Boo hoo hoo, sniff sniff. I’m so happy. It’s been so long since I liked a game enough to finish it! To celebrate, I’m only going to say nice things about 7th Dragon 2020-II. I believe I covered most of the flaws after I finished 2020 anyway, and I don’t have anything add about 2020-II since it’s pretty much the same game. If anything 2020-II fixed some of the flaws by giving me slightly more freedom from the bureaucrats who wanted to control my every move.
Unlike with 2020 I actually did a bit of the postgame dungeon for 2020-II, just to see if it held any new excitement for me. And to kill more dragons. As ogopogo said in a comment last time, the random battles are just ridiculous – you have to fight dragons as regular enemies. DRAGONS! Four at once or more! I said I wanted kill dragons, but I wanted to gang up on them, not vice-versa. What is this world coming to when game bosses start banding together for safety?
Besides, the postgame ‘story’ was a waste of time, being a retread of the story of the original 7th Dragon for those who never played it. And they don’t give it out easily. Instead you have to go through one stage, fight one boss (a slightly harder version of an earlier game boss) and then a character gives you two lines of story – if you’re lucky – then the process repeats. What’s more, you don’t get any Dz for fighting the dragons or bosses and it doesn’t register on the Dragon Counter either. Unless there’s a really compelling reason why you can’t just read a summary of 7th Dragon‘s story on J-Wikipedia the bonus dungeon isn’t really worth it.
I dunno why I found these little hopping dragons so adorable. They’re like puppies!
Well, almost not worth it. I got to test out a new party combination: instead of the Destroyer-Samurai-Psychic combo I’d used all the way through, I went Destroyer-Destroyer-Psychic. TBH my Samurai had disappointed me all game long. He wasn’t as sturdy or as hard-hitting as my Destroyer and he wasn’t as good as healing with items as my Psychic was with magic (plus she could pack a punch with Frostburn if necessary), and he had so many skills on the list it was hard to figure out what to learn. Besides, the Destroyer class had a lot of good skills that I rarely used because my Destroyer was too busy tricking dragons into hitting him so he could hit back double with Counter + Heat Body/Zero C. I thought it would be fun to have an attacking Destroyer and a defensive Destroyer for double the defence and firepower. The main drawback of such a strategy would be the exceeding slowness of Destroyers, but I found a +50 SPD accessory in the bonus dungeon and that sorted the ex-Samurai out nicely.
So how did the new strategy work out? Hmm… it’s hard to tell. I mean it went great, decimated bosses and mooks alike. Destroyer 1 would start out attracting hits while Destroyer 2 packed on the D-levels. Next turn Destroyer 2 would lower the enemy’s defense while Destroyer 1 lowered their attack. The enemy would usually be at D3 by then, so they would use Drill Crawler to put the hurt on while recovering HP. Recovering their own HP also left time free for Psychic to smack them with Frostburn, so the battles went by even more quickly than usual. However, either I was overpowered or the bonus dungeon was really easy, or heck maybe my new party combination really is that powerful, because it felt like every enemy went down too quickly without putting up much of a fight. It’s hard to tell whether it was due to my efforts or not, but at least the experiment was fun.
Btw, I don’t have any particular recommendations about what kind of party to use in 2020 and 2020-II because they all have their advantages and drawbacks. I went Destroyer-Trickster-Psychic in 2020 and D-S-P and D-D-P in this one, but after taking a look at the skill list for all the other classes, it seems you would do fine with any combo. The new Idol class seemed pretty powerful, but I had my concerns about their hardiness. With only 3 members in a party, getting someone KO’ed is no joke. If nothing else you’ll have to waste a turn reviving and healing them, and the boss won’t be standing idly by while you do that. That’s why I wanted at least 1 Destroyer to draw fire away from the other two. As long as you have someone who can take a few hits and someone who can heal effectively, the third party member is up to you.
As you can tell by the way I keep prattling on, battling was a lot of fun in this game. The pace of battle was extremely fast too, especially near the end when my Samurai had his hit-all attack. Oh right, I should note that the Samurai skill that hits 8 times in a row (first on the list) is extremely useful for killing those Furowaro enemies that give all the SP. For that alone I guess it was worth having a Samurai along. Oh, oh, another tip! Wait a bit before resetting your party’s SP. At least wait till they get to the point where they learn Ougis (which seem a bit nerfed in this game compared to the last one but maybe it’s just me). I reclassed 3 times and still ended up at level 75 and beat the last boss handily, but I think I would have done just as well if I’d waited a bit to do one grand SP redistribution. Plus I’m not sure if the new SP total takes the effect of baths and doping items into account, so if you think you’ll be reclassing often, hold off on bathing (…what?) and on using SP items until your final reclass.
Phew! Right! That’s enough battle talk. Now to talk about the game proper. There isn’t much to say though. 7th Dragon 2020-II will be of most interest to people who have played 2020, being a very direct sequel that will leave you going “Huh, who, what?” if you skip 2020. And if you’ve played 2020 then you already know what to expect from 2020-II, since as I said they’re pretty much the same. The story isn’t much to write home about, but at least there was no traitor this time. I’m sorry I suspected you, Shizuka. In that respect it’s a lot more hopeful than 2020. People are more prepared and more upbeat than in the previous game and most of our plans go relatively smoothly. And Team 13 gets a lot of respect from everyone for their work, which feels awesome even though I should be used to it by now.
The music was… not exactly my cup of tea, but I didn’t dislike it. The soundtrack is largely the same as 2020‘s. I never tried Diva mode so I don’t even know what that sounds like. Graphics… haha. Well, they’re functional. Bright happy colors and all that. Dungeon, monster and character designs are 100% reused from the previous game with very few changes, so there’s nothing new to see here. Voice-acting… I chose the voices myself and after 41 hours I can’t imagine them sounding like anything else.
User-friendliness… I don’t usually mention this for other games, but Imageepoch, rest their souls, were experts at creating gamer-friendly games, making it easy to save and to get in and out of dungeons when necessary. Strategic entry and exit points meant that you were never too far from your objective when you returned. I got an Exit spell early and a Stealth spell for when I don’t want to fight and Killer’s Attract skill for insta-battles and all kind of accessories and skills for boosting EXP and SP. The random encounter rate wasn’t that high anyway and as I said, most battles went by really quickly. Boss battles could be a bit long, but I was usually too busy scrabbling to stay alive to look at the clock. If you lost a battle you could Retry immediately instead of restarting from a Save Point, and if you still couldn’t win you had a good chance of running from all non-boss battles even without using a Smoke Grenade.
Within headquarters it was very easy to warp from floor to floor and the floors were small enough that moving around took only a few seconds. Quest items and NPCs were almost always marked with an arrow or exclamation mark so you didn’t have to hunt them down. They also warned you in the store when you had an item that would be needed for a quest so you never accidentally sold one and had to grind for more. In any case there were only three such quests in the whole game, which was great. Basically 2020-II is just a really, really, really convenient game to play. I’m playing Bravely Default right now and it’s doing its best but it just can’t compete with this level of user-friendliness. *snf* Imageepoch, why did you have to die? *snf*
Ah well, all things come to an end. 🙁 Final verdict on 7th Dragon 2020-II: it’s great if all you want to do is roam around dungeons for 40 hours killing dragons. And who doesn’t? It’s best played about a year after 2020 due to the similarities between the two, but if you already like the standard formula in that one, you’re going to love this one. Play if you like dungeon crawlers but don’t want to go all hardcore and stuff. I’ve had my fun, it’s time to move on.
This might be coming a bit too soon after 2020-II but new 7th Dragon just got announced! Not quite sure what to think yet since it’s being developed by Sega’s inhouse team since Imageepoch’s gone for good. So far from what I gathered, the director worked on Phantasy Star Universe while the Producer’s credit consist of pretty much just Sega’s old Virtual-On games.
Here’s the official website: http://dragon3.sega.jp/
It seems that they’ll be doing a live stream on the 3rd of July.
Whaaaaat! This IS good news! I hope. I’ll decide after I watch the stream in a few days. Thanks for the heads up!