So interesting story about this one. I had actually started with 7th Dragon VFD, the release that came out for 3DS first, and very much enjoyed the game, but was interested in a few of the characters and was curious to see where they had come from and so on a whim I went back to the very beginning of the series.

It's not directly connected to VFD as they are separate timelines (or worlds, maybe, it's never really clear) but all the same there are a great number of callbacks from this game in VFD which I was able to appreciate immensely, including several characters that have reprising roles in the future games.

Overall the game is fairly basic and nothing to really write home about, but it does handle its mechanics fairly well. There is one point which requires you to have a team of entirely female characters that you would have no foreknowledge about, and it's in a fairly advanced part of the game, and so having to create/recruit a team of newbies to raise up to be strong enough to get there safely was a bit of a drag, but overall there are very few hiccups along the way.

Fights aren't especially threatening although a few boss fights are interesting in how they present themselves. There is also a fair amount of things that you need to do in order to safely deal with said bosses, and if you don't, you just get a much harder version of the boss, which is an interesting way to go about it and allow for players to customize their difficulty as they go.

There is one series of boss fights which are very frustrating as the boss itself is just there to impede progress so it has high defense which it brings higher with buffs and makes for an ultimately un-fun set of fights, but as you learn the easier ways to clear it, each successive version of that fight becomes easier.

But with a wide array of character classes, and with some even working in tandem (there is a Knight and a Princess class which have overlapping abilities, for example) there's a lot of potential builds for the game, and through that, a fair amount of replay value.

All-in-all, while the game doesn't do anything stand-out or majorly unique, the charm of the title along with the references to VFD in particular made it feel nostalgic despite having never played this before.

Every encounter in 7th Dragon is like the proverbial block in the sorting bucket: they all fit in the square hole of charged non-elemental damage spells. Etrian's mechanics simply don't work if the encounters aren't threatening and the resource management, already trivialized here by non-respawning enemies and short dungeons, can be completely circumvented by the medic's ability to infinitely restore mana. I've heard it suggested that this game wasn't localized because of its difficulty, but I'd like to believe publishers simply recognized it'd have no appeal to an audience not already inoculated by Dragon Quest III.