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Dragon Quest 7: Fragments of the Forgotten Past |OT| Roman numerals are hard

Completely unrelated to this thread, but now that I'm done with FFIV (meh), I'm finally able to jump to Dragon Quest IV! Only IV, V and VI to go before I can play VII :)

You will burn out. Play one of em, another game in between, another one, and so on. It doesn't have to be in order either.
 
So I'm in the desert town in the past and
hadid just left to find the serpent God. A villager told me to go somewhere that only the heroes can go?
No clue what I'm supposed to do...

You may be at the point where you have to
go back to the dig site in the present and take a look at the skull there, and convince the scholar to go with you.

Am I misunderstanding what the monster meadows is for? A couple monsters after I fight them come back and want to be looked after. I tell them about monster meadows and they run off there. But when I go and check on them there; none are around. Just the same first slime-guy and that girl are there.

I go underground and head off to the actual meadows and just no monsters anywhere. What am I exactly supposed to be doing with this or is this just a late game thing that only opens up then?

Yeah, it's a super late game thing that from what I understand they just open up to you early so you can send monsters there for later when it actually unlocks. I didn't play the PS1 version but I get the impression it was awful there, this whole major mechanic that you can't even get started on until almost endgame.
 
So I finished the game. Clocked in at around 95 hours. A thoroughly enjoyable experience. I loved the mini stories of each island and I found the overall experience really charming. Save the for the All-Trades Abbey section, the game was not particularly challenging, but I still had fun. I probably won't be doing the Bonus dungeon anytime soon though because fuck those Mini Tokens.

Queen Euphonia is the true Waifu.
 

kenta

Has no PEINS
Pretty wild to see the varying completion times you guys are posting. Some as low as 60ish and some as high as 90ish and beyond. I have zero interest in the Haven and Monster Meadows stuff because of how confusing and poorly communicated it all is, but I did a fair bit of grinding so I expect my time to be around 80. I will admit it's kinda wearing out its welcome at this point though (
currently collecting great spirits -- why did they dump me at Alltrades if I was supposed to go back to the shrine? Ugh
) so I'm feeling kind of anxious to push through this last section and move on to another game. Still enjoying it on the whole though
 

BGBW

Maturity, bitches.
Yeah, it's a super late game thing that from what I understand they just open up to you early so you can send monsters there for later when it actually unlocks. I didn't play the PS1 version but I get the impression it was awful there, this whole major mechanic that you can't even get started on until almost endgame.

Yeah, I finally got to it about 56 hours in (though I'm a slow player who likes to talk to everyone). Considering this is tied to streetpass, I don't see myself getting many hits for DQVII.
 

Biske

Member
Okay, is it just me or is reading accents super fucking grating?

So far it honestly hasn't been anything TOO over the top, but even the bits they've thrown in, while novel at first just become a chore to read after a while. A lot of times I play in bed and have a less than 100% focus, so a lot of lines I read and think "what the fuck did I just read" and more and more instead of re-reading it. I just glaze over it.
 
So i've done everything (late game)
in the sea-town that turns into a Casino past and present. Got all the Mystery Fragments I can find...
buuut I have absolutely no idea what to do with them and the Imp in the Shrine just tells me about a certain someone in a certain musical kingdom >_>
 

john tv

Member
Okay, is it just me or is reading accents super fucking grating?

So far it honestly hasn't been anything TOO over the top, but even the bits they've thrown in, while novel at first just become a chore to read after a while. A lot of times I play in bed and have a less than 100% focus, so a lot of lines I read and think "what the fuck did I just read" and more and more instead of re-reading it. I just glaze over it.
Really wish they'd tone down the accents. The writing is brilliant without them - that stuff just gets in the way and makes the games harder/less fun to read.
 
Really wish they'd tone down the accents. The writing is brilliant without them - that stuff just gets in the way and makes the games harder/less fun to read.

Yeah, I mean...I remember when none of the games had weird accents, and they were fine. They were charming.

Some entries might have more justification for it, like DQ3 which is actually based on real world locations. The rest, though, it's just a fantasy game. It's fine for most people worldwide to have the same dialect. If the idea is to be realistic by having different languages worldwide, well...it'd be more realistic not to have literally everyone speaking broken english as a lingua franca, both in the present and hundreds of years in the past. Whether child or adult. With no cultural evidence of any reason that anyone should be speaking english instead of their native language.
 

Arkeband

Banned
The accents are fine, but it loses its charm when you know without fail every single game will have a Scottish town, a French town, a Russian town, a German town - it becomes a crutch for the writers.

Finally beat the game, that last boss was a nail biter. Clocked in at 101 hours, although I'm sure some of that was me leaving my 3DS open and sitting around.
 
Okay, is it just me or is reading accents super fucking grating?

So far it honestly hasn't been anything TOO over the top, but even the bits they've thrown in, while novel at first just become a chore to read after a while. A lot of times I play in bed and have a less than 100% focus, so a lot of lines I read and think "what the fuck did I just read" and more and more instead of re-reading it. I just glaze over it.

It's not just you. I fucking hate it. Greenthumb becomes a farce because it's over the top southern accent.

The worse offenders are the non-English accents. La Barouve or whatever it's called is a nightmare. El Ciclo is pretty bad too. The other places aren't bad
 

magnetic

Member
Kinda surprised at how slow and sluggish the US version is compared to the JP one. Everything involving menus is like 10-15% slower, and when there's a lot of animation on-screen (like during the fight with the four bandits near Alltrades), you can sometimes see the fps dip to like 15...and this is on a New 3DS. Sounds like DQ Builders is having the same prob now too - dunno what's up there but whoever is programming these needs to get their shit together...

It made me completely stop playing the game after 30 hours. I mean, I was already starting to get burned out by it, but I never got used to the UI lag.
Starting up any of the DS remakes directly afterwards makes it painfully obvious.

This stuff wouldn't surprise me with a shitty mobile port, but with fixed hardware like the 3DS and apparently simple text based menus this simply shouldn't happen.

It really makes me appreciate the effort that went into modern user interfaces almost always running at high framerates - once navigating isn't smooth, you know something is off.

And DQ Builders is one of the few games I've been looking forward to this year - I hope they can resolve this.
 
Okay, is it just me or is reading accents super fucking grating?

So far it honestly hasn't been anything TOO over the top, but even the bits they've thrown in, while novel at first just become a chore to read after a while. A lot of times I play in bed and have a less than 100% focus, so a lot of lines I read and think "what the fuck did I just read" and more and more instead of re-reading it. I just glaze over it.
I don't mind the accents so much as I mind the localizer's need to translate every foreign phrase RIGHT AFTER saying it. It's so stupid. If the NPCs knew how to say it in English, then don't speak in the foreign language too... Previous DQ localizations didn't do this.
 
Yup that was it. Thank you!

Wish some of the "hints" weren't so cryptic.

That whole section (including events afterward) made no logical sense to me and was kind of awful.

Given that you essentially use the skull to trick a dying man into thinking there is no hope left during his last breath for shits and grins.

I mean even if the plesiosaur guy was really dead at the time, the party didn't know that, they just took his skull into the past. For all we knew there would just be a weird existential situation of being able to see your own remains. There was no reason to wave it around like proof that he was dead.

And then we are told to throw it in the river for absolutely no reason. How hard would it have been to give him some kind of phoenix mythos, that when you return his remains to whence he came he would revive? Nope, we just toss it in there to kind of be an asshole and deprive the modern world of a relic to study. Things work out, but there was no prior indication that they would.
 
Between this game and ace attorney 6, I've realized I no longer like gaming.

I'm living this game, minor complaints abut version changes and localization aside. Friday abs Saturday I spent like 10 hours on it.

I haven't been that way for a bit. This is basically 16 year old game, one I've played before.

I'm not impressed in the direction gaming had gone. My tastes are no longer bring catered to, which is fine. But I think it's time for me to realize that I'm no longer their target demo
 

kenta

Has no PEINS
I do think the accents can get a little over the top and hard to read, but I also respect how well they actually convey the accent itself -- it'd be really impressive if it weren't such a distraction :p

I wonder if the accents would be easier to accept if there were more than, like, 6 character models for villagers and more than 2 or 3 kinds of architecture. If the person you were talking to actually looked Irish or Spanish or redneck
 
I do think the accents can get a little over the top and hard to read, but I also respect how well they actually convey the accent itself -- it'd be really impressive if it weren't such a distraction :p

I wonder if the accents would be easier to accept if there were more than, like, 6 character models for villagers and more than 2 or 3 kinds of architecture. If the person you were talking to actually looked Irish or Spanish or redneck
7
That would mean that the devopers intndef for those places to be modeled after those cultures and not injected by the localization teams for "reasons"
 

Oregano

Member
Post-Buccanham spoilers:

The hero is totally descended from Sharkeye isn't he? He's got that mark on his arm which allowed you to enter the underwater palace place and the Buccanham scholar said that the Prism Dew was on an uninhabited island, in a place full of water.

Plus I already know where the Sea Dragon is, woop woop!
 
Post-Buccanham spoilers:

The hero is totally descended from Sharkeye isn't he? He's got that mark on his arm which allowed you to enter the underwater palace place and the Buccanham scholar said that the Prism Dew was on an uninhabited island, in a place full of water.

Plus I already know where the Sea Dragon is, woop woop!

the game implies that Sharkey is his dad. The sea king removed him from his real mothers womb and transfered him through tone to molly or what ever get name is now in the present
 

MoonFrog

Member
So i've done everything (late game)
in the sea-town that turns into a Casino past and present. Got all the Mystery Fragments I can find...
buuut I have absolutely no idea what to do with them and the Imp in the Shrine just tells me about a certain someone in a certain musical kingdom >_>

You done
the torban festival in Hubble?
 

Oregano

Member
the game implies that Sharkey is his dad. The sea king removed him from his real mothers womb and transfered him through tone to molly or what ever get name is now in the present

Oh that's more interesting than I expected.

Damping ruff and Mervyn have mastered vocations but I'm in the past...
 

NolbertoS

Member
I'm at the 55 hour mark and About 2/3 of the way through the game. You know after finishing this game eons ago, I forgot some vignettes stories so it felt like a new game in other areas. Taking my sweet time travelling the world, building the Haven and mastering ALL human classes for my characters. I'll switch to monster classes later as I heard intermediate and advanced classes don't retain spells, which sucks. I now too realize that as a gamer I'm getting old inf finding time to play :(. With a mortgage, family, work, etc, hard to find more free time. I think after DQVIII gets released will take a break from JRPGs and play sports games online and recreational again.
 

Megatron

Member
In the matching game, do you not actually win anything unless you clear the board? I thought you would get whatever item you matched?
 
I am glad I saw that list of known bugs, because
looking at the "Fixes" section made me realize I didn't cross the bridge in Aeolus Vale to see the cutscene that can cause the bug to occur later.

I already did some game progression (still haven't gotten Meribel back), but if I do somehow end up causing the party to become permanently ruined I can just reload a save and come back without Meribel, right?
 

ghibli99

Member
For some reason, I can't play this game for more than 30-ish minutes at a time before it puts me to sleep. I say that as a semi-good thing since the game's world is so whimsical. It just relaxes me, I suppose. I still haven't made it to Alltrades. :)

I was so pleasantly surprised when I saw the custom Automaton death animation when I did a critical hit on it. I love stuff like that!
 
Well, I have mastered all the human classes and 19 monster classes. Need to collect the last three base class monster hearts to fill in the remaining 15 spots. I guess I have no choice but to continue the story now.
 

john tv

Member
Sorry if this was already posted but is there a place where you can gain vocation levels regardless of your normal level like there was in DQ6?
 

MoonFrog

Member
After an event, I believe region locks are removed.
Yeah
as soon as you get enemies on present world map, I think it's all capped at 99. By the end of that sequence, enemies on say Estard should be total jokes but still level jobs. Maybe this starts even before that, but definitely starts then?

Also seems to me tablets remain grindable after their monsters are too weak on main map. They have caps still, just it seems higher caps. Could be wrong about that.
 
Also seems to me tablets remain grindable after their monsters are too weak on main map. They have caps still, just it seems higher caps. Could be wrong about that.
This is true. Tablet caps are higher but still exist. The basic slime one is level 20 cap from what I could observe.
 

Eusis

Member
Really wish they'd tone down the accents. The writing is brilliant without them - that stuff just gets in the way and makes the games harder/less fun to read.
It's why I hated the DQ1 mobile release sticking to the olde english so adamantly, while you could just sort of skim and figure things out anyway it was a stupid obstacle for a game that should've been reasonably breezy to play.

And really, given the intended appeal of the games they should be kept lighter, a bit of flavoring but not something that makes the game a nuisance to read. I guess the issue is that you CAN largely get that across vocally as DQVIII did, but they were kind of stuck on how to preserve that in later translations that WEREN'T voice acted at all. VI was great though!
 

Jacobbles

Member
What's up with people complaining about performance and laggy menus? I've just beat the final boss (98 hours!) and haven't experienced slowdown of any kind... I'm playing digitally on a New 3DS.

What configurations are people that are experiencing lag playing with? Really curious about this.
 

Aeana

Member
What's up with people complaining about performance and laggy menus? I've just beat the final boss (98 hours!) and haven't experienced slowdown of any kind... I'm playing digitally on a New 3DS.

What configurations are people that are experiencing lag playing with? Really curious about this.

You've definitely experienced slowdown, unless you have CFW on your New 3DS set to automatically use the faster CPU mode. Cursor selection and menu page rendering are slower than they are in the Japanese version, otherwise.
 

Arkeband

Banned
Oh. Uh. Maybe that's it.

I bought a retail copy of the game, though! I only pirated it so I could play it a week before release!

Why do so many people have hacked firmware? I never even knew this was a thing, I'm way past an update where it's even still possible, and losing the eShop would really suck.

As an aside, I just did a post game event that let me re fight the last boss, is there any benefit to continuing with the super long sequence of events that follow this or should I just reload my game?
 

epmode

Member
Why do so many people have hacked firmware? I never even knew this was a thing, I'm way past an update where it's even still possible, and losing the eShop would really suck.

I'm on the latest hacked firmware and I can still buy and download from the E-Shop.

I occasionally drop down to the regular speed just to see how this plays and the menus make me sad. It's certainly playable but it's the constant slowdown is disappointing. I assume the Japanese release was fine?

edit:
Cursor selection and menu page rendering are slower than they are in the Japanese version, otherwise.

I guess so!
 
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