Somewhere in the back of my head lives The Great List of Vita DRPGs That I Haven't Played: the Mary Skelters, Demon Gazes, Dungeon Travelers 2s, even Class of Heroes.
(This list lives next-door to the List of Distinctly Vita-Era Anime Games like Conception II. I think the intersection is somewhere around Criminal Girls.)
The 7th Dragon series is a frequent visitor to this list, despite, impressively, coming out for every single portable system of this era (DS, PSP, and 3DS) except for the Vita.
I only knew so much about the 7th Dragon series as I was able to frantically search in early July while trying to remember whether the original, 2020 (or 2020-II), or VFD was on my list.
The original stood out to me with a distinctive chibi style (courtesy of mota, compared to the later games by Shirow Miwa) and a larger reliance on traditional RPG flavorings.
Could it be - a dungeon-taste game with a more in-depth storyline and the potential to wrap up before I've sunk infinity hours into it? (My tendency to drown in the genre is what ensures I keep it at arms length most of the time.)
Well... sort of.
7th Dragon is certainly no short game (I clocked 45 hours), and there's a good amount of things I'd wish were shaped to my taste just a bit more - but I will agree that these chibis are absolutely fantastic!
(And that isn't a 'well at least the art is good' - I will acknowledge that, at my age, I put an incredible premium on aesthetic - some cute characters will absolutely redouble my motivation for a game.)
7th Dragon is the sort of game that makes me say 'person playing Dragon Quest 3 for the first time this year excited to play Dragon Quest 3 a second time'.
At times I thought the comparison was a bit overblown - early-game is a bit too locked down, with lots of places I can't access out of order despite walking to it on the overworld, and the towns are not quite as wonderfully information-compact as DQ3 - but when it matters, 7th Dragon hits excellent highs that really do make me feel a little 'getting a lot of Boss Baby vibes from this'.
In particular, 7th Dragon has an excellent opening sequence drop and a fantastic climax; cynically, one could argue it's a bit of 'cramming all of the plot in one place', but I found the late-game slice where the truth of the world revealed itself along with a pair of emotional hellos and goodbyes to be very impactful.
There's a good cast of characters all around, and while it's no surprise that 'smol anxiety baby who's a super genius', 'the mysterious blue haired girl', and the 'vaguely neurodivergent military lady with 2 lines' are my favorites, there's a good amount of contrast and endearingness to go around among all the nations.
A surprising strength of 7th Dragon to me is its narrative focus on the 666 dragons (and their poisonous flowerblights) rampaging over the overworld - it flashes its hand at interpolitical conflict in a way that almost seems reminscent of a disaster movie, right down to a overly trigger-happy government attempting to blow the dragons out of the sky with a superweapon, human cost be damned.
The actual mechanical effect of both the dragons and the blight is more mixed, certainly.
I urge you to absolutely NOT be me, the person who laughed off the English patch's 'half encounter rate' option (excellent work by Pokeytax).
Remembering to apply my metaphorical sunscreen and insect repellent was an incredible drag in 7th Dragon, to the point where I just zeroed the encounter rate entirely about 2/3rds through the game - and yet remained overleveled until the end.
My radical suggestion for 7th Dragon is 'what if it was designed so that the overworld dragons were the only monsters' - I think it'd be a striking choices, and since I want to take a wrench to this game design anyway...
7th Dragon has solid Etrian Odyssey party-building fundamentals - though I always sweat when it comes to Etrian-style skill trees, where investments are slow to come by and useless until they're broken, I did find myself salivating and imagining newer and more comical builds while away from the game at the grocery store.
Though there are a few ways the game really tries to push your hand (towards blight resistance of the knight, the MP regen of the healer/princess, etc...), the flexibility feels quite tangible.
My biggest complaint is that 7th Dragon has a few tricks to allow you to avoid the typically tense DRPG resource-management that leaves you chasing one more dungeon dive.
Princess and/or Healer parties have sufficient MP regeneration such that you can heal up to full resources by stalling out against weak enemies - the optimal play being Boring Stalling is a design choice that feels bad to me in lots of genres (I remember getting stuck by this in Dice & Fold).
The Knight having an ability that 100% covers allies if they're below half health felt like a very dominant strategy also (only vulnerable to status ailments) - especially since the Princess, a pair for the Knight, has an attack that does colossal damage at low HP! (A little ironic given that the Princess's moves are largely sadistic and whip-based in nature...)
Overall, I'd say 7th Dragon was a decent game; it dragged on me nearly to the point of quitting in the middle, but I'm very willing to give a game credit for sticking the start and the finish - though I think I'm better suited to a more pure DRPG like the Shiren series or even just Etrian (from where a lot of the staff of 7th Dragon comes from, apparently).
I'll also give the game credit for getting a backloggd review mentioning the part of the game where you need an all-female team to advance and... you all are creating guys?
I should probably use this moment to promote Labyrinth of Refrain/Galleria, two dark but notably story-heavy anime DRPGs with Disgaea flavoring [in terms of Nippon Ichi Customization Overload]. They're not for everyone but if it gets its hooks in you... enjoy that 3,000 floor bonus dungeon.
Bonus facts that I forgot to add to the review:
- Many healer weapons seem to be best described as 'attach heavy object to stick and swing'.
- The 'some people use a language you don't know' system is really cool but underutilized, especially with how frustrating the quest system is.
- I laughed every time you open a chest in town and are like 'actually no put it back'.
- The difference between an anime RPG and a normal RPG is that anime RPGs will tell you how much they love kemomimi.
- Dinosaurs are dragons, apparently.
Oh right. 7th Dragon also has an unlockable 8-bit alternate soundtrack that you can stumble across if you're following story hinting in-game. Yuzo Koshiro is simply goated.
Writing by invelica | Built with zola 0.20.0 | Theme by ネe3 based on futu@main