Dragon Quest VII: Fragments of the Forgotten Past

Fragments of the Forgotten Past is a great – if not the best – entry in the Dragon Quest series, offering a multitude of complex, touching, and tragic short stories. It certainly can be accused of overstaying its welcome, and its gameplay is also too easy for its own good, but Dragon Quest VII still manages to shine by the force of its narrative alone.

The protagonist – who you can name as always – is a sixteen-year-old boy who lives in a small peaceful village in a small peaceful island. His best friend is prince Kiefer, a hot-headed and impulsive boy who wants to discover what else lies beyond their island, across the ocean. Although they are taught that their island is the only body of inhabited land in the whole wide world, they refuse to believe they’re alone in it. The local priest, for example, tells about the time he also questioned their isolated existence and tried to venture into the ocean: he rowed, rowed, and rowed his boat but found nothing but water stretching as far as his eye could see. Their hope, then, lies in an unexplored shrine in the outskirts of the island: Kiefer hopes that if they could just crack its puzzles and discover its secrets the truth about their world would finally come out.

Fragments of the Forgotten Past has a very clearly marked episodic structure: the player collects fragments of stones tablets around the world to put them on a pillar inside the aforementioned mystical shrine, which creates a portal to the past: there, they’ll find a new island and, after saving it from whatever danger, will return to the present time and find that said island has suddenly appeared on the map. After exploring it again to find new stone fragments, the party will return to the shrine, open up another portal and visit another island, and so forth.

The game is massive, clocking in about 80 hours and offering almost twenty islands to explore, all of them with unique characters and storylines. The meat of the game, then, is the islands in the past: their stories are the heart of Fragments of the Forgotten Past, varying in tone and complexity.

The first island you visit, for example, holds a harrowing tale: all the women and children have been kidnapped by monsters, which are demanding that the men tear down every building in the village if they want their families back. It’s just the first story in Dragon Quest VII, but the strength of the game’s writing can already be seen: what would be a simple quest of going to the monsters’ lair and defeating them becomes much more complex as the village’s past is uncovered and the player discovers that the village was built over a lie and named after a coward, unjust act. The monsters are not random but actually the village’s past coming back to haunt them with a vengeance. They didn’t kidnap the women and children simply because they’re evil, but because they want retribution. In a stellar moment, the last boss you fight on the island says a lot with just the action that it will keep performing during the battle, which helps cement it as a tragic character.

The places and locales you visit are usually haunted by their past – be it in the form of unresolved business or old traditions that now will bear ill fruit. You meet a village built under an active volcano whose people worship the “Father Flame” and make fire offerings to their god, which are actually just hastening their demise. You meet a people that live in a cursed village that knows no rain, and so they worship it, praying for it to come every day – but when their wish is fulfilled it only brings ruin to everyone. If there’s one unifying theme in Fragments of the Forgotten Past it is the problem of collective stupidity: most towns and villages you visit will have people uniting in the name of intolerance, foolishness, and prejudice. They’ll pick up arms against peaceful monsters that only want to be alone or even help them; they will sheer for the bad guys to win, being easily deceived by appearances; they will try to harm and blame the “other”  for their woes, and, if not for the hero’s help, certainly perish due to their inane actions.

The narrative’s tone is rightly varied: the funny tale of a village where everyone has turned into animals – the innkeeper is a cow, for example – is, in turn, followed by an extremely dark one in which a town is being stormed by robots. There, instead of a hapless cow, you meet a little girl that is frustrated because she’s unable to lift up weapons to avenge the death of her little brother. There’s a happy soldier celebrating the fact that he has just finished building a wall made from the corpses of his enemies.

Again, the writing makes things more complex, as the characters in this island seem unable to forgive and move on, holding grudges and prejudices that will only confirm the nihilism of one of the key characters in that story, who is another tragic figure: a bitter man who likes to name robots after his deceased Ellie, believing that the robots, unlike his lover, will be more reliable than her, and not die and leave him alone in the world. What he fails to notice, however, is that he will be precisely like his Ellie for his creations: unlike them, he’s mortal and will inevitably pass away one day, leaving them without guidance or purpose, just like he was in life. When you visit the island again in the present and encounter one of the robots, the line “Must administer hot soup…soup will ensure revival…” manages to be at the same time a bit silly and truly heartbreaking.

The game has you return to every island in the present to see what has changed through the course of time due to your actions. Time, however, is rarely kind to people that had to be forced to do the right thing. You revisit them to find that the noble acts of some characters were erased from history, entirely forgotten when not vehemently denied. Some people seem determined to repeat the same mistakes over and over again, denying what has happened in the past – there’s a character that literally smashes to pieces a tablet telling the history of his town because he deems inconvenient the information that it contained.

You revisit some islands just to find that the lesson from the past was not learned. Sometimes, you discover that some practices have even become twisted, and find that a certain religion, for example, has now turned into an excuse to attract tourists and make a profit. But sometimes you visit them to find the people well, safe and living honest lives.

We see the effect of time also in the characters, as you encounter some of them in other islands in different periods of time, sometimes when they’re older and looking for redemption, or younger, and so blind to the tragedy you know will befall them in the future. One of the best stories takes place in a town called Evergreen Gardens and it breaks the adventure formula by being a tragic love story, in which the characters are plagued not by monsters but by their own choices and attitudes. You see characters that care for each other growing apart with time, becoming bitter and sad, living lonely lives, and there’s nothing you can do to help them get together again, because fighting is the only main mechanic in the game, and their problem is definitely not one that can be solved with violence.

With almost twenty islands to explore, the game can get repetitive, especially later on when the stories start to share common themes without adding much that is new to them, such as the one that focuses on a strange people that can fly, but bully a kid that is different. The game also drags on at the end, with an unnecessary epilogue – much, much worse than The Scouring of the Shire – that will make you visit old places yet again to awake some random spirits.

Your party is also far from memorable. The nameless hero has no personality or arc, just being an avatar for the player. The other characters are all one-note: Kiefer is impulsive, Maribel is snarky, Mervyn is loyal, and so on. The focus, however, is not on them, but on the characters they meet, which lessens the problem.

The writing, on the other hand, is full of charm, with NPCs often playing with words and sounds. A fisherman in the protagonist’s hometown, for instance, tells about how sad he is because he “caught a cold instead of fish” and is now saying “Ahchoo instead of Ahoy.” A farmer, in turn, says to you, “These cows are just like my children. We ever run out of things to talk about. They’re so amoosing.” The names are also suggestive: the scientist who works with automatons is called Autonymus, while a king that grows too ambitious is called Hybris. The village under the volcano is called Emberdale and the volcano itself is called Burnmount. There’s a monster shaped like a pot called “Urnexpected”.  There are even some little alliterations thrown around for good measure, making the dialogues a bit more interesting: “We only ask that you do not bracer, badger, or otherwise bother our beloved king,” a random guard says to the hero.

The towns are also full of life because their inhabitants are not static: NPCs often change their dialogues and move around the town to match recent events, displaying unique traits and personality. Some of them even have their own character arc: in a certain village, for example, you meet a boy who also wants to travel around the world and discover new things. He is, however, unable to leave, because his mother is sick and he has to take care of her. Talking to the mother, you find out that she’s actually pretending to be sick just to keep her son from leaving – as she was told by the local fortune teller that he will never come back after going away. As the party solves the problems of the village, the mother will begin to come to terms with letting her son go, while he – and here’s where the brilliance of their storyline lies – finds another reason to stay, settle and form a family.

Gameplay-wise, Fragments of the Forgotten Past is a classic turn-based JRPG in the most boring sense of the term. You have a party up to four characters and each one can either attack or use a skill, magic, or item. Twenty hours into the game, however, the characters barely have any spells or skills to speak of, and the basic attack command will still do the trick even when dealing with bosses. The game is ridiculously easy, and twenty hours in, the characters will have around 120HP while the enemies will be dealing 1-3 damage with their attacks. Around the thirty-hour mark, you get access to a job system, but even then the game is still a cakewalk, rarely pushing the player to actually think about what they’re doing and develop any sort of complex strategy: just spamming your best skill usually works, as does the old “attack-attack-heal” strategy.

Dragon Quest is a series known for the tendency for sticking to its roots, which can lead to a warm feeling of familiarity – making it the comfort food of JRPGs – but also to an annoying sense of stagnation. The game’s soundtrack, for example, composed as always by Koichi Sugiyama, has the same old problem: it’s good, but also incredibly repetitive. In Fragments of the Forgotten Past, we have dozens of towns each with their own distinct storyline, but they all share the same soundscape. Instead of each town having its own theme to build a distinct atmosphere, they all share the same three tracks: the sad, happy, and jolly town themes. It’s a waste of potential and it makes the game’s music tiresome after a while

Dragon Quest VII: Fragments of the Forgotten Past is not a game you come for the gameplay or the presentation. Its strength lies solely on the sheer quality of its short stories, which, in the end, prove to be enough to make the game a memorable experience.

September 04, 2020.