I am a huge fan of Yuzo Koshiro. And just seeing that he's involved will usually make me interested in any video game. I've had my eyes on the 7th Dragon series for a long time because of Yuzo Koshiro's work on it, but up until earlier this year, the only game in the series I had actually played was Code: VFD in 2016. But my desire for more of Yuzo Koshiro made me finally get back into this series and play the earlier games in the series, starting with 7th Dragon 2020.
I ended up liking 7th Dragon 2020 significantly more than I expected, and after I was done with it I almost immediately started its direct sequel 7th Dragon 2020-II. After playing both of these games I considered maybe replaying Code: VFD as it's the conclusion of the 2020 storyline, and I thought maybe its story will actually make sense now that I have the context of the 2020 games. But there was still one more 7th Dragon game I hadn't played: the first game in the series, which seemingly has nothing to do with 2020 and was completely different from the rest of the series.
I had never really heard anyone talk much about the original game since 2020, 2020-II and Code: VFD are the only 7th Dragon games most people seem to talk abnout. The first game seems more like a forgotten relic that people occasionally talk about as fun facts. Like "did you know 7th Dragon was not always about futuristic Tokyo, but it actually started out as a generic fantasy Etrian Odyssey clone?" It's something people certainly seem curious about but no one actually wants to play because it's so different from the other games in the series.
But after finally playing the game for myself, I think this game deserves much more recognition. Because not only do I think this is the best game in the 7th Dragon series: it might just be one of the best games I've ever played. So I want to tell you why I love the original 7th Dragon, and why you should play it so you can love it too.
The first impression
The original 7th Dragon gets often compared to Etrian Odyssey, and it's easy to understand why. Not only were both games directed by Kazuya Niinou with music by Yuzo Koshiro, but Etrian Odyssey was a clear influence on many aspects of 7th Dragon. The very first thing you see after you start the game is the town introduction screen, which is almost identical to Etrian Odyssey dungeon introduction screen, followed by the game asking you to make yourself a party of 4 characters out of 7 available classes. Soon after this you can head off to battle and are presented with a battle screen that's almost identical to Etrian Odyssey's.
If I'm being honest, that did not leave a good first impression. The 2020 games and VFD also share elements from Etrian Odyssey, but they have a very strong identity of their own, whereas the original game simply felt like Niinou just wanted to make another Etrian Odyssey game without Atlus' involvement. However after I got past the shock of the game's first impression and played the game for longer, I satarted notcing that while the game certainly looks like Etrian Odyssey, its gameplay is actually much closer to Dragon Quest.
The game starts with a short prologue that also acts as a tutorial for everything you will be doing for the rest of the game. For better or worse, 7th Dragon is not the kind of game that wastes your time with excessive dialogue and tutorials. Almost as soon as you start the game you are already free to leave the town and go explore the areas near the starting town, and clear your required objectives in whatever order you want. Even early on it gives you very little direction on what exactly you should be doing. Just explore the parts of the world available to you right now and clear every side quest you find.
After enough exploring in the prologue, you come face to face with a dragon, and that's where 7th Dragon really begins.
Not long after your first encounter with a dragon, the entire world gets overrun with dragons (666 of them to be exact) and the poisonous flowers they produce. The peaceful world of the prologue is gone, and you are left with a single task: travel the world and kill the 7 imperial dragons that are leading the attack against your planet.
The core of the game
After the prologue is over, the game starts to really open up. Though you need to take down the first two imperial dragons in a set order, after that you can take down the remaining five imperial dragons in whatever order you want, and this is where 7th Dragon really starts to shine. There is nothing stopping you from going almost anywhere you want in the world. And there is a lot of places you might want to go.
The world of 7th Dragon is huge. As you are travelling the world you will constantly find something new and exciting. Maybe you will find a dungeon, maybe you will find a town, maybe you will find some important item or maybe you will find a mysterious location whose purpose you don't uderstand yet. There is nothing forcing you to go after the imperial dragons specifically, you can just go explore wherever you want and maybe you will run into the imperials on your own. On top of the seven imperial dragons, there's also the aforementioned 666 regular dragons you can hunt, killing them is not necessary for clearing the game, but killing all 666 will unlock the game's final optional dungeon and biggest challenge.
There is much more to 7th Dragon than simply hunting dragons. Though the main quest is very light on story, the game has many optional character stories you can complete throughout the game. Some of these stories are presented as quests, but many others the game will not treat as any kind of big deal. Though not every NPC in the game has a name or a face, nearly every NPC as something to say. It may not be on the level of soething like Trails, but the game encourages you to always talk with every NPC you see because they can have a lot to say. Some NPCs will give you quests, some will give you helpful gameplay tips and some may just have a little story arc of their own. Nearly every NPC in the game has something new to say whenever you defeat an imperial dragon or accomplish some other major main quest objective, so it's always worth it to travel to previous towns and see what its inhabitants have to say.
And not only do all NPCs have something to say, the game has a ton of objects to interact with too. Whether it's just crates or drawers with simple items or money in them, or bookshelves with surprising amount of things to read about, the towns have so much detail put into them. It's worth interacting with everything you see in towns, because you often get something very unexpected from them.
One of my favorite moments in the game was when I cleared a completely optional dungeon and my reward for it was an item that lets you change the game's entire soundtrack to 8 bit arranges. It's a completely ordinary looking dungeon that I'm sure many players might ignore because it's optional, so receiving an item like that at the end of it was something I never could've imagined. Another stand out moment in the game was when I cleared a side quest and my reward for it was a pet cat (or a dog or a cow, you get to choose one) being added to my house. The pet doesn't have any effect on your gameplay, you just get a cute little pet hanging out in your house from now on and I think that's very lovely.
And while not all dungeons or quests give such impressive rewards, doing all the optional content you can is still very much worth the effort. If you simply decide to pursue the imperial dragons and ignore all the optional content, you will miss out on so much of what makes this game special. It almost feels like the game is more about exploring the world and learning the stories of NPCs than actually about killing the imperial dragons. Though that's not to say the imperial dragons aren't exciting too, because they certainly are exciting as well. Each imperial has something that makes them unique from everything else in the game, like Earthshaker: a dragon so big that the entire dungeon you fight him in is actually his body, and you need to take down his tail and legs before you can fight against his head.
As for the combat itself, it is a rather simple turn based battle system at the base level, but there's a lot of depth surrounding it. The overall difficulty of random encounters and dragons isn't too bad, but where the game's challenge comes from is managing your resources as you have limited inventory space, and there are very few opportunities to heal inside dungeons. There is also no option to retry if you die, and aside from a few longer dungeons with save points in the middle, death in 7th Dragon often sends you all the way to the last inn you visited, so you need to play very cautiously. Though despite the harsh punishment for failure, I wouldn't call 7th Dragon an overly difficult game once you get past the beginning and start to have more options during combat, and better ways to protect yourself and save resources.
Besides the resource management, the other core part of 7th Dragon's combat is the classes. You have 7 different classes to choose from to create a party of 4 characters. I played my game mainly with Mage, Healer, Samurai and Fighter (the remaining three classes: Rogue, Knight and Princess I only tried out a little bit), but from what I can tell each class is very good at what they're doing, and the game is designed so that you can make each party composition work. Some classes also have skills designed to be used in tandem with other classes. Such as how a fighter can do combo attacks with mage's spells or how a knight gets stronger if a princess in your party gets knocked out. It's a system that really encourages you to try out different combinations for classes. Each class also has unique EX skills and ultimate weapons that you may sometimes receive as rewards for side quests or dungeons.
So while 7th Dragon's combat can seem simple on the surface, there's a lot more to it than meets the eye. Between managing your resources and choosing a party that suits your playstyle the most, a lot of thought goes into surviving in the world of 7th Dragon.
And then there's the game's soundtrack. I wouldn't say it's one of Yuzo Koshiro's best works (I'd even say it's not the best 7th Dragon soundtrack) but there are some really good individual tracks here. Maybe my favorite song in the game is the theme of your starting town Kazan, which is simply the perfect song to start your adventure with. Other noteworthy songs from the game are the first battle theme: Swords Bursting, the title screen theme: The Tale Began, the imperial dragon battle theme: Seven Threats and one of the game's many dungeon themes: Jungle Navigation. All in all, it's a good soundtrack. Even if it's not one of Koshiro's best, every song in it is very pleasant to listen to during gameplay (though I really wish the game had more than one battle theme for the regular dragons, as their battle theme gets a bit tiring after fighting 666 of them)
The game even got a jazz style arrange album by Norihiko Hibino, who is best known for his work on various Konami franchises such as Metal Gear Solid and Zone of the Enders, as well as a similar jazz style arrange album that was made for Etrian Odyssey. The album only contains 13 songs, but they are all excellent arranges and I love Hibino's jazzy take on the soundtrack, with my favorite being the theme of Marlleaire Islands.
The negatives
As much as I would like to heap endless praise at the game and tell everyone to play it, 7th Dragon is sadly not a perfect game and I have to address its negative sides. This game is janky as hell, especially for a game released in 2009. This game has so many small little issues that may not sound bad on their own, but when there's so many of those small little issues, they start to pile up and become big issues.
One of the first things you will notice when starting the game is your movement speed. You walk across towns and dungeons really slowly, however before the prologue is over you will learn the ability to run, which is nice. However this reflects one big issue this game has: a lot of basic gameplay features are hidden unlockables you earn as rewards for side quests. On one hand you could argue it makes the side quests feel more rewarding, but the game gives you no indication for what rewards a quest might give. Some quests might give you nothing but money, some might give you stronger equipment and some might unlock completely new gameplay features. You have no way of knowing what quests are worth doing and what quests to prioritise until you've actually cleared the quest.
On top of that, some side quests are just very obtuse in general. Just like the game gives you no direction for how to clear the main quest, it also gives you no direction for how to clear the side quests. With some quests the game simply expects you to wander the world aimlessly hoping you'll eventually run into a quest's solution.
The game also has no bestiary which you could use to see which enemies drop which materials, and where those enemies spawn, so when a quest asks you for the loot of a specific monster, you just have to hope you remember where you've encountered them before (or look up enemy drops from an online guide, it's not worth it trying to remember them yourself). On top of that the game has limited inventory space, which I think is great balancing for difficulty since it ensures you can't stockpile endless healing items, but that same inventory space is also occupied by monster drops, and when you're specifically farming for items you will run out of inventory space very quickly. This would be forgivable if the game at least had a storage like in Etrian Odyssey, but for some baffling reason there is no storage and you just have to carry all your items in your very limited inventory.
But the part in the game's quest design I really can't forgive is that the game only allows you to accept three quests at once. The game has a lot of quests, and many of those quests have story to them. The game clearly wants you to do as many quests as possible. But before you can do any quests you have to accept them at the quest office, and you can only accept 3 quests at once.
This is an extremely frustrating limitation and feels counterintuitive to the way the whole game is designed. The game wants you to wander around the world aimlessly while talking to people. And many quests are designed so that if you just talk to everyone you see, you will clear the quest eventually. But you can't get quest specific dialogue from NPCs unless you have that quest active, and since you can only have three quests active at once, the chances of you running into the solution of the specific quests you have active are very low.
And what makes matters worse is that you want to do these quests. As I said before, the rewards you get for clearing quests are sometimes really important. And unless you look them up from an online guide you simply have no way of knowing what quests have those important rewards.
The quest system is so bad that it single handedly ruins a huge part of the game's exploration, which is its biggest appeal to me. If there is one thing I could change from 7th Dragon, it's this. Thankfully the following games fixed this system by allowing you to accept as many quests as you want, but the quests in those games simply aren't as interesting as the ones in the first game.
However while the quest system is my biggest issue with the game. it is not my only one. Another big issue is the game's difficulty balance. The game starts out very brutal, but once the world opens up, the difficulty kind of stagnates because you can go wherever you want and the game can't really balance the enemy levels properly because of that. The more optional content you do, the easier the game becomes because the game has to be balanced so that you can clear it even if you only go after the imperial dragons and ignore everything else. This is only really remedied by the game's final optional dungeon, which you can only access after killing all 666 dragons, so the devs could actually balance it with the expectation that the player is near max level.
And speaking of the dragons, you might think 666 dragons to kill sounds a bit much, and it absolutely is. The game may have a lot of optional dungeons, but there's not so many dungeons that you could place 666 dragons in them in interesting ways. And so many of the dragons feel like they're pure filler made to bloat the overall dragon count so they could have a cool number like 666 as the total dragon count. I still think most dungeons have a good balanced amount of dragons that have been placed inside the dungeons in interesting ways, but there's a couple dungeons with a total of over 50 dragons and they are a real chore to get through because of how many dragons you have to fight in them (though the dragons in those dungeons are also typically super weak and not much harder than a random encounter).
Closing thoughts
The more I think about 7th Dragon, the more I'm amazed that it's a game that actually exists. Every aspect of the game appeals to me so much it feels like it's a game that was made specifically for me. The game feels like a mix of Dragon Quest with its world design, Etrian Odyssey with its mechanics and aesthetics, SaGa with its player freedom and Trails with its large focus on NPCs and side quests. Before playing 7th Dragon I never knew i wanted this kind of game, but now that I've played 7th Dragon I desperately want another game like it. I really want more of this style.
Etrian Odyssey started out very janky as well, until it got sequels that refined its ideas to near perfection. Sadly 7th Dragon's sequels went into a completely different direction, and it never got the sequels that could take its initial concepts and refine them to perfection, there is no equivalent of Etrian Odyssey 3 for 7th Dragon. It is a game that has plenty of fantastic ideas but it couldn't quite execute those ideas as well as it should've, and we will likely never get a sequel that returns to these ideas to do them justice.
Despite the jank and other flaws 7th Dragon has, I have so much respect for this game and I really loved playing. It's a game that I never got tired of and would love to keep playing even more in the future. Maybe one day I will replay it with a different party set up and a lower level to keep it more challenging.
