And killed every single last dragon as well! And got NOTHING for all my trouble! My mind is just all kinds of boggled right now.
More than that, I’m just tired after killing 666 dragons and doing tons of sidequests over the course of about 70 hours. I had a good time, but now I just want to forget I ever played this game. I’m so tired. I’m going to lay all my frustrations on the line and then move on without a second thought.
What I liked about 7th Dragon
1. Relative freedom to go anywhere and do whatever you want
2. Resettable skill trees
3. Small number of job classes, but each class has several builds and no class is entirely useless.
4. Sidequests suck, but they’re optional so that’s good.
5. Subevents are optional too, but highly rewarding.
6. Hold A to fast-forward battles (not that fast, really. In fact they should have just made battles faster to begin with).
7. Decent music. I neither liked nor disliked the soundtrack.
8. Low-level party members are quick to level up. I could have switched out my entire party at the end if I’d wanted to.
9. Dungeons have shortcuts. It just sucks that you have to memorize the location of every single one. They should have auto-marked it on the dungeon map.
10. I actually didn’t find the character designs all that cute, but I appreciate the attempt.
What I wasn’t so crazy about
1. No reward for killing all 666 dragons except a stupid post-game dungeon ;___; I should have checked before starting. I could have finished this game in 50 hours or less!
2. Boring, perfunctory ending sequence. My guild goes out adventuring somewhere, the end. No kingdom for my troubles, no cash, no mansions, no nothing! Just a thank you and a good bye. This sucks.
3. Doing optional dungeons will make you overlevelled. If I’d known there was no point in killing everything I would have left them alone.
4. Being overlevelled will ruin half the fun of the game by making all battles including the final one a joke.
5. All the time I spent wiping out dragons made the game too long.
6. Not just long but also tedious, since I ended up using the same few moves over and over and over again. Like most dungeon crawlers, 7th Dragon is a test of patience and endurance rather than skill or strategy.
7. Stupidly high encounter rate and how much trouble you have to go through to avoid random battles. I’ve already complained about this twice, but a thousand times wouldn’t be enough.
8. Weapon and item shops stopped updating about 40 hours in. I had over 450,000g and nothing to spend it on by the end of the game. Not that I needed anything, but it’s the principle of the thing.
9. Inconvenient transportation. Walking/running is too slow. Portals should have been in every single town, not at a few random places on the world map. The ship is fast, but dat encounter rate. Airship is slow, even with an upgrade. Every method is flawed.
10. No monster/item glossary. In a game where every other quest is “Bring 10 of X” and where you need item drops to unlock certain items and armor, it’s a real pain not knowing who drops what and where to find them.
11. Characters and NPCs look rather small on the screen.
12. Mining and foraging are almost completely useless.
13. No way to check what quests you are currently on once you leave town.
14. A little too much backtracking for my comfort. How many hundred times did I visit Kazan again?
15. No Auto-battle. This is one game that really needed it.
16. Furowaro! That is all.
The good parts were good enough to keep me playing, but since I got nothing worthwhile after all I put in, all I can see are the flaws now. I’m not sure I’d recommend it to any but the most patient and most hardcore of dungeon-crawler lovers. In spite of all the pain, however, I’d still like to try 7th Dragon 2020 on the PSP sometime. Not any time soon, though.
What’s next
Tales of Innocence. And I want to settle things with Suikoden II once and for all this month. But first, sleep and lots of it.
[…] 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 […]
Woo, dredging up this one.
Apparently there’s a fan-translation released for this recently. There’s a version of the patch that also tones down encounter rate and FUROWARO damage.
Now that you’ve played both this and 2020, think the original 7th Dragon is worth playing with said changes? I haven’t used my DS for a while… heck, haven’t even finished SaGa 2/3 even though I really want to.
Finish Saga 3 first~! It’s a bit boring to start with, but I really liked it once it got going. 7th Dragon with less furowaro and fewer encounters = YES! YES! I had other little issues with it, can’t remember them all now, but those were the most annoying for sure. I ended up loving it anyway. Definitely give it a try and tell me what you think.
[…] 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 […]
It surprises me you think the music is just plain ”decent”. Most people who played this game tend to think it’s soundtrack is superb. I was getting sick of hearing the same crap from people who think everything Yuzo Koshiro composes is automatically gold.
Maybe it was superb and I’m just not musically-inclined enough to appreciate it. I hadn’t even heard of Yuzo Koshiro until I googled him just now.
I do remember loving the Streets of Rage soundtrack, but while I love the 7th Dragon series for all kinds of reasons, the music isn’t one of them.