Dragon Warrior VII

Apparently, I can't get enough Dragon Quest.

I beat V less than two months ago, and though it drags on near the end (really, game, I have to level up my kids for hours before I can continue? Thaaaaanks), I ended up enjoying it quite a bit. And last year, I played through what had been my favorite Dragon Quest mechanically - VI. I loved that Class system so much.

I had heard for years that Dragon Quest VII (Warrior here in the States - the last game in the series with that title) had the most extensive version of the Class system, though. I had also heard that it was by far the longest Dragon Quest, and that most people took over 100 hours to beat it, much less do many of the sidequests.

So I longed for the game, to at least try it out. I say try because the game is infamous for being ugly. I never bothered to look it up online because I knew I'd play it eventually.

A few weeks back, I went into the retro game shop near where I work, and lo and behold they had a mint copy of the game for forty bucks. Having just gotten paid, I bought the game knowing I'd probably never see it cheaper than that. I went home that night and popped it in...

And almost threw up. The game really is incredibly, indescribably ugly. I say this as someone who had only a Nintendo 64 in the late nineties, and enjoyed such "beautiful" games as Bomberman 64, Banjo-Kazooie, and other such blurry messes. Dragon Warrior VII came out for the original Playstation at the end of 2001, which is the same time Squaresoft released Final Fantasy X - a game that may still be their best-looking 3D game, in my opinion.

As I played the first few hours of the game, I kept telling myself the battles would look good. Surely, they would, right? I had been weaned on the beautifully animated DS titles, but I tried to keep the faith. And by and large, the battles do look good, at least in terms of the monster sprites. The backgrounds and even the text boxes in battle are godawful. I will say that the enemies animate their attacks pretty well, though I do miss their idle animations from the DS games.

But to look at Dragon Warrior VII's graphics and dismiss the game as bad would be a mistake. At the time of this writing, I have invested about 40 hours into the game and can't say that I've disliked it at all. Dragon Warrior VII is one of the slowest-paced games I have ever played, though. I didn't fight my first battle until I was two and a half hours into the game. Before that point, I had to wander around some stupid ruins and I have to say had extremely little fun. But once you get to that battle, though, the game starts to get good.

And when you hit 18 and a half hours in, you unlock the Class system finally (at least, that's where I unlocked it). I don't know why they put the Dharma Temple (renamed Alltrades Abbey in the DS games) so far into the game. I wish it had been accessible earlier, although a certain character leaves your party just before unlocking it, so I guess I would have been a little upset if I had leveled that characters classes up a lot just before losing them. I still haven't seen him since he left, either, which is weird since he features pretty heavily in the story to that point. Anyway...

You gain experience in your classes by fighting battles, but not by gaining levels. What this means is that after a certain number of fights, your characters will level their class up and potentially learn new moves. What is really nice about this system is that once your characters learn a skill or spell, they always have access to it, even if they switch classes. This makes sense to me more than the Job system in the various Final Fantasies - if I can do an activity at one point, it's not like I forget how to completely do certain tasks once I change Jobs. I always thought that was dumb. Many of the moves you learn are useful, although some of the classes themselves suck because they're largely just barriers to unlock the better classes. I do not look forward to training someone to master the Bard, Dancer, and Jester classes to unlock the TeenIdol class and then have to master that and Sage (which requires I master the Cleric and Mage classes to unlock) to be able to unlock the Summoner class. Ugh.

But, knowing the amount of fun I'm having, I probably will do all that. The gameplay is deep, and knowing cool moves is worth it. My main hero and one of my other party members have a move called WindBeast, which has no MP cost and is their most powerful attack. If I only want to target a single enemy rather than wail on all of them with my boomerang, I'll spam WindBeast. It's great for bosses who aren't immune to wind attacks! Plus, it is not considered magic, so even if my characters are silenced they can still use it, and since it's a "skill," having lowered accuracy otherwise (being "dazzled") doesn't affect its accuracy. Hooray!

One of the downfalls of the game, though, is its localization. I wouldn't say it's incomprehensible, but they packed a lot of content into the two discs, so sometimes the NPCs don't quite tell you enough about where to go or what to do next. So, about three hours in, I began using a FAQ to play through the game, and I haven't regretted it one whit. The fact that you cannot advance in the game without acquiring enough Land Shards means that if you didn't use a FAQ, you'd have to crawl over the entire game looking for that one little piece you need to be able to travel to the next land. If there's one glaring problem with the game, it is that one, even over the godawful graphics.

I do enjoy what those Shards unlock, though. The game starts on what is the only existing island in the world, and to be able to restore the other lands in the world, your party must find these shards, place them in this ancient ruin, and then travel back in time and solve whatever is plaguing that particular land. Typically this involves killing lots of monsters and a few bosses, although sometimes its just solving a few puzzles in towns. The Dragon Quest series has always been known for its vignettes, and they are arguably at their strongest, here. This is because once you save a land in the past, it becomes available to visit in the future. You can then talk to the NPCs and maybe learn how what you did to help the town in the past has gone through time. Sometimes you are revered and remembered (one town explicitly wrote in their history to expect the party to come visit again someday, and to throw a huge party when they do) or are completely forgotten in favor of the local person that helped your party out at the time. Either way, the vignettes are always creative and fun, and many times link together in weird ways (there have been multiple times where someone from some vignette reappears later in a different vignette, older and somewhat wiser. It's always interesting seeing these characters again).

All told, I've got plenty of game left - probably 50 or 60 hours! I hope it doesn't drag on during the second disc, though, which I'm nearing. I want to actually finish this game, length be damned.