Dragon Quest VII: Warriors of Eden Preview

Dragon Quest VII is the first game in the Dragon Quest series (Dragon Warrior in the US) to appear on the Sony PlayStation console. While SquareSoft has already released two Final Fantasy titles, with another one coming, Enix and Heartbeat seem to be taking a lot more time developing their big RPG title. DQVII features a 3D polygonal field map similar to the ones in Grandia and Xenogears. The game world, which is fully 3D, looks great and moves smoothly. You can rotate the camera freely with the L1 and R1 buttons, or you can rotate it in 1/8 increments by pressing the L2 or R2 buttons. In addition, by pressing the square button, you can zoom far out to get a better view of the area you're in. Your character can't move around in this viewpoint, but you can still rotate the camera to look around.

Your main character is a young boy (unnamed, to be named by the player), a son of a fisherman, who lives in a small fishing town. He dreams of one day becoming a great fisherman like his father. Throughout the course of the game, he'll meet with characters like Maribel, whom he has grown up with. A bit selfish, she comes from a powerful, influential family in the small fishing town. Keifer Gran, another character the boy will meet, is the prince of the Gran Estad Kingdom. He is not conscious of his status/responsibility as the heir apparent and he always sneaks out of the castle to have fun. He is like a brother to the main character. The story starts out in a small fishing town in a small peaceful island. Because it is so peaceful, villagers don't believe that islands and monsters exist outside of their town. To satisfy his own imagination, the main character goes on an adventure that will change his view of the world forever...

You will travel through different areas of the world. As the game progresses, you must find the pieces of the "mysterious tablet" that are located in different areas of the world. When you find all the pieces and put them together, you will be able to venture to a new continent.

You can change your occupation by visiting the Daama Shrine, which is located somewhere in the world. The main character is known as the son of a fisherman, but he can change occupations, and acquire special abilities and spells. Occupations include: warrior, monk, magician, priest, dancer, thief, bard, seaman (no, not that fish from Sega), shepherd, and jester. You also have different skill levels for each occupation, ranging from rookie to veteran to master. You will learn more special skills and spells as you progress through the levels. You can switch from one occupation to another without losing your previous skills and occupation level. By becoming a master of two occupations, you can change to a higher level of occupation. For example, if you are a master warrior or magician, you can become a magical warrior; if you are a warrior and monk, you can become a battle master, and so on. You can acquire a special skill based on your present and past occupation as well. For example, if you are now a warrior but were previously a thief, you can acquire a skill called steal-slash, which you can use to attack an enemy and steal an item from him at the same time. Other special skills include dancing blade (warrior/dancer), sheep dance (shepherd/dancer), peaceful song (priest/bard), and many more.

Surprisingly, you can also change into a monster. To do so, you must obtain the heart of a monster after defeating it in battle. You will gain its special abilities and spells, as well as attributes, such as your character being weak against fire, or strong against ice. Additionally, you can turn into other monsters like slime, zombies, or a chimera. There will be other monsters you can change into, including higher level monsters of undisclosed origin.

The battle scenes still keep the traditional front view, with improved monster graphics, background, and animation. The game will also feature plenty of CG movie sequences. Although not confirmed how many there are at this point, there will definitely be a CG movie sequence at the beginning of the game.

Dragon Quest VII spans two CD-ROMs. It is scheduled for a release early next year in Japan.