Even with the transportation spells and other shortcuts that the game gives you, there’s really no reason for all of this running around, except to maybe pad out the game’s length. In some instances, this involves scrounging through the same dungeons you’ve already conquered, or obsessively rummaging through every bookshelf, dresser and treasure chest. In order to open up new lands, you need to search for broken elemental shards. Once you’ve saved a land in the past, you need to revisit it in the present. Many times, this involves transporting back to the present, hiking back to the overworld, finding some object or person to help you out, hike into the depths of the shrine, transport back to the past, and then proceed.Īnd that’s only half of it. After teleporting and discovering the crumbled society you need to save, you’ll need to figure out some kind of resolution. Every chapter works like this: in order to warp through time, you’ll need to hike through several screens to get into the lower chambers of the ruins. The plot doesn’t even start properly until you’re a good chunk through the game, and you won’t even get to mess around with the class system until roughly fifteen hours in.Īnd even once the main story has kicked into gear, there’s still lots of senseless backtracking, because Dragon Warrior VII probably has the highest proportion of fetch quests of any JRPG in the history of JRPGs. But for an RPG, it feels way too drawn out, especially seeing how you won’t even get into a fight until roughly two hours in. According to later interviews, Yuji Horii was inspired by Myst, which focused solely on puzzle solving in an isolated environment. The first segment of Dragon Warrior VII is spent running fetch quests and exploring one long, very boring dungeon (at least in the initial PS1 release). The major problem with the game, though, is that it suffers from absolutely glacial pacing. The past often looks just like the present, except the past is usually encased in perpetual night or something similar (like Dragon Quest VI, there’s no day/night cycle – time just changes depending on the plot.) By and large, it’s not as involving as Chrono Trigger for one main reason (and was one of the most confusing issues in Dragon Quest VI) – there’s no real visual distinction across time periods. It is pretty cool to see the overworld grow from a tiny piece of land, to a small cluster of islands, to a huge series of continents as large as any of the previous games. Most of the stories are unrelated to one another, although a few are connected in small ways. You can also revisit the tomb of the sealed monster, who’s reverted into a powerless human during his imprisonment, and jokes with your heroes about how pathetic he’s become. Come back in the present, and you’ll find that the villagers put on animal costumes during a festival in remembrance of their ancestor’s tribulations. As expected, you find the evil villain responsible for the curse, and seal him away in a tomb. The Dragon Quest games have never been about fancy graphics or sound, but it would’ve been nice if the developers took some advantage of the larger medium or more powerful hardware, especially considering it came out late in the PlayStation’s lifespan.įor instance, one scenario in the past involves a village where the humans have turned into animals, and the animals turned into humans. The package comes with two discs, but the computer rendered cutscenes – also extremely ugly – are pretty rare, and it’s a bit hard to tell exactly what’s filling up on that space, because the music is sequenced, and there are no voices at all. The character sprites actually look worse than Dragon Quest VI, and the landscapes – especially in the battle scenes – are pixellated and generally not all that attractive. Given how long this game was in development, it looked pretty dated even when it came out in Japan in 2000. All of the backgrounds consist of polygons, allowing you to rotate the camera in most instances, while all of the characters still consist of 2D sprites, similar to Xenogears. Dragon Warrior VII was developed by a studio called Heartbeat and is the first title in the series to use 3D graphics.
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