I don’t care what everyone else says. Akitoshi Kawazu is a genius. He work’s with an indie gamer mindset—unafraid of experimentation and rejection, and just making whatever game he feels like making at that moment. So, I’d like to talk for a little bit about the first SaGa game I played—Final Fantasy Legend 2.
Another Atlus game in the Shin Megami Tensei series (and spinoffs), Digital Devil Saga is bizarre. I don’t mean the regular kind of bizarre, which is what Persona 3 or Final Fantasy X might fall under. Digital Devil Saga is downright creepy in its employment of the surreal, creepy, and extraordinary elements of its plot. Perhaps the biggest element of this insane aesthetic is in the fact that you consume your defeated enemies. Not only that, but the enemies you defeat used to be human. So, in essence, Digital Devil Saga is about cannibalism.
To put this into context, I tend to go through phases when playing videogames. It normally goes along the lines of first-person shooter, American RPG, Japanese RPG, Strategy RPG, Turn-based Strategy, Real-time strategy, and then repeat at FPS. This is just how I function as a gamer. There’s individual games within those genres that I always play, and there’s some genres that are always good to play at any time. For example, I always play shoot-’em-ups. I always play Team Fortress 2. And when it comes to Japanese RPGs, I always play Persona 3.
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.