60%PlayStation
67h 4m Progress
Well, I finally did it. I beat Dragon Quest VII, the PS1 version at that. The longest single-player game of all time. It took me 3 hours before I fought my first enemy, and 22 hours before the game fully opened up all its mechanics. That's the point where most JRPGs are wrapping up for me. But this motherf*cker was just getting started.
The sheer length is what always comes up whenever the game is mentioned, and honestly, it might as well be. There is very little else about the game that's unique. Anything good about this game, it owes to its predecessors for perfecting the formula.
Dragon Quest's overarching plots are chronically generic, but I've never found the writing bad during the myriad mini-quests you do across the games, and those tend to be unique. The characters aren't complete tropes like they are in most modern JRPGs, and there's actually a decent bit of dialogue to them that you can voluntarily access. However, while the characters are memorable, I wouldn't call them exactly likeable. One of the supposed main characters selfishly leaves your party 15 hours in and never, EVER shows up again, so I spent the entire rest of the game resenting him. The small comfort I had is because he leaves you while you're in the past (the game involves time travel), by the time you receive a post-credits message from him, he is most certainly long dead and decomposed.
The game's quality is basically that of a SNES game with 3D environments. The DS remakes of DQ 4, 5 and 6 used this same visual style, so I guess this game can take the credit for introducing it, but those games improved on it hugely despite having weaker hardware. The music is MIDI and sound effects are bitcrushed to sh*t even though they didn't need to be on the PS1's CD format. Even the text in this game is often abbreviated when it doesn't need to be, it's not on a 4MB cartridge - it just looks ugly. I know we're supposed to love retro now but this game feels so horrifyingly stuck in the past for its time, like they couldn't be bothered to make the barest minimum concessions to make it modern.
The music is nice, though. Every DQ game has the same music and if I didn't grow to hate it after so many hours of hearing the same thing, it must be good. I'd have liked more variety though, because you can count the number of tracks on one hand. The same track tends to keep playing regardless of any tonal shifts in the scene; introducing some new tracks for those moments would have been better at evoking emotion.
Every criticism I have just comes back to how f*cking long the game is. It's a weakness, not a badge of honour. Battles and exploration are extremely slow, and I honestly think a faster walking speed, more compact dungeons (tons of dead ends here), better reward scaling and faster-paced battles would all have helped this game go by much quicker, in both the metaphorical and literal sense.
By the time the villain was finally introduced, I was so anxious to finish and be done with the game that I had stopped caring completely, especially because I knew there was a whole second disc left. Thank God for emulation, because while my in-game time says I took 67 hours to beat it (it takes the average player 110 hours, but I'm not an average player, plus halfway through I started using a walkthrough and never looked back), it actually took me 45 hours irl. That's 22 hours of real-life time saved through using the speedup feature. That's 22 hours they could have shaved off by making the game move faster to begin with. There's a litany of typos throughout the text as well, which makes me think even the localization team was tired out from having to translate so much.
That's not to say I didn't enjoy it. All these criticisms didn't make me hate the game enough to quit, after all. The simple DQ formula still works; exploring towns, talking to every NPC, breaking pots, buying new equipment with the money you've spent time grinding to save up, mastering classes, hearing the level-up jingle, all of it is still nice. I've often called Dragon Quest the AC/DC of video games, where you know what you're gonna get but it's still good. But now we know why AC/DC never released a five-hour-long album. 6/10!
