I played 7th Dragon on the DS around this time last year. It was extremely fun but also extremely tiring and I ended up with a long list of complaints by the time I was done. One of the reasons why I like to play games in order of release is so I can chart the growth of a series, seeing what was changed, what was left alone, what new things were added, that sort of thing. I’ve only played about 4 and a half hours of 7th Dragon 2020, but it looks like Sega and Imageepoch fixed quite a number of the problems with the previous game. Specifically:
1. They changed the character designs. For the worse, in my opinion, but I did say I wasn’t so crazy about the last batch of designs. I should have kept my mouth shut. ^_^;; Right now the characters portraits look like this:
But in the field and in battle they look like this:
Why bother drawing them all hardcore if they’re going to end up as chibis?
2. They cut the encounter rate down drastically. THANK GOODNESS!
3. Combat is much, much faster. THANK GOODNESS!
4. They made ‘furowaro’ damage floors harmless. THANK GOODNESS! But at the same time, I just said I didn’t like furowaro, I didn’t say get rid of them! I miss the little crunch-crunch feel of walking through the poison flowers. The ideal situation would have been greatly reduced damage and no respawns when you leave the dungeon. I’m guess this would have been too complicated to program, which is why they took it out altogether.
5. They cut down on the number of dragons. Instead of 666, there are now 200 or so, and I’m already down to 190. There’d better be a good reward for killing them all this time because you know I’m going to do it.
6. The number of classes is still small (5) but you can switch between classes after 30 levels, losing only 15 levels and keeping…something. I forget what, but anyway it’s a good deal. Also the names of the classes are interesting: Destroyer, Hacker, Psychic, etc. I haven’t discovered what makes them special yet, but at least they tried to shake things up a bit.
7. There’s Auto-battle now.
8. There’s a Quest option on the main menu so you can see what sidequests you’re on.
Those are the major fixes I’ve seen so far. In any case 4 hours is far too soon for a lot of problems to show up. Things like backtracking and overlevelling don’t usually manifest themselves this early, for example. I haven’t gotten any sidequests yet, so I don’t know whether they still suck or not. The original 7th Dragon didn’t really pick up until the game world opened up and I was set free to roam, meanwhile I’m still on rails in 2020, so I haven’t experienced the ‘true’ game yet. I’m hoping for greater autonomy once I’m done with the current dungeon. Of course, that’s assuming no one went to Sega crying “Waah, too much freedom!” The knife cuts both ways.
I’m pretty optimistic about the game right now. Dungeon crawlers are hard to ruin, as long as combat is fun and the dungeons aren’t too boring. Sega/Imageepoch didn’t just fix the problems from the first game but they also introduced a completely new setting, new characters (and one old), new classes, new items, new dungeons, new pretty much everything, so they’re off to a very good start. This is Imageepoch we’re talking about so it’s too soon to relax, but I have a good feeling about this one.
I couldn’t get into this game, but it’s just me, I think. To me, it feels more like your everyday JRPG-like dungeon crawler than the original game which tried to emulate a more Western dungeon-crawl feel, IMO.
I do know someone who imported this game solely because of the Miku cameo even though he really hates dungeon crawlers though, so I guess I have to give credit to the marketing team for being geniuses.
It IS your everyday JRPG dungeon-crawler. I just happen to have an extremely high tolerance for that sort of thing. If they’d stop railroading me, stop shoving their morals down my throat and stop introducing NPCs and giving them a few lines only to kill them right away, I’d be a very happy camper.
I only have the vaguest idea who Hatsune Miku is (some kind of virtual singer?) so rest assured I’m not playing this for her.
Yeah, I figured you weren’t. I just like throwing around anecdotes.
Miku is… weird. Once upon a time, a company wanted to sell their sound synthesizer software. Since this is a rather niche product in the first place, they decided to go the standard JP marketing path and slap on an Anime girl to sell their product with.
And the weird part is that rather than your standard “we made just enough money to live off this niche product” result, it instead became a huge cultural phenomena and I’m guessing some people laughed all the way to the bank at their sudden windfall of money.
I mean, jeez, does that mean that one day Tony Taka’s designs will be so popular that we will have concerts where the actors cosplay as Shining Hearts characters and sing pop music?
I wouldn’t be at all surprised to see it happen. Seiyuu cosplaying their characters and holding concerts/recording image albums is already a big thing in Japan. So is adopting cutesy mascots for everything. Hatsune’s makers just happened to find an untapped middle ground and hit the mega-jackpot that way. Business is funny that way.
The funny thing about 7th dragon 2020 for me is that if you were to ask me to judge it based on the merit of of each individual element of the game, I would probably say that it’s mediocre at best. While the combat can be fast-paced and challenging at times, it also got repetitive quite quickly and the main plot doesn’t fare much better being a jumble of anime cliches. On the other hand, I found myself remembering the game with fondness now that I think back on it. I think that the best way I can describe it is that it’s a very cohesive experience.
Sure, the story is nothing but simple and straight forward, but it also made sure that everything we, the player did, made sense in context. The side quests in the game doesn’t give me the disjointed feeling that I’m ignoring the plot of the game to take a stroll through the park for some reward, instead, they all tie back into how people were dealing with the Dragon invasion. I won’t spoil the story but I found myself going back to talk to each and every NPC every time a major event happened and I still remember many of NPC’s tidbits of stories which is much more than what I can say for most JRPG I play now a day.
In the end, while it isn’t some grand epic with complex system that’ll keep you coming back for more, it was a very serviceable dungeon crawler that surprisingly immersed me quite well in the game world with its chibi characters and short dialogues. I think the fact they streamlined the game to make it so painless to go through and the comparably short length of the main scenario worked well in the game’s favor and I didn’t regret playing through the game myself.
I did get the feeling this was going to be short, since I’ve already killed about 90 dragons out of 200. I’ll be sorry to see it end. Your overall opinion of 2020 is the same as the one I had of 7th Dragon, i.e. the whole is greater than the sum of the parts. I really, really miss the freedom I had with the first game, but otherwise it’s been a great experience so far, tiny little flaws notwithstanding.