All my worst fears from the last post came true, and I just got more and more bored and more and more frustrated until it was all I could do to finish 7th Dragon 2020
I think it’s fair to attribute most of my dissatisfaction with this game to the fact that I played the prequel not that long ago. It would be nice, in an ideal world, if I could play every game in a complete vacuum without thinking back to anything else I’ve played before. Unfortunately I have yet to master that exotic art. And seeing as I play a large number of games in a very limited number of genres, it is unlikely that I ever will. So the ghost of 7th Dragon did unfortunately haunt 7th Dragon 2020 and affect my ability to enjoy the game to its fullest.
Problem 1: The small scale of the extermination. I’ve played many, many games that are set in just one small city, town or even village. If not for the prequel I might not have noticed or minded all I was missing by being limited to fighting only in Tokyo. But I did notice, and I did mind. All the more because we’re told that dragons have covered the entire Earth, not just Tokyo, not just Japan. Instead of getting the chance to take those out, I’m supposed to kill 200 dragons, kill 9 bosses, rescue 75 people and then pat myself on the back because I’m such a hero? No.
Problem 2: The railroading. The lack of freedom to progress at my own pace. The lack of anywhere to explore. The goal of killing 200 dragons and 7 bosses (to start with) was revealed within the first 2 hours of the game. The rest should have been left up to me to do however I pleased. Give me some guidance if you want, a recommended extermination order if you please, but leave me alone as much as possible.
Problem 3: Too many interruptions. I grew heartily sick of the lengthy meetings and progress reports at the start of every chapter. And I know I was supposed to find my navigator cute, but she kept interrupting me when I was busy concentrating. “Team 13!” “Team 13!” “Team 13!” She wasn’t called Navi for nothing.
Problem 4: The story and the characters. This one had nothing to do with the previous game, they sucked all on their own. Without spoiling too much, the main antagonist’s motivation amounts to “Power is everything. Dragons are awesome because they have power. I wanna be a dragon!” And then Natsume was a dragon, totally forgetting about her hand-picked team of dragon-killing experts… really, you should know how the rest of the story goes. And the moral of the story is, it’s not power but the will behind that power that counts. Also friendship and effort and bonds and never underestimating the power of human beings, etc etc. Like I said, you know how it goes.
It’s all a bit hypocritical anyway, since Natsume is right that the powerful do survive and have their own way while the powerless just die pitifully. We beat Mizuchi because we were stronger than her, end of story. They talk about “will” but since my party is forced to be the mindless tools and puppets of headquarters, going where they say to go and killing who they say to kill, it doesn’t resonate with me as the player. In the end it boils down to this: power+will > power alone. But this is simple mathematics and not really worth making a whole game about.
Then comes the last hour of the game: suddenly, Necron! Specifically Nyarla, the last boss of the first game. I thought for sure I’d killed him last time, but some people never learn. This is one aspect where playing the original helped, because otherwise I can only imagine my shock and annoyance at this boss coming out of left field just when I thought I was done (only there were 16 dragons and a third of the last map left, so I knew I wasn’t done). His shtick is exactly the same as last time and his just desserts are the same as well, so maybe this time he’ll finally get the memo.
Move along, nothing to see here.
Still, 7th Dragon 2020 is a fairly good game. I’ve mentioned before that they’d fixed most of the problems with the first game (while ruining the few good things about it), and it also has several other things worth commending it for:
+ Moderate length at 30-40 hours on average.
+ Resettable skills trees and accompanying stat bonuses.
+ Moderate difficulty, especially if you reclass at least once.
+ Selectable difficulty settings. I wish there had been a “Hard” though.
+ No automatic “Game Over” if you lose a fight. Instead you get to retry as often as you like. This should have been limited to Casual Mode only, IMO, but it saved me once or twice.
+ Lots of savepoints.
+ Easily-usable dungeon shortcuts.
+ You can feel yourself getting stronger as you level up and get better equipment. You fight a lot of the same dragons in the dungeons. Earlier ones might give you a hard time, but by the time you approach the boss you’ll be wiping them out in one turn. It’s good feedback for how strong you’re getting.
+ Warpable maps. You can warp from floor to floor and from headquarters to the world map and back again with very little trouble.
+ Simple but meaningful quests. Most of them have to do with people trying to cope with the fallout of the disaster or trying to help each other out in some way, and many of them teach you more about the sub characters. There aren’t any “Scratch my bum ‘cos I’m too lazy to do it myself” quests.
+ No grinding necessary, but a free, unlimited enemy-attracting skill is available if you need it.
On the other hand, it’s not perfect. Apart from the problems I listed above, note also the following:
– The music is bad in general. There are some good tunes, mainly those carried over from the first game (man, am I biased or what?) but the overall soundtrack is a little too ‘scratchy’ and ‘modern’ for my tastes.
– Exchanging Dz to rebuild headquarters was a PITA.
– Many of the floors I rebuilt were useless. The DIVA room, for example. The JSDF (aka ‘cannon fodder’) floor. Murakumo living quarters. The sky lounge with its accompanying date spot. I’d rather have poured all that Dz into weapon development.
– Reclassing was good and all, but there should have been another way of resetting your skills. Maybe a one-time only item, or maybe a 100,000 Az and -10 level penalty. I badly wanted to redistribute my SP near the end, but that would have added another 2 or 3 hours to the game.
– Too much doom and gloom and forced tragedy. One or two deaths = cool. Everyone dying = lame.
– The unnecessary return of certain characters from the last game. Even worse, they did diddly-squat to help me this time.
– The ending is even worse than in the first game. While we got nothing for our trouble last time, at least the world was safe. This time, sure we “killed” the ultimate threat, but dragons and monsters still roam the world. I don’t feel like I’ve achieved that much.
tl;dr: It’s a decent game, as long as I don’t compare it to its predecessor. I started out not liking 7th Dragon and ended up not exactly loving it but at least having a moderate affection for it. In fact, the more time passes, the more fond I grow of the original in retrospect. And that carried over so that I started out liking 7th Dragon 2020 as well, but that feeling steadily dwindled away the more I played. I’m not saying I disliked it – I recognize its quality, if nothing else – but, ehh, it wasn’t all that. Who knows, maybe one day I’ll play 2020-II and go “Oh, 2020 was so much better!” but I doubt it. I think I’m done with this series.
Yah, I can definitely see why you’d feel that way. I enjoyed it for the most part because I never did 7th Dragon back on NDS. In fact, they even release a sequel to 2020 and I lost interested about a 3rd of the way in because it just felt like more of the same even with the two new classes they added to it.
The original is a lot of fun, but it’s bound to be hard to play coming from the opposite direction. The damage floors and high encounter rates are pretty much deal breakers.
The problem with 2020-II is that it sounds like we’re still trapped in Tokyo. I’m tired of Tokyo. If they’d at least expand the scale to cover all of Japan, it might be worth considering.