When I first played 7th Dragon III, I remember frequently calling it the one game I considered to be a masterpiece. Granted I was around 16 at the time, but I gotta be honest, it's still bloody brilliant in my eyes! You do need a preference for grand-scale plots with insane twists to get the most out of 7thD3, but it commits to them in dramatic fashion and I love it for that.

I also want to note that I have never played the previous entries, so my view isn't affected positively or negatively by them. In my experience I feel one mid-late game plot point might lose some impact if you don't read about a certain pair of recurring characters, but as a completely blind player I still found it emotional. Other than this you can more or less play it on its own.

I played on casual at the time, but would definitely like to retry on normal someday. The combat isn't too tricky on this difficulty, but I liked the sheer volume of strategies available once you obtain more classes, and I liked messing around with a few unconventional ones (my duelist judgement strat... so goofy yet so weirdly fun to pull off lmao). If there's anything I didn't like it was that there's one boss whose sole gimmick is a party-wide instakill chance skill, which was frustrating instead of challenging/fun, but I learned later it can be negated by double-stacking instakill items. Inconvenient, but at least there's a way around it!

Art and soundtrack go hard but this is Shirow Miwa and Yuzo Koshiro we're talking about so it's not surprising, just hella neat. The inserts arranged by sasakure.uk are epic too. In general 7thD3 is just an awesome hidden gem.

"Muahahaha! I, COVID-19, shall sent my evil dragons to spread my deadly spread upon this planet! No one will stop me!"

"We have an emergency! We must assemble a team of dragon slayers with attitude! Operation VFD GO!!"

GO GO 7TH DRAGON!

Don't pick this one up for the story, pick it up for the gameplay. The premise is pretty interesting and it's cool to see how things unfold as you progress through the game, but the main draw of this game is definitely the dungeon crawling and team building. As you progress through the game, you unlock more classes to play with and it's fun to see how all of their abilities mesh together to create powerful teams of dragon-killers. You can try to make them all balanced, or go for different playstyles for each one. Once you get the hang of playing around with the systems, it can be really fun to shuffle the characters in your parties around to find new options and strategies to adapt to the new monsters they throw at you. I think the encounters in this game are generally pretty well-crafted. Enemy groups sometimes have certain gimmicks you have to learn how to counteract or work around, and the same thing goes for the bosses. Some of the bosses, especially later on when they expect you to have a certain mastery over the game, can be REALLY tough. It's great. The only thing that really, really egregiously sucks about this game is, when you unlock the new classes, you MUST create level 1 characters and grind them up so they're usable. There is a part relatively late in this game that will literally gate your progress if you do not have three full teams that are up to snuff. The first time you get new classes, it's a bit of a pain to level them up to what your first team is at. The second time, it will literally take hours and hours and hours and hours of grinding. I think this issue could've been alleviated if you unlocked side dungeons to explore at the same time you got the new classes, but you don't, and so you will be running down the same corridors over and over again to bring your characters up to the required level. You might wanna have a big backlog of videos on your youtube watch later list by the time you get to the grindy sections of this game. Whether that's good or bad is up to you and your mood. I don't think it's exactly a flaw, in this case, and I think it can still be fun to learn how to deal with the encounters all over again with the different setups.