Once you rebuild a particularly notable building your characters will be able to take up different jobs which affect their stats as well as the spells and abilities they'll learn, as in Final Fantasy V or Bravely Default. We really enjoyed our time with Dragon Quest VII's basic battle system, but if that description leaves you wanting more, worry not combat gets appreciably more complex later on thanks to the Vocation system. Speaking of Slimes, the enormously endearing enemies are another Dragon Quest touch, and from the cat-sorcerer Meowgicians and big-hearted jellyfish Heal Slimes to gangs of armored Deathcargot, the baddies on the other end of the battle screen never fail to raise a smile. There are a few quirks that make it uniquely Dragon Quest, too: you'll choose all your party's actions before the turn starts, rather than controlling them one at a time, spells and abilities are particularly powerful, and multiple enemies of the same type will often glom together in groups that act as a single target - so that if you aim for 'Slime x3', your character will randomly attack Slime A, B, or C. In a sense, this is the basic battle system that's been helping JRPG heroes on their way for the past 20 years, but it's stuck around for a reason it's simple and accessible. Your party has access to normal attacks, Spells (which drain MP), and Abilities (some of which drain MP), and you can adjust your formation - putting characters on the frontline for more damage or in the back for better defense - use items or defend, and choose to either issue orders to party members or control them directly. Once you do square off against an enemy, the turn-based combat is classic Dragon Quest: snappy, first-person, and fun. Of course, many of these locales you'll visit in your quest for tablets are also crawling with monsters, and rather than random encounters they're now visible on-field as in EarthBound and many modern RPGs, you can choose to engage or avoid them as you like. A beautiful sketch-style touchscreen map helps you find your way and now highlights fragments, a welcome addition which - along with a fragment detector which lets you know when one's nearby - enormously simplifies the fragment-finding process. Even better, and in a huge update from the PlayStation original, all of these are now fully 3D they're an absolute joy to explore, whether on foot, sailing in your trusty ship, or soaring overhead on a flying carpet. That gameplay loop fits perfectly into the Dragon Quest trappings, which include a beautiful overworld to traverse, towns to visit, and fields, caves, forests and towers to comb looking for monsters, treasures and fragments. More often than not, the newly risen island will hide a few fragments of its own, kicking off the hunt for the next tablet, and the next new land. After helping them out - by solving a dispute, dispatching a demon, or being there with the right item - you'll travel forward in time to modern Estard, and get to see the present-day version of that island pop up somewhere in the nearby sea. In terms of the gameplay, that story setup manifests itself in a loop that - at least in the early stages - looks almost like a cross between a dungeon crawler and a story-based JRPG: you'll find enough fragments to form a new tablet, be taken back in time to that new island, meet the local populace and learn about their culture, their land, and their problems - often taking the form of a powerful monster nearby. Rather than venturing off to save the world, then, in Dragon Quest VII you're heading out to restore it piece by piece, and the result is a wonderfully different form of RPG. With that taste of adventure, their destiny is sealed, and our heroes set off across the seas and through time and space to unearth tablet fragments, resurrect long-lost islands, and uncover the world-spanning archipelago around Estard - along with the mysteries behind its disappearance. Even stranger, once they manage to make it back home, they find the land they've returned from has surfaced as an island off of Estard's coast, but in a state several generations later than when they left it. That's been the prevailing wisdom for as long as anyone can remember, though our hero - along with his adventurous companions, the royal Prince Kiefer and the rambunctious Maribel - has his doubts, thanks to some mysterious shards that look like nothing else on Estard.Īfter picking up a few of these pieces and placing them together to form a tablet, the young friends are quickly whisked off the island and find themselves in an entirely new place. It's a tiny port on Estard Island, a small isle dotted with only a few hamlets and the eponymous castle town of Estard that's also - as far as its residents are concerned - the only landmass on the planet. At the opening fanfare of Dragon Quest VII: Fragments of the Forgotten Past, we meet our young unnamed hero in the sleepy fishing village of Pilchard Bay.
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