Is Dragon Warrior VII really as grindy as they say?
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The original PSX version has you play 3 hours before the first fight. Those first 3 hours are you exploring an island, a dungeon, solving some puzzles, etc, without any combat to break any of it up.
The game's system is basically teleporting you to small self contained island/worlds where you do some heroics, over and over and over again. Each island requires you find 2-6 map pieces to unlock them and IIRC in the original game there's absolutely no hint at all where these map pieces are. No rhyme or reason, either. (I.e., you don't start in the red area and keep going until you're done, nor do you only find the next world's map pieces in the world you're in, you often have all but 1 piece of the maps for several worlds until you find the last piece.)
It's easily 100 hours just for the first disc. The game's script is a literal bookshelf, something like 100,000 ... words? Pages? It's insane.
Part of the problem is some Japanese gaming rag supposedly got a mole in at Square Enix and leaked the ENTIRE plot of the game most of the way through development, so the team tossed it all out and started over. That resulted in them having the engine done and having a good amount of time to just write scenarios. Lots and lots and lots of scenarios.
Oh, and it has a class system not dissimilar to FF5's, except there's no UI telling you how long you have to level, you have to go back to the class change world -- no teleporting! -- to check. And if you overlevel (XP levels not class levels) fights then you stop getting class XP. Which you won't know because again, no UI. Your best way around this is to use some sort of finish-fight-no-xp trick like the Expel spell that just teleports monsters away.
So yes, it's grindy. Holy god is it grindy.
The 3DS remake fixed a lot of these issues. They made the initial part of the game faster, and gave you a stupid looking mobile game mascot character to help point you towards map pieces. They also added a random map generator deal too, and in those random map worlds the monsters always give class XP. The tradeoff being they fucked the class system up a lot: in the original if you learn a skill you know it on other classes, i.e., if you learn healing magic you can heal even if you're not a healer. This is how it's supposed to work. You are supposed to get stronger the more classes you unlock and the more you level. This is a no-fucking-duh level of design.
In the remake, if you switch classes... you can't use that classes' abilities anymore. Hybrid and evolved classes still fill in roles -- your Warrior + Priest -> Paladin will be able to heal and revive, IIRC, but it still kinda sucks. What it ultimately means is you pick a character to be your healer (and it had better not be the obvious one, cause that's the
wrong choice) and just stop learning classes on them. And occasionally walk all the way back to the portal out of an island, try and figure out which fucking portal (they're unlabeled and unmarked) leads you to the island with the class change town, walk your dead ass over to it, change your class to one you've already mastered so you can use it's abilities to beat a boss, walk back to the portal, try and figure out what fucking portal you were just in (they're unlabeled and unmarked), walk all the way back to the dungeon...
