birdwrong

4th July, 2024 - The First Twenty Hours of Dragon Quest VII (3DS)

I recently hit the twenty-hour mark in Dragon Quest VII and wanted to share some thoughts about my experience so far!

I get the impression that this game is somewhat notorious for a couple of reasons. The main complaints I hear are:
1) When starting the game, it takes multiple hours of play before you reach the first battle.
2) It takes approximately 20 hours before you gain the ability to change the vocations of your characters.

Both of these things are true, but are they necessarily bad?

The opening hours of the game luxuriate in establishing its characters and story. It felt so novel for a JRPG to spend this much time easing us into its world! I hear that the introduction of the 3DS remake even cuts out some content from the PS1 original - I would love to try that one too, sometime!

Contrasting with the long opening of Dragon Quest VII, Dragon Quest VIII cuts to a combat encounter almost disorientingly quickly. Before we even know our characters, we're bashing the goo out of a group of over-optimistic slimes.

I like that in Dragon Quest VII, by the time we reach the first battle, we know what a startling and frightening experience this must be for our protagonists! The world we have lived in until this point has been entirely free of monsters, and filled only with an unending sense of childhood adventure and innocence.

As the plot picked up and my ragtag crew of children were thrust into their adventures through time, they felt suitably out of their depth, and I loved my time guiding them through their accidental quest.

If at this point, my characters felt underprepared and out of place, by the time I reached the part of the game that allows me to assign new vocations to each of them, they felt changed, experienced, and deserving of this reward.

So much has happened in these past twenty hours! I will refrain from detailing plot specifics, but will say that the Dragon Quest style of storytelling vignettes is put to excellent use here. I already feel as though I have an entire game's worth of stories, and they just keep coming, and keep getting better!

And the quantity isn't the only impressive point - the variety is huge. I never know what to expect from one town to the next, and the game succeeds time and time again in telling stories that surprise and tug at my emotions.

Before unlocking the ability to assign new vocations, a surprise plot-twist throws you into a story that feels like a season finale. Struggling through it and emerging victorious makes the reward all the sweeter.

I'm excited to see where Dragon Quest VII takes me next. If the first twenty hours have been this rich in adventure, I can't even imagine what I have ahead of me!

Before I sign off, if you want to see the box art - here you go! I think it's a fun cover, and it catches the sense of adventure. I particularly like that the back of the box promotes the vocation system - I admit I can see why people would be irked at waiting twenty hours before being able to engage with a feature so prominantly advertisd, but the journey is so worth it!


Yes, a major motivator to unlock the vocations is to dress everyone up in that sheep costume.