![]() ![]() The monsters hit irrationally hard at times in this game, with very high HP toward the end. If you choose not to grind though, well, good luck to you. If you pick the right spots to class grind, you can develop a pretty diverse and powerful party in just a few hours. Basically, if you want to create an offensive juggernaut who is also a great healer, that is very easy to do (heck, that’s basically what the Paladin class is). Any new skills or magic abilities obtained from a given class remain usable even when you switch classes. Additional hybrid skills can be learned by gaining enough proficiency in specific pairings of classes. There are even rare monster classes that your party members can adopt. Mastery of certain specific classes unlocks stronger classes, such as the unlikely TeenIdol and the powerful Godhand. Although it takes roughly a whopping 20 hours to unlock classes, once you finally have them, you can turn your party into things like Fighters, Clerics, Thieves, or Mariners. The game only differentiates itself in two ways–high customization for party member development, and high difficulty level. Fight the Demon LordĬombat and leveling in Dragon Warrior VII is completely traditional to the standards of the genre that the rest of the series had established. It is an incredible accomplishment for a PlayStation game, and even in modern gaming, the only analogous example I can think of is Super Mario Galaxy. You can walk up and down the walls, and the perspective of the shapes will shift and gravity will change to accommodate you. The dungeon is literally just an odd arrangement of geometric shapes cut at 90 degree angles. Toward the end of the game, you find yourself in a maze, (Actually, everything is a maze in this game.) and what makes it unique is that the entire dungeon rotates on demand. Considering you can easily spend 70-100 hours on this game, the music definitely wears on you after a while.īut before I move on, I do need to elaborate on that aforementioned standout dungeon, because it is truly awesome. The same handful of songs populate most of the locations in the game–the “dungeon” song, the “town” song, the “town-that-is-depressed” song, etc. There might have been one or two songs that I would have enjoyed if I would have heard them less often, but that doesn’t happen. The soundtrack meanwhile, provided by regular series composer Koichi Sugiyama, is not a disappointment, though it is not especially memorable either. None of the tracks really stood out to me, aside from the grandiose main theme. ![]() ![]() If you compare this game graphically to Squaresoft’s offerings of Xenogears, Final Fantasy IX, and Chrono Cross, it makes you wonder how the heck it took Enix five years after the release of Dragon Quest VI to create this homely game. There is the occasional very cool dungeon design, with one extraordinary standout, but most of the time the 3D graphics are standard PlayStation 1-era chunkiness. The 3D architecture meanwhile is passable at best. Chrono Trigger came out in 1995, and yet its sprites are about a dozen times prettier than anything you will ever see in this game. It features 2D sprites in a 3D world, and while all the monster art is drawn well (as faithfully adapted from the illustrations of series artist Akira Toriyama), the rest of the sprites in the game are small and generic. Let me say this in no uncertain terms– Dragon Warrior VII is ugly. ![]() Sights and SoundsĪt least it’s vibrant… whenever you’re not in a cave. In spite of its absolute adherence to tradition and an almost complete lack of innovation in its gameplay, I find that Dragon Warrior VII still holds up surprisingly well by today’s standards. I would even argue that, in both good and bad ways, this game pushes the concept of the traditional JRPG to its limit. I myself did not get my hands on the game until 13 years later. And although we did finally receive Dragon Warrior VII for PlayStation, it did not arrive until 2001, a full year after the release of PlayStation 2. You can’t really blame the US though we never officially got the fifth or sixth installments in this country at all until they were remade for the Nintendo DS. In the United States though, the series has always played second fiddle (or maybe fourth or fifth fiddle) to the prettier and more cinematic Final Fantasy series. Originally inspired by complicated western role-playing computer games like Wizardry and Ultima, Dragon Quest simplified the formula and ended up becoming the most massively successful game series ever in Japan. The Dragon Quest series, known as Dragon Warrior in the US until the release of Dragon Quest VIII, is the prototype for the entire JRPG genre. ![]()
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