If your simulation itch needs scratching with something on a larger scale, there's also a subsystem where you can build your own city, populating it with NPCs you meet throughout the game. There are hundreds of monsters, from smiling slimes to massive dragons, and it's possible to tame certain of them and raise them in your own monster park. Your party can include more than just humans, meanwhile, via a monster-breeding system that takes advantage of the series' massive bestiary. As in Tactics, characters can retain skills from a previous occupation even after they move on to a new one, allowing you to develop a party with an exceptionally broad range of abilities. The hero, named whatever you choose to call him, begins the quest as a humble fisherman on Estard Island, but as the quest progresses (and he discovers the Daama Shrine) he can move through a variety of occupations: warrior, monk, magician, priest, dancer, thief, bard, seaman, shepherd, jester, and more. The core of character development is the job system - it's appeared in previous Dragon Warriors, but modern gamers might be more familiar with the roughly analogous system in Final Fantasy Tactics (or FFV, for that matter). That may sound a little strange to those who remember endlessly bashing slimes on their NES back in the day, but Dragon Warrior VII is built around a fascinating plot concept and all kinds of interlocking game systems. So what sets Dragon Warrior apart? Richness and depth of story and gameplay have historically been the series' strengths. Rotatable 3D backgrounds are the one concession to the current generation of graphics - the character sprites are thoroughly superdeformed, employing few frames of animation in comparison to many other RPGs, and combat is thoroughly two-dimensional. It's the American version of the record-shattering Dragon Quest VII (which has sold more than four million units in Japan to date), and today Enix confirmed that it's due to hit the PlayStation later this year.ĭragon Warrior VII employed a different developer than many of its antecedents (by the name of Heartbeat), and longtime series character designer Akira Toriyama produced very few original creations for the game, but Yuji Horii is still at the helm (he was responsible for game and scenario design in Chrono Trigger, as well as all the previous Dragon Warriors) and the style of the game, visually and otherwise, is still unmistakable. So, does the new breed of gamer, or even serious RPG fans of the current generation, remember the slimes, ghosts, and golems of Alefgard? Do they know the pain of a truly combat-intensive RPG? Can they handle more than 80 hours of adventure? We'll see soon enough, when Enix of America finally releases Dragon Warrior VII.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |