DQVIIr - So continuing all the crazy hard stuff from the Alltrades island arc, the colesium then is a six boss fight in a row match which takes a good 10-15 mins to get to #6 and then the sixth boss can basically 1 turn wipe party members with some bad luck. Especially because these bosses like to hit hard AND have first turn to act. So they knock out 50% of your HP in one turn and the next turn before you can heal it they knock out the other 50%.
I barely survived, this is the first DQ I'm using up all my revive leaf items. Usually I never touch those and just hoard them. They've gotten me through a few bosses where someone died.
The final boss for that arc was easier, but still had an orb attack that hits 2 random party members for 90 damage. Which is a lot when your party members max HP is like 110-130HP and you can only heal one character for 75HP and one for 30HP in a round with 2 characters.
Also only having 3 party members is rough on top of everything this arc. Sure you get a 4th slot NPC often, but they aren't controllable and who knows what they'll do so you gotta dig in and play defense.
So finished it up and got JOBS and started re-learning how DQ Job systems work since it's been a while. I forgot that basic jobs are "fuck your stats in exchange for giving you permenant cross-job skills/spells" so everyone has shitty stats now and like barely 100HP. But cross-job classing is nice and quickly getting some useful stuff for party building. Again, having a 3 person party definitely makes it tougher.
One thing I would have liked is if DQVII had monster recruiting like DQV for party member spots. Yeah I know you can get their hearts through tedious ways mostly and learn them as a job, but that means wasting a lot of time fighting 100-200 battles to get some stuff you could have spent those battles on your main jobs. I got the heal slime heart that has multiheal at 180 battles but I don't know when I want to sacrifice losing 180 battles going towards my main job growth just to get that spell. Monster party members you can just recruit and swap in to fill out the party at times would've helped.
Then again when I get the rest of the party members it'll be fine.
I gotta say, the writing in DQVII is excellent. This is one of the best written jrpgs so far and I can see why people love this game and I gotta imagine it'd be pretty mindblowing back in 2001 along with stuff like Xenogears/FF7-9. The stories don't have insane amount of cutscenes or anything but they're very fleshed out for the tales and settings they are doing and tend to have a whole handful of npc characters whose stories progress through the island tale.
Like in Alltrades island arc you have your main story of your group, but also the story of this girl and her little brother and the swashbuckling priestess guard, the story of the town gang that run the depowered town, the story of the theif who wants to become a priestess guard, and it all weaves through the tale of reclaiming your powers and taking back the temple. During the course you end up pairing with the theif, the swashbuckler, the kid and priestess as battle 4th npc members. It's really involved.
Also the party talk is INSANE in this game. Holy hell we're talking Trails of level of dialogue. I can't believe there are 1-2 sentence party reactions after like every NPC you talk to. I'm sure I'm missing half of them, but what is there is great and fleshes things out.
And I started the next bit in the present and got the carpet and I totally forgot DQ series has flying magic carpets. That's pretty charming.
I gotta say that at this point about 24 hours in, I'd put DQ7 over DQ11. In story I think these story arcs are better than the DQ11 towns and in gameplay DQ11 was zzz easy outside the final superbosses and here the game is actually legit challenging this early on and the job system gives a lot of build variety that DQ11 lacks. DQ7 also has more and better music.
This might end up being one of my favorite DQs, I just hope it doesn't get too grindy later on to progress through the story, especially with all the battles needed to master jobs. I haven't had to grind yet and I'm a little underleveled for the areas (I just hit lvl.18 and Alltrades final dungeon lvl cap was lvl.20). The leveling is incredibly slow because of the length of the game. So much that fighting normal battles and getting xp/gold feels really incremental since you can fight battles for an hour or so before you gain 1 level and only get enough gold for like 1 weapon or 1 piece of armor from those 50 battles you just fought.
But it's a long game and the slow progression works and the way the stories are chaptered and talking/story focused makes it all good.