Dragon Quest VII...this one seems to have the most split opinions. Fragments of a Forgotten Past. A lot of people easily windmill slam it as their favorite. And I can see why. You get the fun class system back from DQ6 with a little more polish. The story is truly epic, taking well over 100 hours to beat. If you like One Piece you'll love the tone here, it's very episodic. Your journey starts out on a small island in a peaceful world with no monsters. But it's just that one lonely island. But as you delve into some ancient ruins you're able to go back to the past. Not to play shitty games that suck ass, but instead you prevent what doomed the rest of the islands. Then when you get back...the present day is a much richer landscape.
Where VII shines is the dungeon design. It has a lot of cool puzzles that are well thought out and is willing to turn off random encounters to let you focus on them. They made excellent use of the PS1 hardware moving away from the old cartridge days. Multiplexus Maximus is such a cool experience, it's a dungeon where your perspective keeps flipping because it's these pearly 3D shapes where you're like...in D&D Manual of the Planes terminology dealing with subjective gravity. If you walk off the edge you're just walking on the side.
That said...I have some big gripes on this one. The length is fine, but the enemies felt phoned in and it's backbreaking. For a 100 hour game I shouldn't be seeing reskins so quickly. There doesn't feel like a lot of though behind how they fit into each region. Not that it matters because for a huge chunk of the game random encounters are just a trivial annoyance. I didn't even plan out my classes too much, but my hero and Ruff were just sweeping everything first turn. Then when there was a difficulty spike it felt as bad as Rhone in II without the buildup and mystique. I also hate them giving you such a small part with such a robust class system you can do so much with...only to yank a character away twice. Keifer was thankfully before you invest all that but Maribel? Bruh you took my Luminary, my precious Hustle Dance.
I like Dragon Quest for tight, polished gameplay. VII has a phenomenal story and I'm glad I crossed it off the list...but I know I'll likely never play it again. Because it's too long to be that sloppy in some core places. That said, I do very much admire the opening and bold choice to not have a single fight until a few hours in. It's all about puzzles until you go to the past the first time. I played this one right as COVID broke out. Was planning on it while I recovered from surgery.
I recently got a new gaming laptop, so i was able to try out minecraft java for the first time with 30fps (Previously it was 5fps...). I downloaded a couple good mods for building and decided to test out what i could make.
So here's the Shrine of Mysteries from DQ7:
This was a fun little test using:
Worldpainter, Worldedit, Xaero's World/Mini map, Litematica, and Controllify (For using an xbox controller to build).
Past the mountains is the rest of Estard Isle. I'm going to try to make the other locations on the island, and i'll decide from there wether this should become it's own project or not.
I think he'd probably be a Torracat in my PMD AU of DQ7's events, but he's obviously still a Litten now as he didn't evolve until he hit his teen years.
Edit: think I'll eventually make Terry a shiny Ralts (eventually evolves into Gallade)