Oh man, oooooh man. This is a special game.

I was getting burnt out by the end of DQVI, to the point where I didn't even beat the final boss.

Knowing that I had the longest DQ game - which reuses/retools a fair few elements of 6 like the classes, style stat, two-worlds etc - was a bit daunting. I thought me DQ journey would end here!!!

But fuuuuuuck if this isn't just the best DQ game. Every little vignette that makes up the islands is bursting with charm. I totally forgot there was even a larger over-arching plot at times and it was great????

Hell, this game is long and ended up taking me around 90 hours, probably longer if I played the PS1 version. Is it a hot take to say that this game actually has really good pacing?

It leans so well into its segmented approach to the adventure, and the inconsistent lengths of each islands are well planned out. If one of the arcs wasn't to my liking, I know that I'd be done with it in like 10 minutes, and the ones that I enjoyed I got to spend a few hours on.

I never felt like I had to stop midway through a dungeon or groan at the thought of a grinding session. But on the note of grinding

GRINDING, I don't like it in RPGs. It sucks. It's awful. Grinding bad.

This game is the closest I've come to actually liking grinding and that's all thanks to the vocations. What's essentially the same system from 6 gets re-tooled and re-balanced in a way that gets me engaged with my party's levelling. Multiple times I'd go backtrack to an area in the middle of a story segment because I knew that I'd have a new spell for my pirate class in three battles, or some new stat buff. It's nowhere near as annoying as DQ6's vocations and it's twice as satisfying.

By the end of the game I felt so involved in my party's abilities. Even in the better DQ games like 3, 4 and 5, I'd always have to stop and think "ooh, who uses spears? What items should I give to this member? Does everyone have the right armour and accessories?"

I knew Maribel, Kiefer, Ruff, Merlyn and Aishe's strengths and weaknesses right off the bat. I got to make these characters my own through Alltrades Abbey. What other games let you control a wolf boy who (in my case) was the master of both the ocean AND sheep?

It's not a shocking observation to say that RPGs are better when you can, you know, role-play in them. But man, DQ7's strength is that it manages to feel so free despite its linearity. A game that breaks up the DQ formula and isn't afraid to double down on it. This is my adventure, these are my party members. I don't want it to end. This is dragon quest baby!!

Coming of age. This is a massive game, and the entirety of its run-time is used for this theme. In the beginning, only one single island exists, it is bliss, it is utopia. It is childhood. There is nothing more to discover or to learn but what you find in your immediate family. Your family is caring and loves you, and life is good. You haven't seen any hardship, and you have a blissful life, with childhood friends and a well-respected father. But isn't that boring? Isn't there more to discover? Dad doesn't let us go fishing with him, he doesn't think we can be any useful. But the world is vast, surely it cannot be the only island in existence, wouldn't it be great to see what's out there? And to be more than the great fisherman's cute son?

Off you go on a huge journey, discovering that there used to be a very different world in the past with many islands. We discover we can travel through time and revive the other islands of the world in the past and bringing them to the present. Each island presents a lesson to the naive, childish main character. Difficult conflicts where neither side is wrong, conflicts that cannot be solved, conflicts where one side is irreparably damaged and cannot be saved no matter the intentions, stories of sacrifice, stories of betrayal, of unwavering courage in the face of hardship. Each island is a punch in the gut for our naive, childish hero, he's doing his best, he is saving people, but there are just some things that are outside your control, the world, as it seems, is not an utopia.

But from loss and hardship, from difficult decisions to witnessing tragedy, our main character, who in this entry is truly our naive, childish real life self before we played this game, is growing up, is learning, is becoming more mature. We learn about how the crimes of the past can be uncomfortable truths that people want to ignore and misrepresent. We learn how important faith can be a community, even to their own peril, and how quickly faith can also fade away. We learn about how much courage a pioneer needs to have. We learn about how to move on from the loss of a family member and that life goes on. And as we learn more and more vocations, as we unlock advanced vocations and eventually expert vocations, as we become Gladiators, Sages and Heroes, as we save more and more islands and win the respect of our beloved Maribel as well as the the people of our island, we are no longer the naive, weak child who follows the prince around and who lives in the shadow of our overwhelmingly strong father. We, me the player and my video game alter-ego, are growing up, we are becoming an adult, we are becoming our own man. Dad will surely take us fishing with him soon.

You may have to use a walkthrough 1 or 3 times in the game to know where to go or what to do for the main story, but other than that it's not an incredibly cryptic game like the older ones in the series. It's not as long of a game as people say it is, as I beat it with almost 70 hours into it, when others say it's a 100+ hour experience. Solid gameplay as usual, the class system is nice, but requires a ton of grinding out battles to level them up. Game is very easily broken balance wise. You do not need to get the most advanced classes to beat the game, for if you get them the last battles will have you yawning. I really like how with the inclusion of this 3DS version there are no more auto battles and so you choose if you want to battle or not. If you are in a dungeon most of the time you will have to fight the enemies on screen as hallways are too small to avoid them. It's very easy to grind battles with metal slimes if you keep moving the screen around, forcing the game to load new enemies.

Forgive me, dwardman, for I have sinned and played the remake instead of the original. In my defense, it’s way easier to fit the 3DS version into my life and there are two major factors that I think make for a general improvement here. One is the way that class outfits are reflected on the characters, particularly when it comes to the Goodest Boy Ruff. Yeah all the characters get their own outfits, but how am I supposed to argue with his Wolf Mom ending up in a sheep outfit when you make Ruff a shepherd? Or the wolf wearing a top hat if you make him a luminary? You may call me shallow for it but it’s incredible stuff. The other, I think, is that having everything on one cartridge instead of two discs makes a certain twist land a little better, I think. It wasn’t too much of a surprise, but I feel like the narrative moxie of it is better served without a second disc spoiling how much of the game is left.

With that said, since I haven’t played the PS1 version, I should start talking about this game on its own merits. It’s definitely as long and episodic as everyone says it is, but I actually enjoyed it for that. Sometimes you want a connected series of vignettes that are fun little adventures but will occasionally leave you mouthing “what the fuck, Dragon Quest” under your breath, you know? It’s good stuff. The playable characters are also all super endearing, and the party chat’s very fun. There’s genuinely something related to the cast that genuinely slots into one of those “what the fuck, Dragon Quest” moments, and I seriously haven’t been able to stop thinking about it.

I have to say, I only really felt the fatigue setting in at the end, and that’s primarily related to how the job system works. The game really does not reward fucking around and finding out; it definitely makes some role assignments pretty obvious, but I found out way too late from checking a guide that it’s much more lucrative to put all monster jobs on one character instead of trying to spread them around. Maybe it would’ve warned me if I checked a manual or something, but man. Also it sucks that you can only have a party of four at the end because I love all my silly party members, and no, I absolutely didn’t bother with the postgame content. I thought I might until I actually tried messing around with the casino, which is mandatory to get one of the postgame dungeon fragments, and lost like all my tokens because fuck if I have the patience to figure out which slot machine has good odds or not.

Anyway, this is the first Dragon Quest I’ve finished since Sugiyama died, and now that he is no longer able to contribute to fash movements in Japan I guess I can judge his work a little more fairly. Sorry dudes the man can write one hell of a jingle but overall his best stuff is from the 8 bit era and the more I play through the series the more I realize the songs I actually liked in 11 were pretty much all from old games. There’s a bit of coziness to some of the tracks, definitely, but honestly I think he ranks only slightly above Motoi Sakuraba When Really Phoning It In On a Tales Game Because He’d Rather Be Composing for Dark Souls for me.

Anyway, overall it’s not my favorite Dragon Quest but it’s definitely a fun game. Get it before the 3DS dies. Or don’t but do crimes to get it on your 3DS after it dies.

This is a game that thinks more automatically equals better, and while I love its episodic structure on paper--and some of the little stories this game tells are really good--it has absolutely no respect for pacing, or for the player's time. There's barely even a hint of an overarching plot until almost the 50 hour mark, and by then I was already at the point where I was ready for it to be over. Even in this form, which supposedly trims about 30 hours from the Playstation original, this is an obscenely bloated game. I don't mind big or long games, but so much of Dragon Quest VII is devoted to running back and forth across x town looking for the next plot trigger. It's big and long in a way that comes across as thoughtless. (For comparison, my playthrough of Dragon Quest XI this summer clocked in at 120 hours, and it felt about half as long as the 75 hours I spent in Dragon Quest VII). It's still a game that I would describe as good, but it really, really should've been great.

And while I love the job system, the way it makes certain key party members unavailable for lengthy chunks of the game so that they're always behind where they should be in their job level is legitimately infuriating. I had to grind about 300 battles at the end of the game just so one of my party members could be at a decently ranked advanced job level for the final boss.

El juego comienza con una cantidad absurda de dialogo en que lo mas que puedes interactuar es mover al personaje para hablar y hablar de punto A a B.
La música es repetitiva, repiten los mismos modelos para distintos personajes, siendo tan pero tan monótono.
Depende bastante del farmeo para poder avanzar contra los enemigos, además que las armas y armaduras son ridículamente caras, que solo podrás ir comprando si te pones a farmear, lo cual es mas tiempo muerto. Ya de por si su jugabilidad es la de un rpg genérico y super mecánico.
La historia llega a un punto en que se siente tan repetitiva, siempre es la misma formula de entrar a una isla nueva donde debes resolver el conflicto que lo llevo a su extinción, donde en ocasiones meten historias ridículas como romances entre personajes, sumado a que repite mucho los modelados y la misma música en todos los mundos. Además para que la historia avance necesitas visitar partes tan especificas del mapa para que salga una animación y que la historia siga avanzando. Yo tuve que andar recorriendo los mapas una y otra vez visitando cada esquina hasta que por fin saliese la animación para que continuará la historia.

The last mainline game I needed to play (though IX remains the last I need to beat, technically, or at least try to beat considering that I'm dropping this one). I'd put this one off and been wary about it because of its notorious reputation as the longest and slowest game in the series, and now that I've played it, that reputation is well earned, and also perhaps even an understatement.

This is a tough one to rate because technically it really isn't that much worse than VI or IV, which are flawed games and previously sat at the bottom of my ranking, but have some positives in their favor. This game is just...really bland to me. The episodic design is unique for the series, but I didn't find most of the stories that compelling, and honestly even found some of the recurring themes to be a little off putting. Otherwise, it has all the slowness and flatness that I found troubling in VI, but drawn out even further. It's a game that's roughly as middling, but thrice the length, and that's just hard to justify.