I tried to play Dragon Quest VIII back in the PlayStation 2 days but the stark contrast between it and the flashier Final Fantasy titles made it tough for me to appreciate it. It wouldn’t be until Dragon Quest IX that I gave this Japanese roleplaying game juggernaut its fair shake. It turned out that I really enjoyed playing Dragon Quest on a handheld. I enjoyed the DQIX so much that I pre-ordered both Dragon Quest VII and Dragon Quest VIII releases on the Nintendo 3DS. I had an inkling what I was getting myself into but I really didn’t know.
It took me just over 85 hours to finish Dragon Quest VII: Fragments of the Forgotten Past. That’s a lot of time for a single player title. The last game role playing game that I invested that much time in was The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt but that was broken up into two giant stints. The DQVII cart was permanently entrenched in my Nintendo 3DS for months as I gathered fragments and witnessed some of the most depressing scenarios in a JRPG.
As conventional as the turn based combat was, the story and the long journey that accompanied it was anything but. The journey began with the son of a fisherman and a prince named Kiefer stumbling into an ancient temple that opened gateways into the past. Apparently the world was a much bigger place with islands and continents all over. The duo would eventually be joined by a local mayor’s daughter, Maribel, and together they gathered the necessary stone fragments to reassemble the lost islands. The assembled stone fragments opened portals to the past which inevitably enabled the trio to restore said islands in the present.
A mysterious calamity in the past doomed each kingdom/island/continent and it was up to the trio to defeat the evil that was responsible make the world whole again. I found it to be a very novel and interesting means of gating access to the world without relying on traditional transportation barriers.
Each island/area was like a little vignette of woe. One island was plagued with terrible rains that turned people into stone. Another was essentially Groundhog Day. And one of the most depressing ones featured a cursed town that had newborn babes turn into demons and running away. As I solved each area’s problems, I learned more and more about the ultimate evil responsible which undoubtedly resulted in a confrontation with said baddie.
Dealing with the sad stories and disheartening circumstances in the past often produced positive results in the present but for a majority of the time they didn’t have real consequences for me or my crew. So when a party member chose to remain in the past and I lost access to him, I actually missed the brute. In fact, by the end of the game, it was possible for the protagonist to be the sole original member duking it out with the big bad Demon King. It was a very unorthodox experience because you just don’t see RPGs, let alone, JRPGs make drastic changes to its lineup part way through the journey. Maribel stepped away from the grand adventure to be with her ailing father for a while and, for the longest time, I was wondering if I would ever see the cross eyed ball buster again.
I accepted the introduction of the fourth character, Ruff, and I tolerated Mervyn’s inclusion into the lineup but the final character, Aishe, was handled poorly. I felt she was thrusted into the limelight because of her heritage and I was supposed to immediately connect with her for that reason alone.
Although I missed the original members for their personalities, I also missed them because I invested so much time developing their classes. Being forced to start a new classes with new characters whom I didn’t really connect with was a bit of a chore. It was doubly worse because I couldn’t easily change classes without warping to Alltrades Abbey and talk to this one specific NPC in the present day.
There weren’t random encounters (except for in this one specific area) but combat was primarily a breeze thanks to the inclusion of A.I behavior. It was like a Final Fantasy XII-lite where I set certain characters to focus on healing while others fought “wisely”. It made thumbing through normal battles easy as pie so I didn’t have to page through the countless abilities and spells that I’ve learned.
The victory lap after defeating the big bad Demon King captured my feelings of Dragon Quest VII: Fragments of a Forgotten Past perfectly. It was charming, filled with warm fuzzy feelings and I wanted it to pick up the pace. And yet, at the same time, I was surprised by the fact that I was an active participant in this victory lap. Dragon Quest VII was a long journey and, in the end, it’s one that I won’t soon forget.
Verdict:
I liked it
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