Introduction

To be honest, 7th Dragon is my first import game in a very long time and is the first time I’ve attempted to play an RPG in Japanese. For most RPGs, this would have been a terrible idea, but for 7th Dragon, where the story doesn’t seem to be at the front of focus, this turned out to just be a regular bad idea. Thank god I can read enough to figure out the place names…

Story

As I said above, I can’t really read most of what is going on, but I will give my best guess about what is happening in the story. The game starts out innocently enough. You start by picking out your name and the class of character you want (more about the classes is explained below.) Later, you pick the names and classes of the other members of your guild.

From there, you start a few of the beginner quests, which are all pretty easy. Only one of them features defeating a boss-like monster. After finishing the first three quests, you start getting the real quests, which sets up a series of events that eventually ends the prologue portion of the game and sees the world more or less overrun with dragons.

These dragons have an annoying habit of growing pretty, red flowers wherever they happen to be. Humans seems to hate these. Maybe it’s because they can’t stand seeing such beauty everywhere. Or maybe its because these flowers cause pain and make most of the world inhabitable. Whatever the reason, your main mission in the game is to kill every dragon… all 667 of them.

Everything other than that is a little hazy for me. I think there are 7 main dragons that, for some reason, are bigger threats than the others. They can also talk, it seems, though I have no idea what they’re saying most of the time. Not as if they’re saying anything important, it’s usually just a couple of lines.

Gameplay

7th Dragon reminds me a lot of DQIII with sprinkles of Etrian Odyssey. Not very hard to believe since the director worked on the first EO game. The combat system is reminiscent of DQ/EO with the same basic DQ battles options with the added EO options of switching the row a certain party member is in and an EX option, which allows you to use powerful EX skills. At this point in the game, I’ve only managed to get one EX skill (the others don’t really seem worth the effort for me, for the most part.)

One thing I’m glad that didn’t take from EO is the first person dungeon crawling, which has always felt weird to me. The influence of EO can be felt through the class selection, though.

Classes

Given that a party is only 4 members (the guild as a whole can have 4 parties,) I’ve actually only tried four of the possible classes. Nonetheless, the rest are pretty easy to figure out without trying them (especially if you have a list of all of their skills.) I’ll only be talking about the classes I’ve used, just to keep it fair.

One unique thing about 7th Dragon is that every class has a special skill they can learn that enables them to take an extra turn when certain conditions are met. These skills are called Reactions. These Reaction skills last for 5 turns and count as a buff for the character that uses the skill.

Knight

For EO folk, this is more or less a better Protector class. It has the standard front row guard and back row guard skill that the Protector has, but it also has the very useful skill, Guardian, that protects anyone who has less than 50% HP by taking the attacks for them at reduced damage.

Of course, since this class is focused on protection, the defense and HP stats are pretty high. What is strange, though, is that the attack of the class isn’t that bad either. It’s not a match for the Samurai, but some of the weapons that the Knight gets makes up for that. Actually, at the point of the game I am at, my Knight is my highest damage dealer.

One of the best attacks of the Knight actually relies on a Princess being in your party. The Princess can learn a spell called Princess’s Order. The spell does nothing else but enable the Knight to perform Save the Queen, which does 2x damage. Very useful.

Another useful skill is Clenching, which at max level, gives the Knight an 80% chance of reviving upon death, in the unlikely event that that actually happens. Really, the only time I’ve had a Knight die and not had my entire party wiped out, was when I was using her as a shield for the other characters when everyone had way less than 50% HP.

The one thing I don’t like about the Knight is its reaction skill. It only actives when the Knight using specified blocks for herself or uses a spell that somewhat blocks an enemy elemental spell. The problem with the first one is that to get an extra turn you, more or less, needed to waste a turn anyway. The problem with the second one is that not a lot of enemies actually seem to use elemental spells. I’ve never had this activate, since I actually lack these skills, anyway.

Samurai

Another class that was more or less ripped straight from EO. It has a pretty good attack, excellent speed, with a pretty bad defense. Besides it’s uber-awesome Reaction skill, it’s somewhat worse than it’s EO counterpart.

The main reason for this is because they actually made the stances a ‘buff’. AKA, to use the skills of a certain stance, you have to switch to that stance, which makes sense. The thing that doesn’t make sense is that the switch counts as a ‘buff.’ In this game, each character only has room for 5 buff/debuffs at any time in a battle. Thus, if the Samurai already had 5 buffs/debuffs, when you switch to a stance, one of the buffs gets knocked off. Which kinda sucks since you have no control over which one gets kicked out. Of course, it’s never any of the debuffs that goes away.

The Reaction kill for the Samurai is pretty simple, if you take a hit that is equal or greater than 33% of your max HP, you get an extra turn. This is where the Samurai’s really sucky defense comes in. Most attacks that you receive, besides from very weak random enemies, take more than 33% of your max HP. It’s a ridiculously easy Reaction to activate.

Furthermore, it doesn’t actually have to be an attack that actives the Reaction. Some enemies cast a status affect that does damage proportional to the amount of damage a character attacks with. With this seemingly negative status, a Samurai can have an unlimited amount of turns, given that she doesn’t kill herself. To make sure that doesn’t happen, you need another character to also have her skill activate.

Princess

My favorite version of the Princess being teased. ^^

This is one class that I don’t think I could play without. I think without her, the game would be 100x harder. The Princess is mainly a buff/debuff character and she’s darn good at it. She can also heal when she’s not busy buffing.

One of my favorite buffs is called Song of Moonlight. This is a Mana regeneration spell that affects the entire party. It heals a certain amount of Mana at the end of each turn. Before getting this spell, long battles seemed almost impossible. The healers only have so much Mana, after all, and Cure comparatively, takes a big chunk of Mana out. With Song of Moonlight, casting Cure might as well not take any Mana at all (at lvl 7, I think SoM gives back exactly the same amount that Cure takes.)

The Reaction skill is the best in the game. To activate it, another character’s Reaction skill has to activate. It doesn’t matter which character does it. Having a Princess and a Samurai in the same party guarantees a high rate of activation for both of the characters. Oh, and remember the reaction cycle I was talking about above? To make it last as long as possible, the only thing you need to do is make the Princess cast Cure on the Samurai each turn.

Healer

This party member is pretty standard as far as RPGs go. The only twist is that the Healer is also good for casting venom spells at the enemy. I’ve never actually done this before, so I’m not quite sure how useful it is. Compared to enemy attacks, though, the Healer’s defense is pathetic. A lot of the early bosses seem to easily one-hit KO the Healer. Bad, because in the beginning of the game, there is no access to resurrection items.

The Reaction skill is probably something every RPG player has wanted since the first RPG. When someone dies, your Healer gets an extra turn. No more wasting a turn reviving someone (unless they die before you actually got to recast the Reaction skill.) I haven’t had to use this a lot since almost no one dies anymore. It’s useful just in case, though.

Difficulty

The difficulty in this game seems very beginning heavy. At the beginning, you mostly have to play without anyone dying. The pre-reqs for the resurrection spell take some time, and most likely you want to be able to cure people before that. The dragons (aka, FOEs) are relatively strong compared to your party and fighting one at a time doesn’t guarantee victory, and having another join most likely meant death.

Later, when your party starts getting awesome skills, everything becomes easier. Right now, the FOE fights feel like long random battles, rather than boss fights than basically leave your party very weak afterward. I can even fight two at the same time without too much problem.

I wouldn’t call the game easy, though. I have yet to get through a dungeon in one-go. I usually have to go at it a couple of times to get all of the way through. Some of the random enemies can be pesky, especially the ones that cast status ailments that the Healer can’t cure (although, the Princess can, by casting a sleep spell.) The status affects in this game can be downright nasty.

Character Design

The character designer for this game goes by the name mota. You can view his site, Motor Home, here . If there’s one thing to say about his art, it’s that it’s really cute. It looks great for the female characters and the younger male characters, but for some of the older male NPCs, it looks a little silly. It doesn’t bother me that much, since I mainly just see the portraits of my characters, which are all female.

The monster design, besides the dragons, is mostly unnoticeable. There are a lot of palette swaps, I think, but I don’t really pay that much attention since they’re generally uninteresting. The dragons are unique looking, though. A lot fo them don’t actually look like what most people would consider dragons. It’s nice that each new dungeon seems to have at least three or so new dragon designs. It’s refreshing.

Music

The composer for this game is Yuzo Koshiro. You may know him from such as: Streets of Rage and Ys. Compared to either of those, the music is pretty subpar. There are some nice tunes here and there, but most of the tunes don’t really stand out.

Technical Issues

Before I start this small section, I have to say that not all copies may have the same problem mine has. I could just have really bad luck. The only major issue I have had with the game is that I get occasional freezes. I have no idea what caused them, I’ve only had it happen twice. That’s not too bad for playing for 30 hours, I guess. Another minor glitch is that the top 8th of my screen is darker than the bottom 7/8. It’s weird, t budoesn’t hamper the experience, so it’s not that important.

Final Thoughts

This game is perfect for those that do not worry too much about character development and focus more on the adventuring aspect of RPGs. Those that want their RPGs to be accompanied by some amazing narrative should probably stay away.

• Battle System: More or less the old tried and true DQ system with some few enhancements. The battle system is pretty speedy, about the same speed as DQ if you hold down the A button. An option to default to the fastest speed would have been appreciated.
• Difficulty: Much less difficult than EO, where FOE battles would almost certainly kill you early on, 7th Dragon is still harder than most of the RPGs on the market today.
• Story: It’s nothing to write home about, as far as I can tell. It’s mostly told by the party doing the missions that are assigned to them.
• Music: Also nothing special. Some nice tunes here and there, though.
• Importability: The mission system makes going to the game pretty easy compared to other RPGs. Place names are highlighted in conversations so you can easily tell where you need to be, as long as you can read the kanji for: forest, mountain, and the four cardinal directions. Trying to do every quest would be painful without the fanmade wiki here though. It can also help with where to go for some of the missions, as well.