After playing through Super Hero Operations, I managed to lose the Super Robot Wars bug (for now ;b) and re-catch the JRPG bug I had a year or two before that. Some other friends of mine across various friend groups also happened to be playing a fair bit of Dragon Quest around that time, so I thought what better time to finally get into the copy of DQ7 I bought last year. I played the Japanese version of the game on original hardware, and it took me around 105 hours.
The story of DQ7 puts you in the shoes of Hero (the main character whom you name), who in this game is the son of a fisherman on the one island in the whole world. You live in this tiny village with your family and play with your friends Maribel (the mayor’s daughter) and Kiefer (the prince of the nearby kingdom) and dream of adventuring one day. Your dreams are suddenly realized one day when a mysterious stone your good for nothing uncle finds leads you to the forbidden ancient ruins in the mountains north of town, where you’re flung back in time to a far off island to help save it (and eventually many others) from being sealed away by some strange dark force!
DQ7’s narrative is a very strange one among both JRPGs and DQ games I’ve played. Though it has named characters, such as Maribel and Keifer and a few others, instead of creating your own blank-slate party members as DQ3 and 9 do, they have very minor roles in the story compared to DQs 4-6 before or DQ8 after. Most of the narrative’s MASSIVE amount of text is taken up by the minor characters on the islands you’re visiting and saving. On each island, you’ll play through a little adventure to free that land from the darkness and allow that island to reappear in the normal world. You’re not only going into the little sealed worlds of these islands, but significantly back in time as well, and they get to have all their history play out by the time they appear in the real world again. Visiting these lands both in their far flung pasts of peril and in the safe present when your deeds are distant enough to have become legend is a really neat story conceit, but most of these stories (though not all) are more or less self-contained from one another.
The game has a vibe something like a playable shonen anime as a result, with each island being like a mini story-arc making up the larger story of the “series” that is this game. It makes it feel like more of an adventure for the sake of it than most other DQ games which usually have clearer stakes, but there are certainly larger things afoot beyond mere island saving. These stories really range a lot in tone as well, with some being more lighthearted and silly with others being quite emotionally affecting and some being truly harrowing. It gives a wide spread of stories to interact with, and they’re all so different from one another that I never felt bored going to a new island. It was always an exciting experience to see just what thing lay around the next portal~. There are just about 20 of these island to go through, and between that and mechanical things we’ll get to later, that’s where you’ll find principle blame for the game’s significant length. I ultimately quite liked the story, even though it’s pretty light on themes at the end of the day, but the sheer length and at time directionless-seeming nature of the story is definitely going to turn some people off, or at least be a significant obstacle in them sticking with DQ7 long enough to finish it.
Mechanically, this is very much a successor to DQ6 and how it handles its systems. At the base line, it’s very much Dragon Quest as you’ve always known it. First-person turn-based battles, you can control party members either directly or with pre-set general behaviors, you can cast spells: a very typical JRPG as DQ so loves to be. The monster recruiting from DQ5 is more or less gone, and instead (around a 30 hours into the game) you unlock a job system very much like DQ6’s job system.
The big caveat here is that unlike DQ6, the jobs here matter a LOT and affect your stats a TON. Being a bad or inconvenient class can really be a pain to play as, but you’ll need to play those classes a lot if you want to get past the weaker jobs and unlock the several tiers of prestige jobs in this game’s job tree. Once you get a skill (be it a spell or other special skill), you keep it forever in a continuously growing pile, and some jobs also have passives associated with them in general and most of them have a bonus for mastering the job. But when you master a job, you’re unlikely to stay as it for long if you can help it, as you need to get to your next job and start mastering that ASAP, because these things take a LONG time to master.
The base level jobs (of which there are about ten and you’ll likely be mastering three to five of them) all take from 130 to 180 battles to master, with the intermediate and expert jobs taking from 200 to 240 battles to master. Top this off with EXP and money being very slow to earn as well, and you have the recipe for a game with a LOT of grinding, and that’s not even factoring in the Monster Job system which is like the normal job system but with piles more stuff to grind through. I kept track, and about 20 hours of the 105 of my playtime were just grinding through the game’s job system stuff, and I never even touched the monster job system. The sheer amount of endless grinding in this game is easily one of the biggest factors that would make me hesitate recommending this game to anyone not already very familiar and comfortable with retro RPGs (and especially retro DQ), as that level of endless grinding is sure to turn of players with more modern sensibilities towards such things.
Speaking of putting lots of time into things, the signposting is another big sticking point for me with this one. I did my absolute best to play through this game never using a walkthrough. I used a guide for the jobs, but only a walkthrough near the very end when I was just so stuck I couldn’t fathom what to do next (and I’m glad I looked it up, because I would’ve been stuck forever otherwise XP). The game is usually pretty straightforward with how to progress, but that’s with the key exception of its main advancement mechanic: tablet fragments. These fragments are found in both the past worlds and in the present, and you use them to unlock new islands to travel to. These worlds aren’t particularly small or compact either, and you don’t even always find only the pieces for the very next island in the one you’re currently on. This means if you miss one or don’t realize what side quest in the present has suddenly progressed and that you’re meant to go back there, you’re up shit creek without a paddle.
Now there is a fortune teller on the main island who gives story progression hints, but they’re VERY general hints, and I basically never found them useful. There’s thank heck a fortune teller for fragment pieces, but she’s quite well hidden and you don’t unlock her location for a couple tens of hours into the game. I didn’t even realize she was there until significantly after that either. Her hints are better, thank goodness, but that involves even realizing she exists in the first place. While I could deal with the grinding, the selectiveness with how well signposted was another really big factor that made this game harder to enjoy than I wanted it to be, and this is almost certainly a game you’ll need to end up consulting walkthrough for at some point or another.
Aesthetically, it’s a very pretty mostly 2D game. Environments are 2D sprites on 3D-ish environments. Buildings and such are 3D, and you can rotate the camera either completely or a bit side to side depending on the area. The battles are entirely 2D and have some really nice 2D animations for the monsters (many of whom are completely new, as a good portion of this game’s monster roster is entirely knew from the comparatively quite homogeneous previous six games). I think some might be turned off by the 2D-on-3D aesthetic, but I really liked it. I think there’s a good reason they used this style for the remakes of 4, 5, and 6 on DS and then for the remakes of 1, 2, and 3 on 3DS (other than that the PS1 remake of 4 used this engine and in all likelihood they just ported that version to the DS and then that set the format for how the rest of those remakes would look :b). The music is also very good and Dragon Quest-y as usual. If you like DQ music, you’ll likely really like what’s here too~.
Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. This game is a really mixed bag. The good stuff is really good and fun. It’s a lovely sort of swansong, in retrospect, to the Enix-era DQ games before they became Square Enix and so much changed. If you can get past the poor signposting and loads of grinding, you’ll likely have quite a good time with this, as I did, but if you’d like a more forgiving time in those regards, seeking out the 3DS remake will likely be better worth your time. DQ7 is a bit of an odd black sheep of the DQ series, but it’s one I think still has a lot of merit and charm to it despite its flaws.
The story of DQ7 puts you in the shoes of Hero (the main character whom you name), who in this game is the son of a fisherman on the one island in the whole world. You live in this tiny village with your family and play with your friends Maribel (the mayor’s daughter) and Kiefer (the prince of the nearby kingdom) and dream of adventuring one day. Your dreams are suddenly realized one day when a mysterious stone your good for nothing uncle finds leads you to the forbidden ancient ruins in the mountains north of town, where you’re flung back in time to a far off island to help save it (and eventually many others) from being sealed away by some strange dark force!
DQ7’s narrative is a very strange one among both JRPGs and DQ games I’ve played. Though it has named characters, such as Maribel and Keifer and a few others, instead of creating your own blank-slate party members as DQ3 and 9 do, they have very minor roles in the story compared to DQs 4-6 before or DQ8 after. Most of the narrative’s MASSIVE amount of text is taken up by the minor characters on the islands you’re visiting and saving. On each island, you’ll play through a little adventure to free that land from the darkness and allow that island to reappear in the normal world. You’re not only going into the little sealed worlds of these islands, but significantly back in time as well, and they get to have all their history play out by the time they appear in the real world again. Visiting these lands both in their far flung pasts of peril and in the safe present when your deeds are distant enough to have become legend is a really neat story conceit, but most of these stories (though not all) are more or less self-contained from one another.
The game has a vibe something like a playable shonen anime as a result, with each island being like a mini story-arc making up the larger story of the “series” that is this game. It makes it feel like more of an adventure for the sake of it than most other DQ games which usually have clearer stakes, but there are certainly larger things afoot beyond mere island saving. These stories really range a lot in tone as well, with some being more lighthearted and silly with others being quite emotionally affecting and some being truly harrowing. It gives a wide spread of stories to interact with, and they’re all so different from one another that I never felt bored going to a new island. It was always an exciting experience to see just what thing lay around the next portal~. There are just about 20 of these island to go through, and between that and mechanical things we’ll get to later, that’s where you’ll find principle blame for the game’s significant length. I ultimately quite liked the story, even though it’s pretty light on themes at the end of the day, but the sheer length and at time directionless-seeming nature of the story is definitely going to turn some people off, or at least be a significant obstacle in them sticking with DQ7 long enough to finish it.
Mechanically, this is very much a successor to DQ6 and how it handles its systems. At the base line, it’s very much Dragon Quest as you’ve always known it. First-person turn-based battles, you can control party members either directly or with pre-set general behaviors, you can cast spells: a very typical JRPG as DQ so loves to be. The monster recruiting from DQ5 is more or less gone, and instead (around a 30 hours into the game) you unlock a job system very much like DQ6’s job system.
The big caveat here is that unlike DQ6, the jobs here matter a LOT and affect your stats a TON. Being a bad or inconvenient class can really be a pain to play as, but you’ll need to play those classes a lot if you want to get past the weaker jobs and unlock the several tiers of prestige jobs in this game’s job tree. Once you get a skill (be it a spell or other special skill), you keep it forever in a continuously growing pile, and some jobs also have passives associated with them in general and most of them have a bonus for mastering the job. But when you master a job, you’re unlikely to stay as it for long if you can help it, as you need to get to your next job and start mastering that ASAP, because these things take a LONG time to master.
The base level jobs (of which there are about ten and you’ll likely be mastering three to five of them) all take from 130 to 180 battles to master, with the intermediate and expert jobs taking from 200 to 240 battles to master. Top this off with EXP and money being very slow to earn as well, and you have the recipe for a game with a LOT of grinding, and that’s not even factoring in the Monster Job system which is like the normal job system but with piles more stuff to grind through. I kept track, and about 20 hours of the 105 of my playtime were just grinding through the game’s job system stuff, and I never even touched the monster job system. The sheer amount of endless grinding in this game is easily one of the biggest factors that would make me hesitate recommending this game to anyone not already very familiar and comfortable with retro RPGs (and especially retro DQ), as that level of endless grinding is sure to turn of players with more modern sensibilities towards such things.
Speaking of putting lots of time into things, the signposting is another big sticking point for me with this one. I did my absolute best to play through this game never using a walkthrough. I used a guide for the jobs, but only a walkthrough near the very end when I was just so stuck I couldn’t fathom what to do next (and I’m glad I looked it up, because I would’ve been stuck forever otherwise XP). The game is usually pretty straightforward with how to progress, but that’s with the key exception of its main advancement mechanic: tablet fragments. These fragments are found in both the past worlds and in the present, and you use them to unlock new islands to travel to. These worlds aren’t particularly small or compact either, and you don’t even always find only the pieces for the very next island in the one you’re currently on. This means if you miss one or don’t realize what side quest in the present has suddenly progressed and that you’re meant to go back there, you’re up shit creek without a paddle.
Now there is a fortune teller on the main island who gives story progression hints, but they’re VERY general hints, and I basically never found them useful. There’s thank heck a fortune teller for fragment pieces, but she’s quite well hidden and you don’t unlock her location for a couple tens of hours into the game. I didn’t even realize she was there until significantly after that either. Her hints are better, thank goodness, but that involves even realizing she exists in the first place. While I could deal with the grinding, the selectiveness with how well signposted was another really big factor that made this game harder to enjoy than I wanted it to be, and this is almost certainly a game you’ll need to end up consulting walkthrough for at some point or another.
Aesthetically, it’s a very pretty mostly 2D game. Environments are 2D sprites on 3D-ish environments. Buildings and such are 3D, and you can rotate the camera either completely or a bit side to side depending on the area. The battles are entirely 2D and have some really nice 2D animations for the monsters (many of whom are completely new, as a good portion of this game’s monster roster is entirely knew from the comparatively quite homogeneous previous six games). I think some might be turned off by the 2D-on-3D aesthetic, but I really liked it. I think there’s a good reason they used this style for the remakes of 4, 5, and 6 on DS and then for the remakes of 1, 2, and 3 on 3DS (other than that the PS1 remake of 4 used this engine and in all likelihood they just ported that version to the DS and then that set the format for how the rest of those remakes would look :b). The music is also very good and Dragon Quest-y as usual. If you like DQ music, you’ll likely really like what’s here too~.
Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. This game is a really mixed bag. The good stuff is really good and fun. It’s a lovely sort of swansong, in retrospect, to the Enix-era DQ games before they became Square Enix and so much changed. If you can get past the poor signposting and loads of grinding, you’ll likely have quite a good time with this, as I did, but if you’d like a more forgiving time in those regards, seeking out the 3DS remake will likely be better worth your time. DQ7 is a bit of an odd black sheep of the DQ series, but it’s one I think still has a lot of merit and charm to it despite its flaws.