Categoría: Dragon Quest

Rest In Peace, Akira Toriyama

~ Ichiro Yamazaki ~ Deja un comentario


«Akira Toriyama, the legendary manga artist who created Dragon Ball and was influential in the creation of many classic RPGs, has died at the age of 68. The official Dragon Ball social media accounts announced that he’d passed away on March 1st of a subdural haematoma; essentially a bleed on the brain.»
Extracted from the article: RPGSite.

It’s very painful to say goodbye to the man behind the all time classic Dragon Ball and also the artist for the highly influential masterpieces: Dragon Quest and Chrono Trigger. Through his creations he brought happiness to millions of people around the world.
May his soul find total peace in the afterlife, and may his legacy live forever.

Dragon Quest VII: Fragments of the Forgotten Past (review)

~ Ichiro Yamazaki ~ Deja un comentario

This game is a remake from the original Dragon Quest VII that came out on Play Station which became the best seller of that console in Japan. This remaster continued Square’s efforts to bring back to life the good old DQ classics and make them portable via DS and 3DS consoles.

Fragments of the Forgotten Past tells the tales about a group of friends that live on an island and one day, they discover some mysterious ruins, which become their entry-gate to other worlds. They travel to these worlds and solve some problems, and then they return to their island (Estard). However, as soon as they arrive on Estard, they notice some additional islands appeared on the horizon, so they decide to navigate there, looking for adventure. The heroes learn that the new islands match the other worlds perfectly, but these new islands represent the current situation (the present), and the outer worlds represent the past of the islands. So, they conclude they can restore ancient lost kingdoms, by helping them on the past so they can exist in the present, preventing their extinction. The fragments are keys to unlock the outer worlds, they are stone tablets that need to be placed on specific pedestals, and when this happens, a new portal appears as a tool to transport to an ancient outer world.
So, our mission is to retrieve all fragments to unlock new areas, help people of that kingdoms to fight back evil, and then visit them on the present to get more fragments.

This time, I’ve decided to just split the description of the game in 2 sections: positive aspects and flaws, and then give a brief conclussion and score.

Positive features

Intuitive, enjoyable and easy to master combat system.
Battles have some depth thanks to all the existing classes (like jobs/roles) and this combat engine includes traditional tools like buffs/debuffs and ailments.
Excelent enemy design.
In general, good dungeon design, and some of them are actually amazing.
No more random encounters, which existed on the original game.
Better graphics/presentation than the original, appropiate for the hardware and with stable FPS.
Allies actually appear on combat, unlike the original game.
A fragment detector was created to easily find fragments.
A new feature allows to talk to our allies to get useful clues on what do to next.
Game requires only a little bit of grinding, allowing us to enjoy more hours progressing the story, instead of just defeating random monsters.
Decent plot even if it is predictable sometimes.
Excellent music and appropiate for the situations.
I loved the music twist between the tragic/sad tunes when a village is ruined, but when the heroes defeat evil and return triumphantly, the sountrack becomes happy/melodic.

Negative features

Basic character and enemy writing.
Character art is just too bad most of the times.
The plot is split on loosely coupled sub-stories that barely have anything to do.
Cyclic storytelling generates a predictable adventure.
Some plot twist near the endgame really sucks.
There is not a single way to fully prevent monsters from appearing or fully guarantee to escaping them.
Some quests/puzzles don’t make any sense and are quite difficult to solve.
Too much simple combat mechanics and so much easy difficulty during all the first third of the game.
Time-traveling was not leveraged at all from the storytelling perspective.
Plot holes and some of the sub-stories are really bad.
Stats meanings are confusing for DQ beginners like me.

Conclussions
Without a doubt, this is the best way to experience DQVII because it has improved mechanics and graphics., and it solved many obvious flaws from the original. Besides, it is possitively shorter and requires less grinding.
However, there are still some flaws that negatively impact the experience, so there are lost opportunities to achieve a better outcome.
This is a fun game but I don’t think this is an essential entry at all, not even from the franchise’s point of view.
Score: 7.5