7th Dragon III: Done and (nearly) dusted

This time it's for real, people. I am standing proudly on VFD's still sizzling remains, covered in sweat, blood and grime, in the middle of a battlefied littered with dragons' corpses. Oh, the thrill!

That cursed beast was not so hard to kill after all, and a bit of preparation went a long way into making it easier to slaughter. I buffed up all my units with special accessories, treated the cats at Meowdens to some Fancy Cat Food in order to fill up all Exhaust Gauges and then went back at it with a vengeance. I used all three teams to make the most of everybody's Exhaust Gauge, unleashing devastating EX Skills at the very beginning of each phase to get a good edge. I kept my usual Rune Knight/Agent/Fortuner team for the third and last phase, with the idea of taking advantage of the Hacking that can be generated by my Agent's EX Skill. Things when as planned, with VFD 3.0 being hacked right from the first turn. Hooray! It couldn't focus and attack after that, which allowed me to use Dragon Hatchlings on my Rune Knight and Agent and unleash a second wave of devastating EX Skills, combined with buffs obtained from Support Skills for good measure. Oh, the intensity! VFD 3.0 was hacked again and left with only a tiny portion of its HP bar, which I proceeded to empty with my most powerful regular attacks. The showdown was over after a couple of turns, without having required more Dragon Hatchlings or even a Unison attack. Now that's a neat and sleek boss fight if I ever fought one. Now that the dragon counter is empty at long last, let the credits roll!

Roll they did; and before I knew it, I was standing at the entrance of the postgame dungeon. Said postgame dungeon turned out to be quite disappointing, if I have to be totally honest. Not only is it a boss rush that implies fighting stronger versions of every single boss fought in the game, but its takes place in a dungeon that recycles bits and pieces of all the dungeons visited throughout the game. Oh, and it boasts dragons as regular trash mobs, obviously. Now, do I want to explore the same dungeons again in order to kill bosses I've already killed? Heck, no!! If I wanted to do this, I'd replay the game itself, thank you very much. Give me an exclusive dungeon with exclusive foes, Sega!

Oh, well. I can't say I'm crestfallen by this turn of events, because I've already had my fill of dragon-slaughtering and dungeon-crawling (or nearly so; but more on that in a bit). 7th Dragon III is an amazing game that I adored from beginning to end, and I'm immensely grateful to Sega for having localized it. With hindsight, I'm also glad that I own both the Japanese and North-American versions of the game, because it deserves all the support it can get. As a matter of fact, I'm planning to purchase the European edition as well as soon as it's released, to show the depth of my love for this game. And one extra purchase can certainly not hurt when it comes to supporting the series and paving the way for future western localizations of its entries, oh no precious.

All in all, 7th Dragon III is pretty much a perfect game in my book. Great aesthetics, great music, great gameplay, great atmosphere, great game overall. The flaws I mentioned in my very first post were somehow taken care of: the excessive easiness disappeared and the railroading, while remaining present and stringent throughout the game, was so brilliantly executed that it was hardly noticeable, let alone painful. The pacing was brisk while maintaining breather moments at the right time and I was always eager to move on to the next step in line no matter what, so all this railroading really didn't hurt at all nor tainted my whole gameplay experience. One teeny-tiny flaw I would like to mention actually revealed itself at the very end of my playthrough: there is not enough dungeon-crawling in 7th Dragon III! This is not really noticeable during the game because of the high encounter rate and the many dragons hovering around, but dungeons are actually quite tiny and there are not so many of them. Now that all is said and done, I'm left with an unsated crawling hunger despite the 35 hours of play I poured into that game. I'm pretty sure that this is due to my insatiable appetite for all things Roaming&Crawling, though; most gamers will probably deem the amount of dungeon-crawling present in 7th Dragon III perfectly decent.

Now that I polished off 7th Dragon III, discovering the series at long last in the process, I totally plan to play the original 7th Dragon as well as 7th Dragon 2020 and 2020-II. I own them all, which is a great starting point; and from what I've seen, they use the same templates as 7th Dragon III when it comes to interface and general gameplay, so I should be at home when playing them even if my Japanese is still lacking. The box of 7th Dragon is sitting on top of a console at home, taunting me and begging me to play it; I don't know when I will, but I'd wager that it will be quite soon. Thanks for reading, and be my guest anytime!