Look, I am generally a fan of the recent Dragon Quest VII: Reimagined even with the cutting of content and sometimes oversimplifying a few things. I like the improvement of character stories. I like the voice acting. I like the art. I like most of the pacing.
BUT, this took a stupidly long time to do…
To put this in perspective, I beat the game somewhere around the 60-70 hour mark. The rest has been grinding up stats and unlocking achievements. There is something like 10-11 hours of just playing for the achievement I’m about to rant about in this post.
Most of the achievements are precisely the sort of things you like to see for videogame achievements. Fight a certain number of fights. Get a certain amount of gold. Reach a few storyline checkpoints. Even some trickier stuff, like having to compete against some fairly difficult bosses. At least of a “standard hard difficulty” in the aspect of needing to grind quite a bit and trying out new strategies to be strong enough to do it without really good RNG.
Only the true boss of the entire damned game is not that, it’s a stupid match game called Lucky Panel where you flip over tiles and match items and some items have some chance of ranking up and if you get lucky you might rank something up to max before the final round and get a chest and then get a shot at a few really rare items.
And the sadistic game designers made it so that there are several items that are not only locked to the panel with no other way to get them but locked to the most RNG of RNG luck. Chests are already slightly rare due to the “early max rank” condition in a game where you have to also use some luck | strategy | skill just to keep playing – or, in various ways, cheat – AND then some of those items [such as the liquid metal gear] is very rare even by chest standards.
What this means is that folks are reporting 10-15+ hours of post-game content dedicated entirely to getting those rare-rare items from panels. And some are actively encouraging stuff like screen captures if not outright cheat-ware to help.
Sure, we only need to do play Lucky Panel if we want to get all the achievements, but I detest content like this where you have to play against highly complex dice rolls. Where people who luck might get those items in a dozen plays while folks like me have to play the match game…wait, let me see.
188 games. Siggghhhhhhhh. It’s the return of gacha trauma.
Anyhow, after said 188 games, I finally got this…
Which unlocked the Heroic Hoarder achievement and that unlocked the final “get all the other achievements” achievement. My word. I have no idea, going by the top screenshot, about that poor 0.3% who managed to get through the stupid Panel grind without getting everything else which generally pales in comparison.
While there are a handful of text/translation errors and other things I would prioritize fixing, at this point one of my big wish list items for this game if they could go back and tweak it would be to allow some items like rare monster hearts that increased the number of misses or improved the luck on the panels or something like that.
OR, make it so that every item can be gotten, somehow, outside of it and leave the Lucky Panel as less a requirement and more a fun way to just score a few duplicates of rare items if people are so inclined.