Japanese players had to wait five ever-lovin' years to play VII when most Dragon Quest games stewed in development for only two years. What makes judging Dragon Quest VII a bit difficult can be chalked up to how a lot of its issues are tied directly to the context of its release. While the concept of alternate realities feels a bit half-baked in VI, Chrono Trigger contains one of the best uses of time travel as a storytelling and game mechanic, and VII definitely gives off vibes of the latter.
#DRAGON WARRIOR VII SERIES#
All of this plays out though a nice little series of loops, undoubtedly influenced by Dragon Quest creator Yuji Horii's work on games like Dragon Quest VI and Chrono Trigger (both released in 1995). The game begins on a planet that contains one small island, and gradually, you start going to the past, eliminating the issues that took out these towns and kingdoms, until the world regains its former glory. In English, this collection of binders would likely be 3-4 times the size.ĭragon Quest VII also happens to contain my favorite premise in the entire series. This is the entirety of Dragon Quest VII's text in Japanese. The fact that I couldn't spot a single typo in this inestimable amount of text speaks volumes to how much the localization team killed themselves to make it happen.
NPCs spout volumes of text that change after small events, and certain big changes that happen late in the game give everyone in the entire world something new to say (and I think this happens more than once). In fact, I'd say the 3DS version has the best localization I've ever seen, simply because it has the most localization I've ever seen. And not only does this version look better, it's also been giving a proper localization-you can read about the hell the Dragon Warrior VII localization team went through in a feature I wrote for USgamer last year. You likely know this by now, but yes, the 3DS version polishes the turd that was Dragon Quest VII's original release into an entirely new, non-turdlike object. Even if I couldn't finish it this time, starting a new game would probably rank relatively low on my list of deathbed regrets. Even if I never played it, my purchase could exist simply to tell Square-Enix "thank you for supporting Dragon Quest once again in a way that will inevitably lose you money." But, by the time January rolled around, I couldn't resist tearing open that package to see if I could commit myself to giving Dragon Quest VII a second try. So, with these painful memories behind me, of course I had to buy the 3DS remake when it eventually made its way to America nearly four years after the Japanese release. I kept that saved game on a memory card I still have today, laboring under the delusion that I'd return to VII one day for the sake of closure.
I first encountered Dragon Quest VII when it was released for the PlayStation as Dragon Warrior VII back in 2001, and sunk 120 hours of my life into it before losing to the final boss and immediately forfeiting any desire to give it a second go. And if I wasn't finishing the game almost entirely out of spite, I probably would have given up long ago, too. Though I bet if you could somehow find out how many people who purchased Dragon Quest VII and actually finished it, that number couldn't possibly be higher than 10%. I finally finished the 3DS remake of Dragon Quest VII after eight months and 113 hours-a feat I consider so significant that I've decided to write about it.
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