my last post, 7th Dragon gave me a ship and set me loose on the world to do whatever I wanted in whatever order I wanted to. Walk around, sail around, fight whichever dragon I want, take whichever sidequest I want, rest when I want, it feels sooo good. Of course the game does provide some guidance about what I should be doing, but they’re just that: guidelines. It’s up to me to choose when to follow them and when to go my own way.

There was a bit of story progression when I reached 333 dragons, which got me a bit worried that they’d try to force me back on the rails. Luckily my fears are unfounded, and I still having a blast roaming the world in search of dragons to murder. It really helps that they’re so ugly and unsympathetic.

Now, about the factors I mentions in the previous post that might prevent me from finishing the game, well… Some of them have improved and some haven’t but I’ve learned to live with them.

1. Damage floors – Yeah, they still suck. But they did introduce an item that reduces the damage you take. The catch is that you have to keep opening the menu to check if it’s still effective, ‘cos they don’t tell you when it wears off. Plus it doesn’t last that long. Thankfully I have lots of money so I can afford lots of them as well as all the healing items and mana-refilling potions I care to buy.

2. The encounter rate – It gotten a lot better, now that my Samurai has an ability that prevents lower-level enemies from approaching me 90% of the time. The stores also stock items that supposedly reduce encounters, but they do diddly and squat. As with the damage floor item, I need to check my menu every couple of steps to make sure the ability is still in effect (really hope they fixed that in the sequel). Still I’ll take that any day over random battles with level 1 weaklings.

3. Low-level enemies attacking – Yeah, they still show up if I let my guard down. And my Samurai’s ability has no effect on those worthless loser mobs that are higher-level statistically speaking but still drop jack all in terms of EXP. I really, really hate them.

4. Poor EXP and item drops – Gotten used to it. It probably has something to do with me being over-leveled almost from the get-go. Now I kill dragons for the fun of it, not because I expect anything in return. I’m like a charity or something.

5. Useless skills – They fixed this with an item that allows you to reset your skill points in exchange for losing 5 levels. A worthy trade-off, obviously. If you redistribute those skill points effectively you’ll end up just as strong as before, if not stronger.

6. Boring sidequests – I don’t do them, for the most part. I might be missing out on some really great rewards as a result (I highly doubt it) but it’s not worth the aggravation.

And there you have my progress report. I’m still not 100% sure I’ll be able to finish 7th Dragon, but now I’ll admit it: I’m having a great time. Not in the heart-pounding excitement kind of way, but more in the “Okay I’ll go here, and then I’ll take care of this, and I should probably stop by there, and I mustn’t forget to do that, and…hmm, this room is getting kinda bright GAAAAH THE SUN IS RISING I’M SUPPOSED TO BE UP AT 7!!!!” kind of way. I should finish this quickly so I can get some sleep.

7th Dragon – Twelfth hour

It’s highly playable and fairly enjoyable, but not that different from all the other dungeon crawlers I’ve played recently. In fact, Final Promise Story and Fuurai no Shiren 2 are the only dungeon crawlers I can definitively say are worse than this. Everything else – Unchainblades Rexx, Criminal Girls, WiZman’s World, etc – leaves 7th Dragon crawling in the dust on the other side of the world.

Will I be able to finish this game? I’m not very sure. The story simply goes that dragons have taken over the world and a band of adventurers (created and led by me) is out to kill them all and save everyone. What’s interesting is that there’s a counter on the bottom screen that shows exactly how many dragons there are left. It started out at 666, and after twelve hours of killing and adventuring it’s… let’s see… 584. That’s 82 dragons in 12 hours, or approximately 6.8 dragons per hour. Assuming things proceed at the same rate, I’ll need to spend another 85 hours on this game before I finish it, and do I really want to do that? First word: Hell. Second word: No.

Unless something radically changes about the gameplay in the next couple of hours, here are the factors that will most likely prevent me from finishing 7th Dragon:

1. Damage floors, in the form of deadly flowers known as “furowaro” or something silly like that. Stepping on them will sap your party’s HP before you ever take on a single enemy. Warp out to heal and save and when you come back you have to go through all that pain again. This is the real reason it takes so long to take down those dragons, because they themselves aren’t that tough.

2. The encounter rate is way too frickin’ high. Especially on the world map. I’ve tried different items, I’ve tried different abilities and it’s still way too high for me.

3. Coupled with the above, I hate the way low-level enemies keep attacking even when they should know better.

4. The game is stingy with EXP and item drops, even for dungeon bosses. On one hand all the bosses so far have been so pathetically weak that I’m not surprised, but on the other hand, come on! What kind of boss battle doesn’t yield even a single level up? After all I went through getting through the bloody dungeon? It’s disgusting, that’s what it is.

5. Too many useless skills you have to waste skill points on in order to learn the few useful ones on the whole grid. I liked the way Final Promise Story did it, where they let you reset all your skill point assignments in exchange for a monetary penalty. Heavens knows I have more than enough money and nothing to spend it on.

6. Boring sidequests, mainly of the Twenty Bear Asses variety. I almost never do sidequests in this sort of game, but that doesn’t stop me from holding that fact against 7th Dragon anyway.

#1 and #2 are the ones I have a real problem with. If I can find an item/skill that reduces “furowaro” damage and/or stops it from growing back inside dungeons, and if I can find a way to stop non-dragon enemy encounters altogether, this game will take a massive, immediate turn for the better. It’s not an unreasonable expectation.

Everything else in the game I can deal with. I’m playing with an all-girl party now, as a tribute to Criminal Girls. I’m happy with my Samurai, Rogue, Mage and Healer, I can take down pretty much any enemy without too much trouble, I’ve got lots of money and items and I’ve found several shortcuts for getting through completed dungeons. If they’ll just fix those niggling little flaws, there might be hope for 7th Dragon after all.

Iron Master: The Legendary Blacksmith – Finished one route

It turns out you don’t get the complete “story” (what little there is of it, anyway) unless you play the game three times and choose a different town to live in each time. What’s more, you only get to make a maximum of 6 kinds of items in each playthrough, so you have to play repeatedly if you want to make everything. I started a New Game Plus (nothing carries over) so I could get to make armor for a change. Making armor is fun, especially when you turn the finished pieces around and admire them from all angles. While I may finish this second game, I won’t be playing a third time to get the full story, so blog-wise this is a good time to say goodbye to Iron Master: The Legendary Blacksmith.

Final thoughts… haven’t changed that much from my initial ones. It is slow, and it does have frustrating moments, though those are few and far between now that I’m a master at all the mini-games. And what I really can’t stand is the sheer number of reps you have to put in just to master each item category. You need 5 reps to master level 1, 6 for level 2, etc. all the way to 10 for level 6. That’s 5+6+7+8+9+10 reps for each category = 45 reps. And you have a total of 6 categories for each playthrough, = 270 repetitions. And that’s if you get a perfect A rank every single time, which you usually won’t when it’s your first time making an item. It’s pretty crazy.

What’s worse is, because of the amount of time you have to spend on crafting to progress the story, you’re left with very little time to devote to the store management aspect of the game. First off, you don’t get any EXP for making items you’ve already mastered, so you’re just delaying your completion of the game when you make them. More importantly, it is very difficult to keep products on the shelf. They sell out almost faster than you can make them, so 90% of your floor space will be empty no matter what you do. In the end you just get stressed out, and your customers all leave the store in a huff because you can’t keep them happy. Not that keeping them happy has any effect on the game at all, come to think of it. I’ve always been more into crafting than into selling, so this is no big loss. On the other hand, though, I’ve enjoyed pretty much every selling game I’ve played, so I’m disappointed they didn’t flesh out that aspect of the game a little more.

Tedious repetitive mini-games and pointless selling aspect aside, I’ve enjoyed my time with Iron Master. I could throw up simple instructions for each mini-games if anyone is interested in trying it (ask soon, before I forget everything), but otherwise I’m basically done with this for good. Final roundup:

Pros

– You can make lots of different weapons and pieces of armor
– You can analyze your finished pieces from all angles, in very well-done 3D
– Mini-games are challenging, but fun
– You can practice each mini-game as much as you need to before playing for real
– Helen, your assistant, is cute and funny
– The music is surprisingly good. Fits the game perfectly
– Character designs and other graphics are very nice
– Adventurers of different job classes available to hire, each with their distinct advantages

Cons

– You have to play 3 times to make all items
– You have to play 3 times to get the full story
– The story itself isn’t much to speak of
– Each playthrough is too long
– Mini-games get tedious after the 1000th time
– Not much depth beyond endless mini-games
– Item overlap in each route – e.g. I still have to make bows and daggers in my second route
– Selling aspect of the game is woefully underdeveloped
– Adventurers are underutilized as well
– Store customers keep asking for items you can’t make
– No quicksave/quickload. Must turn game off to load from save.

Moving onnnnnn~! Time to start 7th Dragon!! If any game can give Phantasy Star Portable a run for its money in my 2012 Affection Rankings, it’ll be this game. Incidentally the 2011 Champion was Criminal Girls, followed by Tactical Guild, of all things. Lots of good games in that year, though. 2010… definitely Tokimeki Memorial Girls’ Side 3rd Story, with Luminous Arc 3 as the runner up. That was a good year in general. Crap, I’m starting to get nostalgic. Gotta look forward, gotta look forward. So, 7th Dragon! And a little bit of Suikoden II whenever I feel like it.

Monster Kingdom: Jewel Summoner – Decent (spoilers)

Monster Kingdom: Jewel Summoner is a passable game. I would even have deemed it “pretty good” if the endgame hadn’t dragged on interminably. It’s one of those games where you approach the final dungeon thinking “I’ll be done in about 5 hours” and then that 5 turns into 50 before you know it. As happened with Persona, the playing time is all screwy because the clock keeps going even when the game is asleep. Except  this time those 311 hours actually feel like 311 hours. I am slightly burned out right now.

Story

Monsters and humans lived in harmony, then the monsters inexplicably turned into jewels after some Great Disaster. Humans known as “jewel summoners” can summon monsters from their jewels and use them to fight. Our main character, Vice, is looking for a winged monster who killed his mother… and that’s about it for the preliminaries. In the process he ends up losing the monster his mother left him, and then joining the Order of jewel summoners to get it back (he never did on my playthrough) while finding out that there’s more to the Order and jewel power than he’d originally thought.

The story isn’t great to begin with, but it’s made a thousand times worse by some of the most stilted, disjointed English dialogue I have ever had the displeasure to read. It’s seriously bizarre, because most sentences usually make sense on their own, but it’s like someone tossed them all into a bag and shuffled them together, so once you string them together it’s like, WTF? It looks like the writers (or translators?) didn’t have the first clue about cohesive devices and coherence and, you know, plain old Making Fricking Sense.

And there’s a bigger problem: once you slog through all the nonsense and make it to the end, you’re still left with a ton of unanswered questions. E.g. What was Grey doing at the lighthouse at the beginning (I get the feeling they accidentally used Grey’s portrait instead of Bargus’s), why hasn’t Zygard aged all this time, what exactly is that evil thing we fought in ending 1 and what does it want, why did the Abomination go after Maera, where does Zygard and Vice’s special power come from, what exactly (if anything) is so special about Vice’s jewel, etc etc. …Come to think of it, I don’t care to know all that badly. It’s that kind of game.

Characters

Squall and Paine had a baby!

Vice starts out as your typical cocky main guy with a bad attitude, and quickly devolves in your typical shocked-at-everything-cares-about-everyone kind of hero. I didn’t hate him as much as I thought I would, mainly because he was so obviously playing it by the book.

A few hours in you’re made to choose two other party members who you are then stuck with for the rest of the game. There’s Elly the Dumb, and Grey the Stupid, then you’ve got Lynn who is nice but nuts, and Bargus who is nice but suspicious. AFAIK there’s no real advantage to picking any particular person, so I went with those I could stand, i.e. Bargus and Lynn.

The supporting cast isn’t much to write home about. No particularly memorable villains or NPCs, though the reveal about Professor Anhj certainly blindsided me. Always be suspicious of unnaturally large boobs!

Gameplay

Third-person dungeon-crawling: Speaks for itself. You also have field abilities like Hover, Decode, Trap, Reveal, etc. that help you make your way through and solve the switch and platform puzzles you come across. While the dungeon layouts were occasionally confusing, I did manage to figure everything out by myself – apart from the bloody awful final Monolith dungeon.

Element triangle: Dark elements (Ice, Water, Earth, Dark) overpower Light Elements (Fire, Thunder, Wind, Light) and vice-versa. It goes like this: Dark <-> Light, and Fire > Ice > Wind > Earth > Electric > Water >Fire. When you hit an enemy with an attack it’s weak against, its turn moves back in the queue, same if they do it to you. It goes on until the monster gets mad (literally. They get pissed) and attack anyway. It’s not too different from the Press-Turn system in some Megami Tensei games otherwise.

Normal turn-based battles: The monsters take to the field, not the summoners, but any damage done to them is drawn from the summoner’s LP (aka HP). When a monster runs out of JP (aka MP) it is removed from battle and replaced with another equipped one. Chaining attacks together gives percentage bonuses to attack. “Escape” works a surprising 75% of the time. I hardly ever used “Guard.”

Monster capture: Beat them within an inch of their lives and then use the appropriate element prism to capture them. It beats the “unchain” mechanic in Unchainblades Rexx, at any rate. Captured monsters are sent to the Jewel Bank and can be equipped and used, though it sucks that you have to exit your current dungeon and return to the Order to do so.

Amalgamy: Where you use quartz and AP to strengthen and level up your monsters. You can make things significantly easier for yourself by giving monsters abilities they normally wouldn’t have naturally or that early in the game. For example, you can give electric attacks to a water monster so it can fight other dark/water monsters more effectively. You can also boost the strength of your attacks, add an ability slot and even evolve certain monsters, though this aspect is hardly explained in-game. Personally, I ended up ditching all my previous monsters in favor of the high-level high-attack monsters I caught in the final two dungeons. Why do monster-capturing games always end up this way?

That’s about it for battle strategy, but the game got a lot more fun and the battles got a lot faster and more interesting once I stopped trying to power my way through and actually took advantage of the element and chain bonus systems. Things got a little too easy towards the end, but hey, I earned it.

Graphics and Music and All the other stuff I don’t care about

The character designs you see on the cover and in the intro are slightly different from the ones that are actually used in-game, which is a real shame. The battle themes were pretty good, but I don’t remember any other tunes – and I just finished the game one hour ago. The screams and croaks of the monsters got on my nerves a bit. Voice-acting was so terrible I turned it off about 5 minutes into the game. I’ve never heard anything so bad. Nothing else worth reporting.

What I think of this game

If not for the half-assed story and the terrible writing and the horrible final dungeon, I would have rated Monster Kingdom: Jewel Summoner fairly highly. When you actually get to play, it’s actually pretty fun and even challenging in parts. It’s just a shame that my final memories of this game are the painfully bad Monolith dungeon, the pathetically weak final boss and the most insulting excuse for an ending since Blade Dancer. It’s worth playing if you can find it cheap, but don’t expect too much. In summary:

The Good
– Interesting battle system
– Fast transitions to battle
– Short/no loading times
– Decent music
– Easily navigable dungeons (except the Monolith)

The Bad
– Poor story
– Horrible writing/translation
– Meh character design
– Laughable voice “acting”
– Shoddy ending
– Difficulty falls off a cliff near the end
– Amalgamy takes forever unless you cheat
– Insufficient explanation of gameplay elements like stats and amalgamy
– Insufficient differentiation of monsters: all monsters with the same element learn the exact same attacks at the exact same levels.
– The Monolith dungeon SUCKS
– Post-game content is worthless, as usual

Next up

Finally made it to the 9 hour mark in Suikoden II. Also finally patched my DS together so I can continue Iron Master and Aquarian Age. And I’d like to start either Tales of Innocence or 7th Dragon sometime this month. Oh, and I also want to play an SRPG and maybe another otome “game.” So much to do, so little time…