Dragon Qarrior VII

Monday, November 14, 2005 » gaming thought

About a month ago I set off to beat 2001's Dragon Warrior VII before the sequel's release. Well, this weekend I finally did it, just in time to pick up Dragon Quest VIII tomorrow. It was a lengthy ordeal, although it turned out that the much-hyped promise of "100 hours of gameplay" was a bit of an exaggeration. Dragon Warrior VII is not really a 100-hour game.

It's more of a 92-hour game. And that's without even doing the sidequests—the town-building, the monster-catching, the class-mastering, etc. Sure, I spent a few extra hours in the casino and in the field learning new class abilities, but, other than that, most of those 92 hours were just me making my way through the main story. There were a few times—probably in the 40-60-hour range—when I actually felt exhausted. I felt like I had called the game's 100-hour bluff, not knowing that it actually was holding a royal flush. (Or a 5 Slime, in this case.) Somehow, though, I kept at it.

I think it's probably because the game is just fun. It feels like playing an old, 16-bit RPG, before they all turned into lengthy, 3D opuses with gratuitous spell animations and sinister, conspiring religions. Sure, some shiny graphics would have been an improvement over DW7's horribly-scaled 2D sprites and chunky 3D environments, but (and this is going to sound so clichéd) the gameplay is the real star here, as has always been the case with this series. The battles are as strategic as ever, and the class system has been given a great overhaul since the last time I saw it in Dragon Warrior III. There's a lot more of an incentive to switch classes, plus there's no longer a level penalty for doing so. The game's island format dampens the sense of exploration that I enjoyed in the previous titles, but all the dungeons and towers and shrines fanes are pure Dragon Warrior.

And then there are the puzzles! The first dungeon alone had more puzzles (albeit simple ones) than all the RPGs I've played since Vagrant Story. (I refuse to acknowledge Final Fantasy X's inane Cloisters of Trials.) The frequency dropped off steeply after that, but they didn't disappear completely. At the end of the game there was even a puzzle in the form of the dungeon itself, which began roughly as a 3D cube you could walk over all of the faces before expanding into more complicated shapes, some regions of which could only be accessed by finding the right route across the faces. Pretty clever use of 3D, Enix.

Finally, DW7 has a totally bizarre sense of humor that wasn't in the first three games. When you talk to one of the villages' elder, for instance, he hints that he can't wait for your party of travelers to leave so he can get it on with his nubile young maid, who's dressed up in a pig costume for the village's animal festival. Except then you see the maid later and it turns out she's been out of the costume for hours, and, yeah. It was definitely a defining moment of the post-SNES era.

So while the light-hearted approach to the dialogue is a definite plus in the humor area, the way some of the plot events were handled made me wonder if Dragon Quest would benefit from a more dramatic approach. Pretty late in the game there's a town where the last few generations have been covering up a terrible wrongdoing committed by their ancestors. When you bring evidence of the incident to the mayor, he comically destroys it with a couple of cheesy axe-chop animations and a really 8-bit sound effect. Surely they could have taken the entire village sequence—especially that one scene—and directed it differently to bring out the drama without turning it into some overwrought melodrama. Final Fantasy VI (and even FF4) had plenty of dramatic moments, even though everyone was just sprites.

Then again, maybe the general silliness is one of the essential elements of Dragon Quest that give it its character. I wonder which direction the series will head in with its latest, fully 3D and voice-acted installment. (Actually, I already have an idea because I tried the demo, but I'll wait a while before passing judgment. I'd say at least 50 or 60 hours.)