Welcome to my second blog of 2013! As promised, I’m going to write about the re-release of Dragon Quest VII for the Nintendo 3DS.
One of my favourite games from my Playstation 2, was Dragon Quest VIII, although admittedly, I never actually got round to finishing it… The final boss kept beating the absolute crap out of me no matter what I tried. I feel like I’ve somewhat failed as a gamer since I’ve just admitted that – so don’t tell anyone!
Anyway, Dragon Quest VII was originally released back in 2000 on the Playstation, then a year later it was released in North America… and that’s where our story ends. It’s been re-released a bunch of times, but we never got a look in. Again.
Then on February 7th, Japan got their re-release with a facelift. And according to some sources, over the first weekend alone, over 800,000 copies of the game were sold. Looks like Square Enix knows exactly what titles to remake and sell. Especially since they recorded a 5004million Yen drop in profits between 31st December 2011 and 31st December 2012, with an introduction to 2013 like that they’re off to a better start this year!
Anyway enough numbers, that’s Anthony’s department, time for some more JRPG chat!
The story revolves around a silent, unnamed protagonist, although in the manga, he is named Arus. For the purposes of this blog I’m going to call the guy ‘Hero’. Creative, I know. The story begins when Hero’s dad brings home a piece of a map from a fishing trip but on this map were continents that didn’t exist in the world today.
In response to this knowledge, Hero, along with some friends find a way to travel to the past and fix the problems which threaten to literally remove them from the world. When these problems are resolved in the past, they pop back into the present! Pretty tidy, eh? Obviously there’s more to it than that but that would be giving the whole story away!
From what I’ve seen of the gameplay footage, it seems to be a hybrid of Dragon Quest VIII and the earlier Final Fantasy games… which would make sense because they’re both made by the same company. Although unlike in Dragon Quest VIII, there are no random battles. To initiate battles one simply needs to collide with the beasties on screen. In this respect it takes after its predecessor Dragon Quest IX.
It’s a tale of magic, sages, friendship, betrayal, possession and a horse princess.
If you have played any Dragon Quest game previous to this title, ignoring VIII and IX, for the moment, all of the battles have been shot from a first person perspective, so you can’t see any of your characters attack. Then VIII came along and it made me happy that I could see my characters make ridiculously long jumps from the enemy back to their starting position. VII follows this kind of battle system, with the camera fixed at a third person view behind the party. I’m not entirely sure why this makes me happy, but it does. Not seeing my characters in battle was a pet peeve for me. It didn’t put me off playing the other games, though, it was just annoying.
If you want to fill your time between now and when/if this gets released outside of Japan, I’d highly recommend that you pick up a copy of Dragon Quest VIII. It is a brilliant introduction to the series and I can’t stress this enough. It’s a tale of magic, sages, friendship, betrayal, possession and a horse princess. I suppose I should mention the cursed King Trode too…
Unfortunately, as of yet, there has been no scheduled release of the 3DS remake outside of Japan, although considering how well Ni No Kuni did in the West, Square Enix could do with taking a leaf out of Namco Bandai’s book and giving us what we want.
Continuing with the theme of games we’re missing out on, next time on Silent Protagonist, I’ll take a look at Final Fantasy Type Zero.
To be continued…
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