Initially, it feels like the random encounter rate is a bit high but thankfully, you unlock an item that lets you lower that rate early on in the story. Another thing that should be familiar to Etrian veterans is how you should avoid taking too long in battles when there’s a Dragon (or FOE in the case of Etrian) nearby because they may ambush said battle. There’s a gauge on the top left that indicates how close you are to a random encounter. This boosts your stats for a limited time.ĭungeons are lush and full of colour (and dragons and random battles). The Exhaust mechanic is like a limit break that fills up as you take damage and deal it out. There are also party skills that have the inactive teams helping out with various things like breaking enemy defence. Just like in Shin Megami Tensei games, instead of doing an even distribution, I’d recommend focusing on what works for you. Skills are earned by using SP gained from battles. The Duelist reminds me of Ace from Final Fantasy Type 0 with the card draw based attacks. Speaking of teams and parties, you have 3 members in your active party unlock the ability to add more sets of teams later on. A team with two God Hands can unleash massive damage combos. The God Hand can stack attacks that cause God condition on enemies and do more damage. The Agent can hack into enemies and make them attack each other, doing so with a range of great battle animations. Throw away your previous ideas of melee and healing because we have some unique classes here. I absolutely love how interesting these classes are. You unlock the remaining four in pairs of two with story progression. You start off with four playable classes: Samurai, Agent, Duelist, and God Hand. I can see why they didn’t bother doing an English voice over here as well which is something to consider before jumping in. There’s tons of portraits for both male and female party members and plenty of voice actor options for the few lines of voiced dialogue and battle dialogue - more than I could be bothered to preview before setting up my party. The customization options here are the real stars. The main hub lets you construct and upgrade various things, which in turn help you buy more items. The difference is that you’re encouraged to stock up, prepare, and take out these dragons in each areas so you can build your base. Here, there are dragons that are indicated by purple icons on the map. Dungeon crawling visually is similar to your traditional chibi style 3DS JRPGs while the combat and the layouts of enemies reminds me of Etrian in a lot of ways. Having played a few Etrian games as well as Bravely Default, I found a lot to like here. The story is never in your face but there’s more than your average Etrian Untold game and it keeps things interesting enough as you power through floors of dungeons. There’s time travel, hacking, rabbits who keep insulting you, cat ears, and more in 7th Dragon III Code: VFD. A video game corporation called Nodens Enterprise teams up with you and a party to save everyone (this is a JRPG after all). The premise here is dragons descend onto Earth and things are about to get very bad for humanity. Having not played the previous games on DS and PSP, I wasn’t lost at all in Code: VFD - there are some historical references but nothing felt major. I’m glad SEGA took a chance on this release because it breathes some new life into the dungeon crawling genre with interesting changes, making it feel like the best of various franchises rolled up into one great package. 7th Dragon III Code: VFD is something I never thought I’d get to play in English, yet here we are. But for those people, it’s a good enough RPG respite in the sense that it actually allows you to play a role in the way you see fit.Being a fan of Japanese games involves various stages of excitement and disappointment as you see multitudes of games announced that may never make it outside Japan. If you want a rich, engrossing story with unique characters that grow over time, turn around and walk away now, as this is very much a niche dungeon crawler that will only speak to specific members of the community. An instant warp system (triggered by the R button) is also convenient, because that’s what 7th Dragon does best - it streamlines all the fluff, sometimes at the cost of a more captivating world.Īgain, 7th Dragon III Code: VFD isn’t a game you want to get into if you aren’t the type of person who puts a lot of time into party preparations. It’s a small, confined, and sometimes vanilla area, but you can basically alter it to your whim, adding optional modules with “Dk” points, acquired on quests. That hardcore element of number crunching also expands to the hub system.
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