So I finally reached the end of the main story. I’m happy to report that this remake of Dragon Quest VII delivered on its promise of a main campaign that doesn’t take over 100 hours to complete like the original version. This time, the quest to restore the world and defeat the great evil is a nice little 90 hour jaunt. I have some reservations about this game, as I’ve alluded to earlier, but the long journey was largely worth it in the end.
With such a long game you’re no doubt going to be in for a lot of story. Fortunately, I found the way that this game uses its overarching premise of travelling to the past to save islands and restore them to the present day world as a form of storytelling to be outstanding. Connections between seemingly isolated islands start to appear part way through the game and eventually a deeper history between several territories is often revealed. Many of these connections unfold in unexpected ways and the narrative isn’t always linear. Rather than the game simply trying to push the narrative forward in a calculated manner, the stories and legends in the game are often subtle enough that it felt like natural storytelling to me. Through speaking to villagers, exploring the islands, and finding new locations, the subtle hints and small pieces of information began to come converge and bring the narrative of the game’s world closer together. All of it served to make the main story a very engaging one.
What was more hit or miss for me were the stories on some of the specific islands. Many of the stories are genuinely interesting and well paced, but some of them dragged on much longer than they should have. In the most egregious cases, I was running back and forth between a handful of locations, talking to key NPCs to trigger events, and shuffling messages or items back and forth between them for well over an hour. The story has to be very engaging in these parts if the game is going to force the player into gameplay like this, but, unfortunately, on some of these islands it wasn’t up to the task.
The characters, on the other hand, were a constant source of enjoyment for me from start to finish. Maribel is one of my new favourite characters in any game, ever. She should be the new standard for characters that exude vanity while still being funny and likable; there are few (if any) characters I’ve seen pull this off as well as she does. The rotation of characters in your main party are all endearing in their own way and I can’t remember the last time I enjoyed reading the party chat in an JRPG this much (and there is a ton of it). There are plenty of memorable key characters outside of the main party as well, from the Hero’s mother and father to my personal favourite Captain Sharkeye, who seriously needs to star in a Dragon Quest spin-off game. Hats off to folks at Nintendo Treehouse; this is some of the best writing and localization I’ve ever seen.
The first thing that drew me in with Dragon Quest VII wasn’t the story though; it was the gorgeous visuals. The overworld is one of the most vibrant and colorful I’ve seen in a 3DS game. Once the world starts becoming populated with the islands you’ve restored, you’ll start to see mountains and forests off into the distance where only an endless ocean could be seen before. Beyond those landscapes you’ll see clouds moving across the horizon and it all serves to give the large, open world more depth and feel even more vast. From a gameplay sense there isn’t much to explore in the overworld; at most I found a treasure chest or two on each island and most of the time there wasn’t anything particularly useful in them. However, everything is so well presented that I wanted to run around and explore every inch of the islands anyway. There is a lot of pop-in and noticeable textures on the islands, but in the second half of the game there are several locations which look so amazing that you would think you were no longer playing a 3DS game.
Where the game shines even more brightly, however, is in the battle backgrounds. I don’t need to attach any qualifiers to this statement: the battle backgrounds are some of the best I’ve seen in a video game. They’re exquisitely detailed and capture the essence of wherever you might find yourself in the world. My favourite instance of this is one area of the game where the heroes are traversing a mountainside at the break of dawn, next to a waterfall that they had trouble crossing the day before. Rather than displaying the usual backgrounds for mountainous or hilly regions when I was drawn into battle here, these two key elements in the story were incorporated. The backdrop now showed the rising sun over the ocean in the far background, with the mountain landscape and waterfall falling over the side of the cliff bathed in sunlight. Often times, the backgrounds will even reflect less obvious environmental conditions. When I fought an enemy in a tower close to a section where part of the tower was destroyed, the left side of the wall had light pouring into the dark dungeon and clouds beneath the wall to reflect the fact I had reached the upper levels of the tower. There are numerous examples I could share beyond these ones. I was continually impressed by the detail and effort that went into this part of the game, especially in the second half.
The visuals are well complemented by the music, which itself is superb. It’s as epic as the series’ music is reputed to be and although the number of pieces is on the smaller side, I never stopped enjoying the music during my long journey with this game. I should note that this not the orchestral music from the Japanese version, but even after listening to the soundtrack for the Japanese version I still found the music in the North American version to be just as enjoyable.
While the visuals got a complete overhaul, one place where this game hews much closer to tradition is in its gameplay. I played Dragon Quest IV (DS) earlier this year and the straightforward battle system remains largely unchanged here. The crux of normal enemy encounters is really just how quickly you can end them, since there are a lot of them, and the only difference in boss battles is that the small handful of basic buff and debuff spells come into play. The battles are still somewhat satisfying in the way that battles in traditional JRPGs usually are, but they’re nowhere near as engaging as as the battles in games like 7th Dragon III: Code VFD or even Bravely Second (which serves as something of a contemporary to this game), where the systems are more complex.
Many other antiquated gameplay elements from older Dragon Quest games return in Dragon Quest VII as well; anything stored in your party’s bag cannot be used during battles, equipped items take up part of these inventory slots, items are transferred between party members or the party’s bag one item at a time, and on goes the list. To top it all off, the plethora of menu screens that you must navigate are also quite slow. It’s clear that these are all intentional decisions from the developers and have nothing to do with hardware limitations, so I have to assume that this is how the core Dragon Quest fanbase wants the game to play. The charm is somewhat lost on me as someone who doesn’t have much nostalgia for the series, but these were mostly minor annoyances and something I was able to get over pretty quickly.
What isn’t simply a minor annoyance is the class system. This is where the majority of the party’s skills are obtained, so making good use of it is important both in terms of being able to do well in combat and making combat itself more fun. Unfortunately, one major flaw serves to undermine what would have otherwise been a very effective and engaging class system: advancement within classes is based on a predetermined number of battles, not on accumulating experience points, and the battles must be fought against enemies of a certain strength relative to the level of your party members. This is a misstep on a fundamental level given the nature of the Dragon Quest series.
In a series that unabashedly emphasizes grinding, this class system actively penalizes players for finding ways to level up their party in an efficient manner. If this were done in an effort to shift the series away from being so focused on grinding I would find this admirable, but given how many battles it takes to master vocations it’s clear that this wasn’t the intent. Instead, because it takes so long to master the most powerful classes (upwards of 250-260 battles) this effectively adds another layer of grinding on top of everything else. You’ll have to seek out the enemies which give you the lowest experience points while still meeting the threshold for class advancement if you want to master classes quickly. In other words, I found myself actively avoiding enemies which I knew would give me a lot of experience points, even if I could make quick work of them. Your highest level party member will become overleveled if you engage these enemies too often and if you don’t notice this soon enough, those party members can go several hours without learning any new skills (until you reach a part of the game with stronger enemies).
To make matters worse, the only way to tell if you’re advancing in your class in this game is to talk to a specific NPC in a specific location (Alltrades Abbey). There’s no way to use fast-travel spells in the past, so you’ll have to journey all the way back to the teleportal, exit the Shrine of Mysteries, warp to Alltrades Abbey, and then retrace your steps just to talk to this NPC. The game obviously keeps track of how many battles you’ve fought in your current class, otherwise the class system wouldn’t function at all, so to give the player no option to check their progress in the menu is baffling to me. The only explanation I’m left with, again, is that this is the game being old-school for the sake of being old-school, but it’s hard to get away with that when you’re dealing a system that already has the potential to be frustrating.
Fortunately, it’s not all bad and the class system does have its fair share of redeeming qualities. I’m a big fan of the the fact that there are tiers within this system. You’ll have to master multiple beginner classes to gain access to intermediate classes, and master some combination of beginner and intermediate classes to gain access to the most advanced classes. For example, the Martial Artist and Priest classes must be mastered before a party member can access the Paladin class. From there, Paladin and Gladiator (which is unlocked after mastering the Warrior and Martial Artist classes) must be mastered in order to unlock the Champion class. This necessitates planning beforehand and gives some direction to the player, rather than having them aimlessly mastering random classes, and gave me more satisfaction to mastering a class beyond attaining the most powerful abilities.
Another plus for the class system is that the skills for the advanced classes feel appropriately powerful and worth the effort. Hundreds of battles must be fought to eventually attain the final skills of the Champion class, Gigaslash and Blade of Ultimate Power, but they’re so powerful and badass that it all feels worth it in the end. I wasn’t able to fully master the most powerful magic-based class before I got to the final boss, but I’d imagine the final skills obtained in this class are also game changers. Though the path to get there can become more arduous than it should be, the class system does ultimately succeed in giving you a wide array of worthwhile skills that make the combat more enjoyable.
Around these myriad of old-school elements, there is one significant modernization to the gameplay that was a pleasant surprise: the guidance features. If you’re wondering where you ought to be headed next, you can receive general hints from the caretaker of the Shrine of Mysteries and another set of hints from the menu system for tablet fragment locations. Between these features and the tried and true method of speaking to characters and NPCs, I almost never found myself wandering aimlessly or at a loss for what to do next. At the same time, I usually didn’t feel like the game was simply giving me the whole answer when I used these features either. You’re given a general direction to travel in, but it’s up you to put several pieces of information together to arrive at the final conclusion or to navigate an obstacle to reach your goal once it’s in sight. For such a long game, with such a large world, to strike this kind of balance is a tremendous achievement.
Another pleasant surprise for me was that, despite being over a 90 hour journey, there was enough new content being introduced throughout the game to keep it feeling fresh (most of the time). While I did take issue with how long I was saddled with story in certain locations, I was impressed with how many different locations and dungeons there are and how rich they were in content. There is naturally a lot of backtracking given the premise of the game, but I often found that the islands or villages had changed in significant ways once they were restored. There are often new dungeons to explore in the present day world and entirely new villages can be found on some of the islands as well. Even towards the end of the game, where many JRPGs will have players retracing their steps, I was continually surprised by how many new dungeons or areas were being introduced.
It’s hard to talk about the ending more specifically without getting into spoiler territory, so I’ll just say that I really enjoyed it. It’s hard for any ending to be worth a 90 hour journey on its own, but the ending of Dragon Quest VII certainly left me feeling happy with the time I had put into the game (which is no easy feat for such a long game either).
After playing through this game, I'm even more elated that Nintendo put in the work to bring this game to the West than I was at the time of the initial announcement. While there are elements in this game that keep me from wholeheartedly loving it like I do like many other JRPGs on the 3DS, this was still a great game for me in the end. In terms of presentation value, breadth of content, attention to detail, scale, and the overall level of care that went into it, this is one of the most impressive games I’ve played on the system. There was seemingly no expense spared when this game was made for Japan and the fantastic localization lives up to the standard of the overall product. I don’t think I’ll ever like Dragon Quest as much as its most ardent fans, but Dragon Quest VII has definitely given me a new appreciation for the series and I’m glad I got to play through this game.