Sega Unveils 7th Dragon
An all-star RPG staff is behind Sega's latest DS game.
By Kevin Gifford, 09/24/2008
Everybody knows that when your home is infested with cockroaches, simply crushing one or two of them with a shoe isn't going to help matters. You have to kill all of them. So, too, it goes in the world of Eden, although instead of bugs, they have slightly bigger fish to fry. Eighty percent of the world has been taken over by a dizzying number of fantasy reptiles, led by a mysterious cadre of seven all-powerful dragons, and the flowers they use to mark their territory causes crystallization and death to any human hapless enough to blunder into them. For the huntsmen charged with doing something about this, the task is simple: Kill all the dragons, or the human race is going to be wiped out of existence.
Sega's 7th Dragon, announced this week in Japan's Weekly Famitsu magazine, is a Nintendo DS game with a seriously deep pedigree. The title's being produced by Rieko Kodama, a woman heavily involved with Skies of Arcadia and the Phantasy Star series before it went online; this is the first RPG she's been involved with in six years. Kazuya Niinou, who distinguished himself with Etrian Odyssey last year, is the director, while music composing duties are being handled by Yuzo Koshiro, who needs no introduction among game soundtrack freaks.
What sort of game is this dream team of JRPG-dom making? So far it looks like a standard, turn-based role-player with a few twists. You control parties of four in the fight against the dragons, creating characters from scratch and assigning one of seven classes to each. The DS's top screen depicts the action, while the bottom screen displays a map of the world that's constantly updated to show the current territorial situation between humans and dragons.
The game's due out spring 2009 in Japan, and with a staff as pedigreed as this one, we can only hope a US release isn't too far behind.
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