Saturday, April 28, 2018

7th Dragon

I just finished the original 7th Dragon on DS and I wanted to get my thoughts in order about it. Prior to the fan translation coming out, I badly wanted to play this game - it looked gorgeous, was from the makers of both the original Phantasy Star games and the Etrian Odyssey series, and had a compelling hook: a counter at the beginning of the game that you want to bring down to zero from 666, which is the total number of dragons in the entire game.

So, I imported a Japanese copy of the DS game at first and tried to learn some rudimentary Japanese to bumble my way through it. I gave up pretty quickly; like most RPGs, 7th Dragon is pretty text-heavy, and there are plenty of plot flags that you have to find to be able to advance the story. I gave up, sad that it seemed no company was looking to localize it, then out of the blue (seriously, no one knew he was working on it until it dropped) in 2014 a random guy who goes by Pokeytax released a full English translation. He did a great job on it, too, with everything working and only a few minor issues, usually related to some text overlaying parts of maps, because obviously in Japanese the name of the area was listed vertically rather than horizontally in English, but that's no big deal. I bought a DS flashcart explicitly for 7th Dragon, downloaded the patch, and started playing. That first playthrough was rough; I had expected Etrian Odyssey, but honestly 7th Dragon is much more like old school Dragon Quest, not just in the way the dungeons are laid out, but also how often you leave and come back after healing. You do that in Etrian Odyssey, too, but not quite this much. There's also the matter of the Bloom, the flowers that litter both the overworld and the dungeons - each time you step on them, they sap 2% of the HP of everyone in your party, and they come back when you leave the screen. The flowers only disappear if you kill all the dragons in the area (or if you kill the boss of the dungeon, it varies from dungeon to dungeon). Running in, killing a dragon or two, and running out to heal started to grate, especially with the extremely high encounter rate, which killed my first playthrough about 10 hours in.

I gave it another shot a few weeks ago, and it clicked finally. I'm not sure why... maybe it's because I'd just played through several Dragon Quest games just prior (finished VII after a break and played through the entirety of VIII and IX). I was determined to get the counter down to zero - I haven't, yet, and I'm not sure if I will, though I want to try. The remaining dragons, I'm pretty sure, are buried in special quests, which is a problem for me because the quest system is garbage in 7th Dragon. You can't check your quests in the menu, you have to go back to towns to even see which ones you have active, and you can only have three active at once. You also have to find the questgiver, go to the quest building, accept the quest, then go back to the questgiver to get started. It is tedious and awful, especially because you often forget where the questgiver is so finding them after you've completed it can be a pain. Many don't give very good clues as to what to do, either - there is a NPC that will give you better clues, but that's in one town in the whole game so you'd have to fly around if you have the airship or warp around just to get to her and get a clue and I'm just sick of it by then. It doesn't help that many of the quests are collecting drops from non-dragon random battles, all of which give negligible EXP, so you're grinding for basically only the drops since you get so little EXP from the random battles.

Anyway, there's a lot to like about the game - as I said above, the soundtrack is great, both in regular and chiptune versions (I prefer the chiptunes by far, but both are great). It's unfortunate that you have to get through like half the game to get the quest to unlock the chiptune soundtrack, but at least it's not in the postgame like I thought it was until I found it.

The dragon fights are repetitive, but managing your HP and MP while trying to take out as many as you can is pretty fun. Party synergy isn't quite as good as the later Etrian Odyssey games - 7th Dragon came out before EO3, the best one, IMO - but my party still worked pretty well. My Fighter chased elemental attacks from my Mage, my Samurai basically spent the entire game spamming an attack that blocks enemies from using skills (and it activated more often than I thought it would, so it actually was pretty useful), and of course I had a Healer to keep everybody topped up. When you level up, you get 1 or 2 SP to spend on abilities, just like in Etrian Odyssey. Each class has a couple different routes you can take; my Fighter was a sword user rather than axe, each of which has different abilities. Same thing with my Samurai, who specialized in speed rather than power or defense. My Mage was able to almost max out all three elemental types by the end of the game, but I didn't touch the non-elemental spells with him. My healer healed (there are some attack abilities for the Healer but I didn't bother).

The story isn't super original or groundbreaking, but it's entertaining. It's basically Dragon Quest but with a lot more dragons, mixed with just a touch of Shin Megami Tensei (just a touch, and most of it comes late in the game).

It's a shame this was never released in English - while I don't think it would have been universally loved (the encounter rate and quest system would have probably pissed off lots of players), it was still worth releasing over such garbage as Sands of Destruction or Izuna the Unemployed Ninja or My World My Way, etc. I can't believe The Dark Spire came out when that game is punishing as hell and 7th Dragon... isn't. That's the reason given by many publishers at the time- that 7th Dragon was "too hard," which isn't true at all, and I didn't even use the hack the translator made that lowers the encounter rate and ups EXP gain! The game is just a very methodical push through top down dungeons and feels very old school. I could even see myself playing through it again someday, whereas I have no desire to push through the above games even once.

Luckily, Pokeytax has already released a translation patch for 7th Dragon 2020 for the PSP, which I just started, and supposedly later this year he'll have released a patch for the sequel to that game, which means once that comes out the whole series will be playable in English now that they released the 3DS game, which is the last in the series. I intend to play them in order - the 45 minutes of the PSP game I've already played has references to the DS game, so I'd imagine stuff like that carries through the series, so my playthrough of the 3DS game will be all the better when it references the old games that were never officially released. Thank god for fan translators!

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