Welcome back to Save State where I finally went through some of my 3DS backlog. A while ago, I experienced an issue where one of my 3DS cartridges would no longer work and spent essentially a day fixing it and testing all of my other games. During this time, I wound up pulling a sealed copy of Seventh Dragon III: Code VFD off my shelf, which I had bought many years before but simply never got around to playing.
After popping it in to check if it still functioned, the colorful visuals and impressive art style immediately grabbed me, and I began playing Seventh Dragon III a little bit every day or two when I’d get a chance. What I got to experience is one of the more delightfully charming JRPGs on the 3DS, offering an interesting turn-based combat system with great character-building mechanics.
Seventh Dragon III: Code VFD is apparently the fourth Seventh Dragon title overall, and the first one localized into English and released in North America. I personally had never heard of the series before despite being into many niche JRPGs, even going so far as to play some with translation guides or patches back in the day- Soma Bringer, my beloved. Apparently, it was released without much marketing pomp and circumstance by SEGA, which is a bit of a shame considering that it’s a competently designed JRPG with a lot of positives.
The good news is that you don’t have to play any of the previous Seventh Dragon games in order to enjoy Code VFD. It does a great job of worldbuilding and explaining what’s at stake without needing to know a lot of lore surrounding the series. The story of Seventh Dragon takes place in a futuristic world where the most unbelievable thing about it is a corporation gathering resources to try and save the world rather than destroying it to make a quick buck.
Your starting party, whom you get to choose the portraits, names, and classes for, get noticed by the Nodens Corporation while playing their latest virtual reality game. With the skills you displayed during the intro dungeon, the president of Nodens brings you in for the incredible task of assembling the Dragon Chronicle to save humanity from the advent of the Seventh Dragon, an event that will surely result in the end of humanity. After weathering a single dragon attack, your characters hop right on board and quickly venture into different time periods to find the pieces of this Dragon Chronicle to prevent the world’s destruction.
The actual controls and moment to moment gameplay of Seventh Dragon III is precisely what you would expect if you’ve played any other traditional JRPGs, like a classic Final Fantasy (with no ATB meter). You go into town, which in this case is the building of the Nodens Corporation, and after buying your gear or items, you blaze your way through dungeons to continue the story. This type of gameplay loop is simple to understand, and there are no timing challenges or quick time events that you have to worry about as you play. What you need to succeed in Seventh Dragon is pure, unadulterated strategy.
As mentioned before, Seventh Dragon III: Code VFD allows you to completely customize your team of time traveling dragon slayers. While the story has both its interesting moments and overt cliches, the real attraction to this title is the dungeon crawling and combat, which you’ll have almost full control of due to how many options are available when building your team. As you grind up levels and earn skill points, new classes, and more, you’ll be able to build around powerful synergies, boss control, and damage to challenge even the godliest of dragons.
Initially, you’ll only be able to select from a very limited list of classes, like the martial artist God Hand, gun-toting Agent, or card-wielding Duelist who draws from a deck to utilize elemental power and slay your enemies. As you progress, you’ll unlock new, very powerful classes like Banishers, Rune Knights, or Fortuners who can offer you entirely new strategies. There are eight classes in total, and many can buff, debuff, or even force enemies to attack one another. There’s a great amount of variety here.
Combat in Seventh Dragon III: Code VFD is your traditional turn-based combat system… at first. It may take you a few moments to figure out how turns are ordered, but after that it will seem like a very standard 3 character turn based system. Later, you’ll get a support team of 3 additional characters, and a short while after that, you’ll have a whopping 9 characters whose skills you can use in different situations and for differing combos and synergies. Combat is somewhat traditional, but buddy skills, EX skills, and unison attacks really expand on the depth of this system as you progress through Seventh Dragon III: Code VFD, which is amazing.
The music of Seventh Dragon III is pretty fantastic and shares the same composer as the Genesis Streets of Rage series as well as Etrian Odyssey, just to name a few. The visuals of the game, however, are not up to the same bar as the music because while the art style is incredibly charming and well done, the graphics themselves aren’t anything to write home about, nor does it look much better than many other JRPGs on the 3DS. You’re definitely not going to be playing this to see any cutting-edge visuals.
Seventh Dragon III: Code VFD is one of those games where I had absolutely no complaints the entire way through, and the battle systems did just enough new that I found myself always interested in buying new gear, trying out new team compositions, assigning attribute points, and buying new skills. If you’ve ever wanted to play a title with Etrian Odyssey-style character building within a more traditional JRPG framework, then Seventh Dragon III may be for you.
That being said, it may be time to bring this entry of Save State to a close. Remember that if your wife’s cat ever spills coffee into your computer, you’re legally allowed to estimate the value of that cat based on their total amount of property damage divided by their weight.
So far Midnight weighs in at $83 a pound. See you in two weeks!