As you all have
heard over and OVER again, I love the RPG and JRPG genre. Moneywise, they are
usually some of the best games you can get because they take hours to beat.
They also have pretty fun stories, if a bit generic at times. You can get
action or turn-based combat in these genres and also get a great cast of
characters to carry you along the combat and story. A lot of my favorite games
of all time are RPG’s and JRPG’s. Though my love for them is big, it doesn’t
mean I love or enjoy every single one of them. Final Fantasy 13 and its sequel
are, in my opinion, incredibly average RPG’s (if you don’t judge them as Final
Fantasy sequels). Quest 64 is considered to be one of the worst RPG’s, along
with titles such as Lagoon, Hoshigami, and others that I can’t list off the top
of my head. However, there is one RPG that people have tried to convince me
that I was way too harsh on, Dragon Quest 7. Until now, I was going off of old
memories when I played a few hours of it and just didn’t like it. Now, it IS a
solid RPG, but I think this is one of the hardest RPG’s to recommend to anyone.
It has aged poorly and it is way too expensive for its own good. Don’t get me
wrong, it is a good game. It is like I said, just super hard to recommend to
anyone who isn’t a RPG fan or a hardcore Dragon Quest fan. Let us get started
then on the first RPG in this special, Dragon Quest 7 for the PS1!
To give this game
credit, the setting is pretty fun. You are the son of a fisherman and live on
this island in the middle of the ocean. This would seem utterly bland in
everyone’s eyes until you realize that the island you are on is the ONLY ISLAND
IN THE ENTIRE WORLD! Seriously, you live in a small village that is a part of a
kingdom, and it’s the only village and kingdom you have ever known. One day,
you and the prince of the kingdom, Kiefer, and the daughter of the hotel owner
that is in your village decide to venture over the island and find some unknown
rooms inside a temple that has been on the island for many centuries
apparently. All three of you go inside and head into one of the rooms and get
zapped to another island that has apparently been there in the past. From this,
a grand adventure begins where you meet many unique characters, like Gabo, a
young wolf cub turned human, Melvin, a knight that literally fought with God,
and Aira, a female swordswoman/dancer. Like I said above, the story can be
interesting and the fun-filled monsters, quirky characters, and unique and
familiar story is here, but here is where the biggest issue comes into play.
The game’s story and pacing is terrible. It’s boring, slow, and tedious. There
is just so much filler shoved into the game’s pacing, and maybe it was added
since it took forever to get this game released, but that is no excuse to
extend an RPG’s time of 40-50 hours of completion to 70-100 BORING HOURS! To
give an example of how boring this game is, you do not and I repeat DO NOT get
into your first battle until you are TWO HOURS IN!!! That is bullocks! I mean,
in every other RPG, you get into your first fight at least in the first 5, 10,
or on the 20 minute mark, but MAN, did they screw this part of the game up.
Again, it has its fun characters and charm of the franchise, but holy macaroni,
does this game have a terribly paced story. Before I move on, even though I
just ranted on how poorly paced the story is, it does have some truly great
moments that caught me by surprise while playing through it. The story is still
generally paced badly, though.
The gameplay is,
of course, of the traditional JRPG style. You have your party of four fighting
monsters in random battles in a first person perspective. It’s nothing new,
since every main Dragon Quest game has had this same combat, until Dragon Quest
9 and 10 which ditched the first person perspective of games like Wizardry. The
main draw of the game is that it follows its Dragon Quest 3 and 6 family
members and has class changes, but I will explain what is wrong with the whole
class system in the complaints section. If you have played Final Fantasy 3 or
5, you can make your characters gain abilities in different job roles like
warrior, wizard, healer, and you get the idea. If you can master the basic
classes, more advance classes will be available so you can get much better abilities
and stats. There are also monster classes that you can obtain by collecting
monster hearts. Of course, what would an RPG be without side quests to
complete? You can do many things, such as collecting monsters for a monster
park, rebuilding a town like in Breath of Fire 4 and Act Raiser, collecting
medals, going to a casino, and of course taking on bonus dungeons with bosses
that are much harder than the final boss of the game. I mean, what do you
expect when you literally get to fight God? Overall, this is probably the
biggest RPG on the Playstation. You don’t get into your first fight till 2
hours in, you don’t get your first ally until 12 hours in, and you don’t get to
change job classes until you are 25-30 hours in. While this is usually a good
thing, I will explain later on why this kind of backfires on itself.
The graphics,
while looking like Grandia and Wild Arms 2 to an extent, don’t really look good
even when this game came out. It came out AFTER the PS2 came out and the
graphics are rather ugly. I am not usually a graphics snob, but man, does this
game’s graphical presentation look terrible. Even the colorful monster designs
of Akira Toriyama look pixilated and muddy. The monster sprites don’t even
move. I mean, when you look at games like Suikoden 2 that use pixelated sprites
to represent the characters and enemies, they are smooth-looking (for back
then) and fully animated. The only time the enemies move is when they attack
and then they look like a screenshot of the game that you would see in a magazine
article. The monster designs are still good, but this game’s graphics just look
lazy. The music however is much better. At first, I did not like the music. It
sounded just as cheap as the graphical presentation, but over time, it grew on
me and then I heard a lot of great tunes. I still think that Dragon Quest 8’s
music is still superior.
So, what is wrong
with this game? Well, I can easily say there are a whole lot of things wrong
with this game. Besides the cheap graphical presentation and music, the game
feels padded and filled with distractions. Once again, the first fight in the
game is TWO WHOLE HOURS IN! What is with the sluggish-as-heck pacing?! Any
gamer these days will not have the patience to get through this game. It is
amazingly bad pacing. You do not even get different classes until 30 hours in.
Usually RPG’s like to get you into the job system about 40 minutes to an hour
in. You are about halfway through the game when you get to this point and it is
just tedious. The pacing is also hindered with the very tedious game design sin
of backtracking. Yeah, I know a lot of games like Dust: An Elysium Tale and the
Vanillaware games can do the backtracking thing right, but you are REALLY
forced to backtrack to the same areas over and over and over and over and over.
For example, to unlock new areas to travel back in time to, you have to find
all of the shards in the islands from the past AND the islands in current time.
This means if you miss one, again, ONE shard, you will not be able to move onto
the next area. I think that is the biggest sin this game commits, it’s too
long. Nowadays, we want our games to be long, and back in 2001, this was
probably a bargain back then, but oh man, there is WAY too much stuff here. I
know this is one issue, but this one issue of pacing and execution makes
everything else suffer. The story, the gameplay, the grinding, and everything
else suffers because of the pacing. Heck, the CGI cut scenes that are few and
far between are ugly. Akira’s artwork definitely looks ugly within those cut
scenes. The story suffers a lot since it has that Fallout and Elderscrolls kind
of story telling where it wants you to be immersed within the game’s setting,
and then about halfway through, the game’s story becomes more apparent. The
story does have a lot of touching areas, but the bad guy doesn’t really reveal
itself till halfway through or a little after that.
This is easily one
of those RPG’s on the Playstation that has not really aged well at all. With
commitment, you are playing a rather solid RPG and entry in the franchise.
Obtaining this game however, is a whole other story. This game did not sell
well here in the States. It sold 4 million in Japan, but they could have been
wrong. This shows in the game’s sales over here in the states being 200,000. It
is one of the hardest to find PS1 games and easily one of the more expensive
games. It doesn’t go near the Suikoden 2 or that special Assassin case thing
for Elemental Gearbolt, but it can be about 90 dollars and and up. The Japanese
version is about 20 dollars on Ebay. This game has no re-release and I mean NO
RE-RELEASE. No DS version, no PS2 version, and that is saying something when
every other game besides Dragon Quest 8 and this game get a re-release on
different consoles throughout this franchise’s lifetime. This is a solid RPG,
but compared to games like Suikoden 2, Final Fantasy 9, Wild Arms 1 and 2,
Grandia, and Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete, it is less worthwhile and more
expensive. Here we go then, let us hope the next RPG in this special will leave
a more positive impression on me.
This
game gets a 7 out of 10
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