NFOpocalypse

In almost every town in Dragon Warrior 7 there’s a well. Most of these wells don’t contain anything. Some of them contain quite a lot.

In Dragon Warrior 7, there’s an item called a Tiny Medal. You can collect these, and eventually give them to a medal collector to get special items and equipment based on how many you’ve found. It’s sort of like the Golden Skulltulas in Ocarina of Time, or the little red gems in Illusion of Gaia. Sometimes you find these in wells.

Other times, you find a dungeon in a well. These are a bit rarer, and vary quite a bit depending on what the story’s doing at that point. In two cases, you find a casino in a well. There’s no indication that there will be a casino down there—you just need to explore on your own a bit. The first of these casinos is outside of an inn by a lake, which is near a place called the Dharma Temple. The Dharma Temple is where you can change classes—or, at that point in the game, take on a class for the first time. Classes in Dragon Warrior 7 govern your stats and what skills and spells you learn, along with a few other things. It’s a fairly big system.

However, the first time you get to Dharma Temple, something’s not quite right, and as soon as you try to change classes, you find out that monsters have taken over. They strip you of all your skills and spells at that point—the characters effectively have a default class, and keep learning spells up to about level fifteen or so—and send you into a dungeon.

Skills in Dragon Quest 7 are very important. Status attacks actually work, for instance, like in the recent Shin Megami Tensei games. The game play mechanics, for this segment, change completely, as you have been, up to that point, relying heavily on your skills and magic.

At the same time, though, you get two new and very useful things—a free, infinite-use healing item, and during this time you can also buy the thief key, which let’s you unlock several chests you’ve already passed. As soon as you get out of the dungeon the invading monsters dumped you in, at least. Well, dungeon isn’t really accurate. It’s actually two or three—I’m not really sure if two of them were different dungeons or not—and then two different towns, also. And this entire sequence has its own self-contained storyline, characters and lasts about four hours, but also serves to reveal a lot about the plot at large and what’s going on. It’s also the hardest part of the game up to that point—as I already said, you can’t use any skills or magic.

Eventually, though, you succeed, drive the monsters out of the temple, and restore everything to order. At this point, you can finally change your class. And at this point, you’re about thirty hours into the game, and the introduction of classes changes everything.

Dragon Warrior 7 also has a variant on the monster collecting system that’s been in all of the games since the fifth (including Rocket Slime, sort of), and even had its own spin-off series. In Dragon Warrior 7, you don’t collect monsters to fight with you per se, but you can collect their hearts and use those on your characters to turn into a variety of monsters classes, and you can collect monsters for a sort of monster park side quest, which is quite similar to another town building side quest that gets introduced much earlier, and lasts for a good part of the game.

I haven’t seen either of these things yet. Dragon Warrior 7, clearly, is a game that likes to take its time. And I mean that as a compliment.

It’s thirty hours in and I’ve just seen a new gameplay system. I’ve seen little changes and restrictions—such as the inability to use magic and skills for awhile that I mentioned, along with certain characters joining and leaving your party, plot events changing the way the gameplay flows.

It’s also a matter of balance. Getting new skills—and getting a new system to get said skills—matters because the game is balanced in such a way that using status attacks and strategy in general matters. One character named Gabo, for instance, has a base skillset that involves calling wolves to do his bidding, or acting wolflike himself. One of his skills is called Bark. Actually, it’s the first skill he gets. Bark allows you to paralyze a group of enemies with fear. It doesn’t always work, but does a good part of the time. Shortly after getting Gabo, you start seeing some enemies that are a bit stronger than you could normally take on. Instead of leveling up until you can kill them more easily—which would be quite boring—you can instead try paralyzing them with Gabo’s bark skill—which, I should mention, is free to use—and picking them off in a more controlled fashion.

Prior to this, you have the character Maribel, who has a sleep spell that does roughly the same thing (although sleep can last multiple turns and the effects from Bark are only one or two turns). Again, casting sleep on enemies—even regular ones—is useful. But now, Gabo has a free version of that spell, so you can free up Maribel to do other things. This is also about the time when you start finding whips for her, which attack an entire group of enemies. They don’t do tons of damage, but they can make Maribel a decent fighter. Or, you can treat her more as a healer or a mage, as she has a defense lowering spell, a fireball spell, and a healing spell by this point.

A skill Gabo gets much later, called Howl, allows him to summon a wolf pack, which does four attacks distributed to all of the enemies randomly. However, it doesn’t always succeed—and from what I can tell, always fails in internal locations. Gabo also has another skill, though, called Rip, which attacks an entire group of enemies, and always succeeds. However, the damage it does is erratic—something like .8 to 1.4 percent of your normal attack value. Another option, of course, is to buy a boomerang for Gabo, which is a weapon that can hit every enemy on the screen. A nice feature DW7 has is that you can change equipment in battle, so you can keep multiple weapons on hand and change them as needed. Useful since Gabo can also equip claws and brass knuckle type weapons, which are generally more powerful.

There are two other points I wanted to bring up. Originally I’d planned on writing this entire thing through smoothly so that I could move from point-to-point seamlessly and weave some sort of epic review-narrative.

Unfortunately, I suck as a writer.

Dragon Warrior 7’s towns aren’t huge. They only tend to have five to seven houses, and less than twenty NPCs. However, the towns are detailed. Even the generic, nameless NPCs feel like they have their own stories. See, each town in DW7 has a quest associated with it. There aren’t any towns where you just stop through to buy some items and move on. These quests are also long, make up the bulk of the story, and start tying together. They also involve the NPCs in the towns—a lot. While Dragon Warrior 7 doesn’t have a day/night cycle like 8, 3, and I believe 6, what the NPCs say, and where you find them, changes a lot throughout these quests. So what’s effectively a small cast of characters seems a lot more important because of the amount of writing there is.

Also, there’s lots of treasure in DW7. This isn’t something you really notice until you start playing a game where you can’t break every jar, barrel and potted plant in town, or open every dresser, or look in every saddlebag, or find treasure chests, or dive into the aforementioned wells to see what happens. A while back I watched the movie La Grande séduction, and one of the characters in it mentions that finding a dollar or some small amount of money laying about in the street can make anyone’s day. It’s a lot like that.

There’s a huge emphasis on the towns in the game, basically, and the fact that their role isn’t diminished makes them feel more like actual places and less like those little shop screens you’d occasionally enter in Fantasy Zone.

Solving the quests also progresses the game in an interesting way. While within the quests, story events occur that propel you on to do the dungeons, or do something in town, or whatever else you need to do to finish that town’s quest, finishing the quests themselves doesn’t necessarily start any story event that forces you to go to another town. While, strictly speaking, the game is linear, the game progression is pretty subtle.

In your travels, you pick up things called land shards, which can be arranged on pedestals in the first dungeon in a bit of a meta-puzzle that reminds me of The Fool’s Errand for some reason. Each land shard, basically, shows a portion of an island’s map. As soon as you complete that map, you’re sent to that island, in the past, to do whatever quest is happening in whatever town is there. When this is done, you can go back to that island in the future and do something else.

There’s nothing in the game, however, to tell you which islands you can complete and when. You find the land shards as you go along, and it’s up to you to go back to the pedestals and arrange them. It feels natural and transparent. You feel like you’re in control of what’s happening, even though the game is, as I said, mostly linear. The difference, though, and maybe this is the biggest feature of Dragon Warrior that separates it from most other console RPGs, as a series, is that you never feel like you’re being forced to do something, but rather discovering it on your own.

As I said, there’s no way to tell what all those wells contain until you actually dive in.

Tags: company-artepiazza, company-enix, company-heartbeat, company-squareenix, crpg, elegnaim, jrpg, PS1, rpg, single player

This entry was posted by elegnaim on Tuesday, March 18th, 2008 at 10:15 pm and is filed under Adventure, Musings. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.