The GWJ JRPG Club 2018 - Dragon Quest VII

Had to party wipes on the boss of angel valley. Looks like I will actually have to think about synergy between my vocations for this one (so far, I've picking whatever willy-nilly).

MC will stay Champion for now, but I will probably switch Ruff to Gladiator, and maybe try to get Sir Mervyn to Sage or something. Not sure what to do with Aishe yet. Maybe Luminary (she already has dancer and troubadour, and about halfway through jester).

(I'm also trying to get off of sleeping pills and could use a good night of sleep right about now, so it's entirely possible that my strategies are not as well thought out as they should.)

Aishe went Luminary and ended up on Druid for me. I did pad her stats out with some seeds though until she was about the same as Maribel.

I ended up demoting my druid (Maribel) to a regular ol' sage for the final battle. Sages have more healing options than druids.

i'm up to Level 10 now, working on the Emberdale island. Enemies suddenly started doing significant damage, but my healing skills seem to be offsetting things nicely. Steady as she goes.

Managed to beat the boss of angel valley this morning, completed the events of Vogograd, and I'm hoping I can finish Buccanham today. If I can go at this pace tomorrow and Wednesday, there is a chance I can finish by this weekend. The end is in sight!

Edit: Played some more tonight, unlocked the final mode of transportation. The end is indeed in sight!

Congrats!! That Angel valley boss gave me a lot of trouble in both versions. In fact it was the only time I died on 3DS.

I made it to Orgodemir this morning (in the Malign Shrine), and got another party wipe. My vocations were not ready for this. I might spend some time grinding for cash today as I have not upgraded my armor in forever. (Luckily I have a bunch of podcasts in the backlog.)

I am elbow deep in my first trip to all trades Abbey. Having read a lot of the references to the Abbey here, I was not expecting my first trip to be so eventful.

Edit: Alltrades Abbey sucks. It is quite a long time to not have abilities.

Yep. Alltrades was by far the most difficult, most tedious, and least fun part of the game. I enjoyed everything after it quite a bit more.

The really great thing is that you can give the cure stone to a party member, set their AI to heal and forget about it.

What cure stone?

You should have gotten an item that is your substitute heal while you can't use magic.

Played a bunch yesterday. I got to the Sea Dragon this morning, and I'm on my way to awaken the yellow and green spirits. With a bit of luck, this will be done by Sunday!

Wembley wrote:

What cure stone?

Mr GT Chris wrote:

You should have gotten an item that is your substitute heal while you can't use magic.

I think it's called the Stone of Salvation. You can equip it as an accessory, but you can also use it as an item during combat to cast Heal without using MP. Notably, you do not need to have it equipped to use it as an item; it just needs to be in someone's inventory instead of the bag. If you give it to one of your companions and set their AI tactics to Focus on Healing, they'll use it automatically.

I wish I had known that when I went through that area I figured it out after I had left the Stone of Salvation in Ruff's inventory... hours after finishing the Alltrades Abbey scenario.

I played a little bit this morning and am in the middle of an ascent up Ventus Tower. Air Spirit, here I come!

bobbywatson wrote:

I wish I had known that when I went through that area I figured it out after I had left the Stone of Salvation in Ruff's inventory... hours after finishing the Alltrades Abbey scenario.

I wish I had known that the items didn't need to be equipped to be useful. There's a variety of weapons and accessories that also function as spells when used as an item that would have been really handy for when my characters ran out of MP (or before they did), but I thought they had to be equipped, so I chucked them in the bag. They only need to be in a character's inventory.

On the item screen, if something's description says that it can also be used as an item in battle, that means it can be used to cast various spells and other abilities without spending MP. For example, the Serpent Sword you get near the end of the game can be used to cast Maelstrom for nothing. Give those items to your companions, and if you're using the combat AI, they'll automatically use those items if they run out of MP or if they're set to not use magic.

LastSurprise wrote:

I played a little bit this morning and am in the middle of an ascent up Ventus Tower. Air Spirit, here I come!

I just finished that part! The dungeon right after that is a major pain in the ass. Random battles are even more annoying!

ClockworkHouse wrote:
Wembley wrote:

What cure stone?

Mr GT Chris wrote:

You should have gotten an item that is your substitute heal while you can't use magic.

I think it's called the Stone of Salvation. You can equip it as an accessory, but you can also use it as an item during combat to cast Heal without using MP. Notably, you do not need to have it equipped to use it as an item; it just needs to be in someone's inventory instead of the bag. If you give it to one of your companions and set their AI tactics to Focus on Healing, they'll use it automatically.

I do not remember getting an item like that. I certainly didn't use it. That would have been much better than starting my own medicinal herb farm to supplement my healing needs

After 66:59 hours (probably a bit more than that since I closed the game without saving at least once), Dragon Quest VII is now done!

I was absolutely not ready for the final boss (my equipment was not as good as it could have been, and my vocations allocation was definitely not optimal), but I managed to beat it with almost of my MPs depleted. I went into the final dungeon thinking I would use Evac eventually and start over once I was ready, but then I thought 'At worst I will love half my gold, so let's go'.

I'm somewhat ambivalent on the overall experience. On the one hand, I enjoyed the very classic JRPG gameplay, I liked the short, self-contained stories. On the other hand, I can't shake the feeling that this game wasted my time quite a bit by having me go through dungeons at least twice, and bored me to death with its music and under-developed characters.

I may have time this week to detail my thoughts a bit further.

Now, all that's left is for me to decide whether I go from one timesink to another (aka Persona 5), or if I finish Assassin's Creed II first as a palette cleanser (I'm already about halfway through). Decisions, decisions...

Congrats! Can’t wait to hear your more detailed thoughts. I’m at the door to the final dungeon and will probably finish this week; I’ll post mine then, too.

If you start up Persona 5, I can promise you won’t be sorry ...

Made it to the final boss, and suffered a party wipe during the second form.

I knew it would be rough going from the jump. MC doesn’t have enough levels in the Hero class to re-learn Kazing, and I don’t think Aishe had enough damage-mitigation gear, because she kept suffering huge damage from the breath attacks throughout the dungeon. She died several times to the boss, and eventually I couldn’t sustain my health well enough to continue. I also made the mistake of giving Aishe, rather than MC, my powerful, shiny new sword. He’s already my strongest, and I thought it would help if she could hit harder, but she’s a Luminary and does Hustle Dance most turns, so the sword was wasted on her.

I’ve invested in some pricey armor from the Sea Dragon; hopefully that will help. I’m also planning to go through all four of the spirit paths to get the best gear for the MC, and then will give it another go. May also switch MC back to Champion.

As I was making my way through the final dungeon, I fully expected having to go through all four areas associated with the spirits before being able to get to the final boss. I was pleasantly surprised to see it was not the case. I did not know I could actually go through all four... How do you do that, exactly? Just go through one, Evac, come back and go through another one?

Yeah, or so I read in a FAQ. And apparently each area has a unique piece of equipment. You have to cast Evac before you go through the teleporter, it won’t work afterwords (I tried).

I went through two of them before deciding to just plow on toward the boss. The equipment wasn't make or break enough to offset the tedium. I had much more success rejiggering my team's vocations than fussing with equipment.

My winning strategy was to focus my main (as a Hero) and Maribel (as a Sage, not as a Luminary) on using Multiheal, Aishe (as an Armamentalist) buffing the party's offense and defense, and basically putting all the offensive duties on Ruff (as a Gladiator, using the top level attack). I also had to give everyone a case of magic water to keep MP up enough to power the whole thing, especially Ruff's attack.

(You can buy magic water indirectly in the town near Alltrades in the past. Go to the casino in the well, buy tokens, then buy magic water with those tokens. It works out to 4,000 G or something like that per magic water.)

I didn't even know about this fancy pants equipment :). I thought the final dungeon was kind of short, whoops!

I did not even know about the equipment either. As for vocations, I had MC and Ruff at Hero, Aishe as a Gladiator, and Maribel as a Sage, all at max level. The final boss was moderately challenging, and I was out of MP by the time I beat it. Having MC and Ruff both able to use Kazing and receiving 50 HP back at the end of every turn definitely helped.

Well, Dragon Quest finally said those three magic words: Orgodemir is defeated! Vocations were MC at Champion, Ruff at Pirate, Aishe at Luminary, and Mervyn at Sage.

Spoiler:

I almost lost during Orgodemir's final form, when he unleashd cold breath and his high-powered group fireball at once. Ruff and Aishe were killed outright, and Mervyn was left with 2 HP. Fortunately, he spent the next turn summoning his minions, which gave me enough time to recuperate.

Also, Tatron (my summon) was a big help! Over the course of the fight he managed to hit Orgodemir six times for about 500 damage each time. I was not expecting that. He also took damage for party members a few times.

Ruff, with his high speed, made liberal use of the Sage's Stone I found shortly before the final fight. He would also occasionally would use Oomph on my MC or use Multiheal for some more powerful, targeted healing.

Now I need to do the farewell tour, and then DQ VII will be officially done!

Had some time at the office today, so I figured I should spend it putting together my thoughts on Dragon Quest VII, now that it's been a week since I finished it.

Overall, I'd say I had a good time playing it, but that it has several flaws that are hard to ignore, and make this game somewhat hard to recommend.

The biggest problem I had with the game is how much it wasted my time (even in the upgraded 3DS remake). Having to go through each area twice or thrice? Check. Having to talk to each NPC twice? Check. I was fine with it at first, but eventually it became a pain the butt. Some of the towns are actually interesting (I liked El Ciclo, with its buildings very reminiscent of Gaudi), but then all the towns people are the same everywhere. I kept thinking, as I was playing it, that a little palette swapping here and there could have spiced things up slightly and made the whole thing feel less repetitive. Maybe that's something that makes it a good portable game: play it for a little while, go through a town, maybe a dungeon, advance the story a bit, and then put it down to go do something else. I played large chunks of this a few times, and eventually put my 3DS down because I had had enough of boring dungeons.

Seeing the monsters before they attack is nice, but there is very little room to evade them in dungeons (though it works well on the world map). Speaking of dungeons, they felt pretty bland to me. Lots of caverns. One volcano. One industrial. Some Egyptian-like temple. The usual. They don't really have anything to make them that interesting, outside of the occasional puzzle. I did like the rotating 3D dungeon, despite the fact that it was somewhat hard to navigate without an FAQ.

The music is another sticking point for me, for two reasons: There's not enough of it, and what is there is not that great. It's not something I would put on my phone to listen to while I work. Even after one week, I can't really recall any of it.

One small thing that I found somewhat annoying: they should have made the doors taller. Watching tall characters clip through them as they are existing rooms made the thing look somewhat amateurish...

Some good things to make this whole thing less negative (because we could all use some positivity these days):

  • The battle AI is good!
  • The battle AI makes the few thousand fights a lot more tolerable!
  • The hint system actually saved me a visit to GameFaqs at least once
  • Party chat is also super useful!
  • Monster design is great throughout! Also they look pretty good, and the animations are great
  • Character design was also pretty good!
  • Vocations are fun, and they don't take that much time to master
  • Small, self contained stories, with some of them linked to the greater Orgodemir/Almighty plot...
  • ... most of which were different enough to keep things fresh...
  • ... and not every one of them had a happy ending
Spoiler:

Speaking of the story, why is it that the Roamer's ritual actually awakened Orgodemir instead of the Almighty? It is entirely possible that I missed the explanation altogether, as I was rushing to get this done and move on to Persona 5.

Edit: Thanks to LastSurprise for pointing out that I should have spoilered that last section!

Despite all my complaints, I actually liked this game. As I said above, I would not recommend this to everybody but, even without the game club, I probably would have finished it.

Also: Congratulations, LastSurprise!

I'm actually still plugging away at this, but I'm not sure I will finish my the end of March. Any idea how far I am from the end if I have just done Nottagen?