RPG Diary

Dragon Quest VII

I know very little about Dragon Quest VII. There are a lot of RPGs on the PlayStation, but I rarely hear about this one. The last two games in the series left me a little disappointed with their thin stories, so I'm approaching this one with mellowed expectations.

Title	Dragon Quest VII (US Dragon Warrior VII )
Year	2000 (US 2001 )
System	PSX
Developer	Heart Beat
Publisher	Enix

Dragon Quest VII is such a strange game that I'm not even sure where to begin.

It's the first (and only) game in the series on the PlayStation. In my opinion, the game does not make good use of the console. Visually, the game does not fully commit to 3D as there are 2D sprites layered over 3D backgrounds. These 3D backgrounds have low quality textures, so the whole thing looks very ugly to me — I very much preferred the pure 2D aesthetic of the SNES games instead. I was also disappointed with how there are barely any FMVs. Somehow this game spans two disks, but I have no idea what all that space was used for!

Once again, Dragon Quest VII has some good plot ideas, but there isn't enough story to keep my interest. The majority of the game is centered around a fairly unique and interesting concept: restoring the world, piece by piece like a giant jigsaw puzzle. This was fun for a few hours, but it moves at such a slow pace. Additionally, the game has many segments without any battles and/or requires backtracking across many screens. Honestly, it felt like the game just does not respect the player's time. You could even argue that the main story doesn't really begin until 50 hours in, which is just absurd.

The core gameplay is very similar to Dragon Quest VI, with a hierarchical job system unlocked several hours in. Unfortunately the jobs seemed even less balanced than before! 0 MP skills are still vastly better than magic spells, and insanely powerful skills (e.g. SwordDanc) are available very early. It was very frustrating to see so much effort and variety in the job system, only to find that most of the jobs were completely useless. On top of all this, it felt like jobs leveled very slowly, perhaps because of the long periods without battles.

Party composition was also a huge source of frustration for me. There are several points in the story when a party member abruptly leaves for long periods of time. When you factor in the slow grind of the job system, this could be diastruous — for example, what if that party member was your primary healer? Plotwise, some of these events felt like weak writing, reminding me of the awkward excuses for party changes in Final Fantasy IV. For reasons unknown, the wagon mechanic of previous games is absent. By the end of the game, you are left with 5 characters but only 4 party slots. Again, factoring in the slow grind of the job system, this means someone is the odd one out and left to rot for the rest of the game. (I picked Melvin, because Maribel was my only mage. Besides, Melvin was pretty underwhelming and unconvincing as the legendary hero...)

Finally, while it's not really significant in the grand scheme of things, I just need to vent about this plot twist: I am still pissed that Kiefer abruptly left the party permanently about 15 hours in. I thought he was the most interesting character, and he was easily my favorite. He was also the strongest character at that point, so the party shrinking from 4 to 3 characters was really painful for awhile.

After completing a game, I add it to my overall enjoyment ranking which orders the games I've completed from those I most enjoyed to those I least enjoyed. I did not enjoy this game very much, so the only question is how low to place it. NES RPGs like Final Fantasy are thin and grindy, but they are much shorter than Dragon Quest VII which is just way too long and slow. The story was more interesting than Lightning Returns though, so I'll place this above it.