7th Dragon III: Perfect curves

 
I'm not referring to the characters' perfect body lines and postures there—although mind you, these terms could perfectly apply to them. They are getting more awesome by the sprite and I really wish I could have selected some of the latest models at the beginning of my playthrough. But I digress.

 

I'm here to talk about other curves, starting with the awesome difficulty curve, which is the most perfect one I've seen this side of Link's Awakening. I mentioned the easiness of 7th Dragon III in my last post in a slightly disparaging tone; but after 18 hours of play, I have no complaints anymore in that department. I went from a smooth place where I was able to take down dragons in two turns, was swimming in money à la Uncle Scrooge and basically owned the dungeons to a much rockier place where I have to grind for money to purchase equipment, face double dragon battles on a regular basis and have to play hard even in field battles if I don't want to end up in a bind. Oh, and cherry on the nastiness cake: the Dragonsbane flowers, which used to be pleasantly innocuous in the early stages of the game, are now hurting me—in a vicious nod to the original DS entry. And you know what? I absolutely adore this evolution. The most awesome thing is that I didn't even realise that the game was getting harder by the dungeon, because the difficulty curve is so smooth and flawless that there is virtually no difficulty spike. I just suddenly pondered things after disposing of a particularly tricky boss and thought: "Wait a minute, where is the easy game I was playing a couple of hours ago? What I'm playing now is a grind fest, and a hard one at that! Hooray!" I'm so totally lapping this up, and I hope the game has more challenges up its sleeve before the end. Which I'm sure it has.

 

Never a truer sentence was spoken.

Another curve 7th Dragon III draws just right is its learning curve, especially regarding party matters. I started with three party members, a limited amount of skills and battles that demanded no further implication from me than spamming the attack command every turn; 18 hours later, I'm managing nine party members wielding skills by the truckload and I have to carefully strategise each move in battle if I want to escape unscathed. And once again, getting from the former to the latter didn't hurt a bit thanks to the learning curve being so brilliantly executed. You would have thought that a serial solo runner like me would absolutely hate being stuck with so many units to manage, but I'm actually relishing it, to my utter surprise. The game did a great job in introducing new party members very slowly and letting me get properly used to them, while skillfully drawing my attention to all the benefits brought by these extra units rather than to the micromanagement hassle they could generate. As a matter of fact, they really don't generate that much micromanagement hassle, rather bringing a welcome variety to the gameplay. When I was getting bored of my first trio of dragon hunters, I switched to the second one and nearly felt like I was playing a different game. Right now, the game is requiring me to roam the dungeon du jour with one team at a time, which is a neat challenge. (Cherry on the convenience cake, I didn't even need to grind to level up my new recrues; while they are waiting to take the stage, they stay safely tucked away in the back row while XP is raining on them.) In a nutshell, the learning curve is so utterly perfect that it's nearly frightening. 

 

I'm now climbing these flawless curves with an eagerness that's only growing by the dungeon, and I hope they still have many delights in store for me before I'm done with eradicating the last dragon of the game. By the way, I didn't miss a single one of them so far! I'm now down to 139 and counting—the halfway mark is in sight, hooray! The current dungeon alone still hosts 37 of them, so I'll have scoured a good chunk of that pest when I finally make a triumphant return to the Nodens headquarters, all drenched in sweat, blood and grime. With that said, I'm getting back to it! See you soon for more dragon-slaughtering epics, dear fellow gamers; and as usual, thanks for reading, and be my guest anytime!