7TH DRAGON III CODE: VFD is a hell of a title, one which will not be named throughout this review, and I will just call it 7th Dragon…not to be confused with the DS version of course.
7th Dragon is an RPG game on the 3Ds, and an RPG, focused around, if you couldn’t guess, the 7th dragon from a series of other dragons. In this game, they are space dragons who came to earth to fuck shit up, plant some flowers that are poison to humans, and then move onto a different planet. Gotta gives them credit, this is a very new story. It gets SORT of samey after this, you are players in a popular VR game and get picked from the top scorers in a competition to be entered into a secret organisation to fight real life dragons and save the world, which is a pretty steep learning curve.
So, apart from that, again back to older dungeon crawlers, you get to create all the characters, main character or others in your party from a present of character designs. You start off with a set amount unlocked for you, with quite a few currently locked until you meet certain criteria for some of the better-looking designs in my opinion.
You also get a set of 8 classes, with once again, 4 being locked behind a unlock wall for now. You get to start off with Samurai, God-Hand, Agent, Duellist. Each class feel different from each other, that even if you are not sure who to pick right at the start of the game, you will get an interesting gameplay.
Gameplay-wise, it’s very similar to dungeon crawling RPG’s, you do not actually SEE your characters, just who you are fighting, but you do get to see them when they deal damage which isn’t that bad. You take turns, fight foes, try and deal lots of damage, it is standard RPG affair that we’ve seen since the first RPG ever. However a great difference to other dungeon crawlers is the game isn’t limited to grid movement on the map/overworld, you get to move around freely, which isn’t much of an improvement but it does give you a better sense of freedom when moving around. You get your different classes, with some very interesting moves and abilities, Punch man, sword man, magic man and gunman is all pretty standard, however, there is a class that revolves around drawing cards, and depending on what you have currently got, restricts what spells you can cast, a lot of RNG but some nice interesting gameplay to be found.
There are a lot of different styles when fighting battles, god hand focuses around linking together combos, where you can’t use the final move in the combo until you have used the previous ones, samurai is, well pretty boring it’s just a samurai, and gunman is the same, but with some interesting skills to keep it interesting.
Graphically the game looks very nice, as much as can be expected for a game running on the 3DS, characters and environments look nice and well designed, foes are very lovingly created, with some of the bosses looking quite amazing for the 3Ds when considering the models of the game. The characters you play has had a very chibi stylised character running around which is a design choice I personally do not mind, but I showed this to a friend and it put him off, saying, “Why are all of their feet so pointy? something I couldn’t unsee for the rest of my play time for the female character models.
Really, graphically the game looks very similar to Persona Q, another dungeon crawler, which might seem a bit odd, but I’m just glad some solid dungeon crawlers are becoming so popular.
Overall, 7th dragon is not a game that is amazing unique to the point where everyone should be playing it, it’s a dungeon crawler with some different features not seen before, but at the same time, when playing it, I couldn’t shake the feeling of, it’s the same old game again, with a different story. The game is presented well, with some great gameplay ideas and story ideas, but I can’t help but feel the cliché side drags the game down a little too much to the level of, it is something we’ve all seen before. Maybe the market is different over in Japan, but this style of game seems to rapidly be going out of style in the west, considering its something we’ve been seeing since the late 80’s to deal with technology limitations, and now it seems to be either laziness or to speed up development time to remove certain features from the game. However this isn’t to say the game is bad, it was very enjoyable and the improved features that were added to this style of game made it play much smoother, and overall increased my enjoyment of the game. Overall the game gets 6/10, it is not a bad game, but at the same time it isn’t amazing, just an okay game, that is fun to play in short bursts.
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