Video Game / 7th Dragon

Released in Japan March 5, 2009 for the Nintendo DS, 7th Dragon was developed by Imageepoch and published by Sega. The director behind this game is Kazuya Niinou, the mind behind the first Trauma Center and Etrian Odyssey game. Music is handled by Yuzo Koshiro and produced by Rieko Kodama (Phantasy Star, Skies of Arcadia).

The game's plot involves the world of Eden, which was peaceful until the sudden arrival of 666 Dragons which dragged the world into conflict and brought the strange Dragonsbane, a poisonous flower, into the world. It is up to a brave guild of adventurers to slay every dragon and save Humanity and the Lucier from extinction.

The gameplay is a mixture of Etrian Odyssey's point-based level-up system and class reliance combined with a more traditional JRPG structure, not unlike Dragon Quest. The player begins by creating and naming their own guild; then selecting guildmates from among seven classes: Fighter, Knight, Samurai, Mage, Princess, Rogue, and Healer. The game’s battles are turn-based and utilize a mechanic in the exhaust system where a character can expend one exhaust bar in order to power up their next action. With a short prologue to help introduce the mechanics, soon the player finds the world to be literally infested by both 666 Dragons and Dragonsbane - the Dragonsbane appears directly both on the world map and in dungeons. By stepping on the flower the player permanently eliminates it from the world map, but only temporarily in a dungeon, taking damage from stepping on it. The bottom screen displays a counter of the number of dragons left in Eden which starts at 666 and slowly ticks down as the player defeats each one. The dragons appear on both the overworld and in dungeons and have the ability to enter random encounters at will.

The game spawned the following:

Manga

• A manga series by Dennou Ouwadan, set before the events of the first game, ran on Monthly Comic Rex from July 2009 to February 2010.
• 7th Dragon 2020 Comic Anthology, published in May 2012 by Ichijinsha.
• 7th Dragon 2020 -EGO-, a manga series by Kotora Kino and Akihiro Kimura set between 7th Dragon 2020 and 7th Dragon 2020-II, ran on Famitsu Comic Clear from June to November 2013.

Video Games

• 7th Dragon 2020, released on November 23, 2011, for the PlayStation Portable. It departed from the fantasy setting of the first 7th Dragon for a post-apocalyptic Tokyo. The number of classes was reduced to five and the dragons to only 200.
• 7th Dragon 2020-II, released on April 18, 2013 for the PlayStation Portable, centers around new dragon baddies.
• 7th Dragon III Code: VFD, released on October 15, 2015 for the Nintendo 3DS. It is the first in the series to be officially released in English, with the release occurring on July 12th, 2016.

Literature

• 7th Dragon III UE72 Mikan no Yuuma, a Light Novel prequel to 7th Dragon III Code: VFD, written by Carlo Zen of The Saga of Tanya the Evil fame and illustrated by Shirow Miwa. It was published in February 2016 by Seikaisha under the Seikaisha Fiction imprint.

The official site for the release can be found here. A useful resource for the first game can be found here; Cavespeak released a translation patch for the first game in April 2014, and another for 2020 in March 2016.

Compare Etrian Odyssey, Niinou's previous highly successful dungeon-crawling series, which 7th Dragon takes many cues from.

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The 7th Dragon series provides examples of:

Multiple Games

• Action Initiative: Some skills have an "Instant" property that allows the user to go first, or at least before any enemies (as it's possible for an ally with high enough speed to precede instant moves, or for multiple party members to use instant moves in one turn). Attacks that inflict Stun are always instant (if it were to hit after the target takes their turn, the stun would become useless). Using an EX gauge will also give the user the same level of priority.
• Alien Kudzu: The Bloom spread by the dragons and that spreads the dragons. It is deadly to humans and grows quickly.
• An Adventurer Is You: There are seven classes in the original, Fighter, Knight, Mage, Samurai, Rogue, Princess, and Healer. In 2020 those classes are replaced by Samurai, Hacker, Destroyer, Trickster, and Psychic class. 2020-II also adds the Idol class. III has eight classes, Samurai, God-Hand, Agent, Duelist, Rune-Knight, Fortuner, Mage, and Banisher.
• All in a Row: How your party appears in the world map, dungeons, and in towns.
• Anti-Air: Skills described as inflicting "aerial" damage do additional damage to flying/floating enemies.
• Arbitrary Headcount Limit: Your guild can hold up to 16 members, but only 4 can be taken in your party. 2020 reduced this to only 3 characters. III plays with this by having three people in the main party, and then another two teams of three taking a support role.
• Beneath the Earth: Some dungeons take place underground. In case of 2020, they are part of the subway or underpass. There are also ancient ruins beneath Tokyo, dating from 12,000 years ago.
• Bizarre Sexual Dimorphism: The Lucier. The women have fox/cat ears, while the men have elf-like pointed ears.
• Brutal Bonus Level: The bonus dungeons unlocked after beating the game, like the Illusory Capital in 7th Dragon 2020 and the Shadow Realm in 7th Dragon III Code: VFD, are much tougher that anything else in the game. It is stocked to the brim with upgraded Dragons as random encounters, and the bosses it contains are magnitudes stronger than the versions fought in the story.
• Combination Attack: Some skills from each class will have synergy with other classes’ skills granting an additional benefit to the attack.
• Cute Bruiser: It's possible to create one by creating a character with a non-muscular child or adolescent portrait and then giving them a high-damage class focused on physical strength. Heck, the default portrait for the punching-oriented God-Hand class is a maid who appears to be in her late teens.
• The Dragons Come Back: Dragons appear and wage war against humanity. It doesn't help that the dragons cause the world ecosystem to shift to their liking, which is deadly for humans.
• Dungeon Crawler: Plays as one crossed with a more traditional JRPG.
• Flying Seafood Special: Some of the enemies are hostile flying fish.
• Extra Turn: Each class gets a skill that allows them to gain an extra turn if certain conditions are met. For the more proactive extra turns like the Agent's and Trickster's Assassin's React, the player can potentially gain multiple extra turns back-to-back, though there is a cap of 3 extra turns per party member.
• Glacier Waif: It's possible to create one by creating a character with a child portrait, but then assigning them to a Mighty Glacier class. Proceed to laugh as that Bombardier kid in your party brutalizes a dragon for 3,000 LF of damage with Comet Spear.
• Health/Damage Asymmetry: Your party members will be lucky to reach 400 LF by endgame, maybe 500 depending on class. Meanwhile, bosses tend to have thousands of LF.
• Hollywood Hacking: The Hacker (no surprise there) and Agent classes revel in this. Not only do they engage in the over-the-top rapid-fire typing typical of the trope, they can even "hack into" fully organic beings.
• Lazy Backup: It doesn't matter how many of your guild is in the reserves; if your current party bites it, it's Game Over. This gets particularly silly in III, where you can have two rear teams of three and revival items in the Bag of Sharing, yet it's still mission failure if the front line gets wiped.
• Limit Break: Exhaust Gauge. It can be expended when it's full, and the next thing you do that turn will be significantly empowered: the character enjoys Action Initiative, attacks do more damage, healing items heal more, and so on. There are also EX Skills, highly powerful and flashy attacks only usable while Exhaust is active.
• Little Bit Beastly: Female Lucier have animal ears.
• Metal Slime: Dragonsbane Seeds offer large amounts of SP, Queen Rabi give lots of EXP, and Gold Rabi drop a bunch of money. On top of liking to run away, the Seeds take 1 damage from all attacks while Queen Rabi have obnoxiously high evasion.
• Our Dragons Are Different: A lot of the lesser Dragons resemble hybrids between a dragon and another creature, such as Dragon-turtle, Dragon-grasshopper, Dragon-dragonfly, Dragon-hyperactive-puppies, Dragon-on-giant-nut... Also, Dragon-human such as what become of Mizuchi and Takehaya.
• Pre Existing Encounters: Just like F.O.E.s, Dragons visibly roam the overworld and will usually give chase if they spot you.
• Stance System: The Samurai class works on this and is a staple of the franchise. The Samurai is able to switch between Iai (Sheathed) and Battou (Unsheathed) stances, where the Iai stance allows the usage of elementally-imbued, single-hit attacks while Battou stances are for multiple-hit physical attacks.
• Status Effects:
  • Burn - Causes damage after each action, and slightly reduces offenses and defenses.
  • Freeze - Causes damage after each action, and severely reduces turn speed.
  • Paralysis or Fear - May cause the affected to miss their turn.
  • Blind - Lowers accuracy.
  • Poison and Bleed - Causes damage at the end of each turn.
  • Curse - A portion of the damage dealt by the affected is inflicted on them.
  • Stun - Causes the affected to act last this turn.
  • Skill Seal - Prevents use of skills.
  • Null Action - Prevents taking of any action.
  • Confusion or Charm - Cannot be controlled, and may randomly attack self or allies.
  • Sleep - Prevents taking of any action. Cured at the end of turn after taking damage.
  • Petrify - Prevents taking of any action. Causes Game Over if all surviving allies are petrified.
  • Hacked - May cause the affected to miss their turn, and enables other skills of the Hacker or Agent.
• Suspicious Video-Game Generosity: If you see a Save Point and a teleport point next to each other, chances are there's a boss up ahead.
• Take Your Time: Narrative-wise, you generally move from one clearly defined mission to another. Gameplay-wise, you're free to hunt dragons, finish quests, and grind levels.
• The Red Mage: Psychics in the 2020 games and Mages in III can use both elemental damage and recovery spells. Unlike many other examples, however, they excel at both.
• Useless Useful Spell: Much like in Etrian Odyssey, anything that can inflict Curse status due to Health/Damage Asymmetry. Enemy smacks one of your party members for a large chunk of their lifebar? Said enemy will be tickled at best from losing 300-400 LF tops, when enemies near the endgame have thousands of LF. Your damage dealer does 5-digit damage to a boss? Hoist by His Own Petard, at least 30 times over.

7th Dragon

• And Zoidberg: Pleroma's shelves of stories from the ancient world include titles like King Lear , Emma, I, Claudius and Twilight.
  • This was the joke in the original Japanese as well; the stories were Tales of Watatsumi, Maelstrom, Nobara no Mori and...Twilight.
• Art-Style Dissonance: The character design is very cute—they are meant to sell Nendoroids—but the plot itself is borderline Cosmic Horror Story. This is not dissimilar to Niinou's previous dungeon-crawling experience, Etrian Odyssey.
• Back from the Brink: When the game begins proper the entire world is cowering before the dragons and overrun with Dragonsbane. It's up to you to take everything back.
• Boss-Altering Consequence:
  • An early-game Imperial Dragon, Dead Black/Eclipse, can be weakened by finding an orb key item and placing it on a pedestal in its dungeon: the "incorrect" item, a Big Glass Orb (purchased for a sum of money), weakens it for six turns, while the True Orb (gotten from a quest) does it for ten turns. In its weaker form, the boss has lowered stats and cannot use its signature move that instantly kills any characters with enough HP missing.
  • Imperial Dragon Earthshaker is so massive that it is Mt. Jomaron, the dungeon the party traverses to face it. Going after Earthshaker's head starts the boss fight with it, but it'll have appropriately mountainous health, encouraging the party to traverse the rest of the area and take on each of its body parts in mini-boss battles. Each one defeated cuts off a chunk of its health, so by the time its horn is destroyed it'll be down to two-thirds of its maximum. In addition, it's possible to ask an NPC for assistance in distracting it beforehand, which will occasionally cause Earthshaker to lose its turn.
  • The second and final run-in with Flame Eater sees it residing near a pool of lava, giving it high HP regeneration per turn from the heat. While still killable like this, it becomes easier to fight by traversing its dungeon and killing the two mid-bosses that are supplying that lava, halving and then stopping the regen.
• Doomed Hometown: Kazan. However, one of the first things your guild does upon waking up is retake the place for the citizens.
• Downer Beginning: After a short prologue, the dragons come and completely wreck the world. The opening credits are interspersed with everyone reacting to the events, all while the bottom screen shows everything being progressively more covered by the Dragonsbane.
• Early-Installment Weirdness: Only game to use 2D graphics and only game to use a fantasy setting rather than the modern or future settings of later games.
• Earth All Along: Hinted at in the original game, but not confirmed to be the case rather than just a joking reference until the sequels, which take place on Eden back when it was Earth. (with Code: VFD including time travel to the distant past and to Eden)
• Easing into the Adventure: The start of the game does not begin with any dragons at all, and serves mostly to get the player acclimated with the game’s mechanics.
• Exponential Potential: The number of gimmicks can be overwhelming. This is probably why the number of classes were reduced in the PSP games. And some of them require trial and error to use effectively, such as various forms of counters.
• Fantasy World Map: The world of Eden, which starts out like most other fantasy settings until the Dragons arrive and infest it with Dragonsbane.
• Featureless Protagonist: Each class has four portraits of varying species and gender. The player can choose their own name, but using default ones gives the character an extra skill point.
• Fight Woosh: A battle begins with a burst of flower petals from the center of the screen as it fades to black accompanied by a woosh of wind.
• Fire, Ice, Lightning: The three elemental types of magic that the Mage can use.
• Gotta Kill Them All. There are 666 Dragons. How many are left are always in the upper corner. You don't have to kill every last one; but it does unlock the Bonus Dungeon.
• Heroic Mime: Your adventuring party is made up of them.
• Informed Equipment: Your character model only reflects the equipped weapon, nothing else.
• Last Lousy Point: To get to the Bonus Dungeon, you have to kill all 666 of the Dragons. This can require extensive combing once one gets down to the single-digits. Commonly missed dragons are side-quest related or in the Valorean Forest. Because Haze displaced the "normal" dragons there, one needs to beat him one and use a Bloom Seed to get them back.
• Lone Wolf Boss: The sidequests' Optional Bosses include indigenous large monsters from Eden and superweapons that were part of an ancient civilization, with some of them sealed away due to their great powers. And none of them are affiliated with the Dragons' forces.
• The Medic: The aptly named Healer class, though the Knight and Princess possess healing abilities of their own.
• Monster Whale: Moby-Dick himself is an Optional Boss encountered in the Briskilla Ruins.
• Non-Elemental: Another type of magic the mage can use, carries the distinction of not being resisted by anything, but doesn’t match the elemental magic in raw power.
• Number of the Beast: The total number of Dragons adds up to 666.
• Palette Swap: The Kingsblade guild members are just palette swapped version of 3 of the playable characters.
• Random Encounters: By the boatload. It doesn't help that a Dragon can join the fun (F.O.E. style) in the middle of an on-going battle.
• Save Point: While one can save at an inn, there are save points located in most other areas.
• Scienceville: Preloma.
• Side Quest: Multiple, including some that are permanently missable.
• Skill Scores and Perks: Each class starts with 3 skill points that are spent on a large skill tree. 1 skill point is gained every level, 2 for every fifth level. As with most, certain skills must be leveled up to unlock other skills.
• Tentacled Terror: There are some octopus-liked monsters called Roper^note ローパー and Noble Crown^note ノーブルクラウン, who are noted to have elastic tenctacles and slimy skin. And there's also the Optional Boss called Sensualist^note 官能の奉仕者. You can imagine how the fanbase rolled with that last one.
• Time Skip: After the prologue, 3 years pass. By the time you and your guild wake up, most of the world is under the dragons.
• Trauma Inn: In each town. Inside each inn is a doctor that can revive dead party members.

7th Dragon 2020

• After the End: The game takes place in a ruined Tokyo.
• Anyone Can Die: By the time 2020-II starts, the only carry-over Murakumo characters are Emelle, Rin, and Kirino.
• Artificial Human: The NAVs were engineered to have information processing abilities far beyond those of regular humans.
• Back from the Brink: The entirety of the game, but most apparent during Chapter 0.

• Big Damn Heroes: SKY, who saves you from War Cry in Chapter 0. They don't stay heroes for long...

• Cutscene Power to the Max: The opening is a significant exaggeration of what your characters can actually do in the game.

• Draconic Humanoid: Both Mizuchi and Takehaya become human-dragon hybrids.
• The Dragonslayer: Murakumo. Their official seal is a sword that goes through the head of a dragon.
• Eagleland: The game really doesn't portray USA nicely. However, the ethics of individual Americans varies.
• Elegant Gothic Lolita: The default female Hacker wears a lacy, frilly outfit.

• Fire, Ice, Lightning: Everyone gets them eventually, but the Psychic is the classic Mage archetype.
• Global Currency: The Az.
• A God Am I: Human Dragon Mizuchi.
• Gotta Kill Them All: The Dragons. Some of them can be avoided, but you want their Phlebotinum to repair the facilities in your base.
• Greek Chorus: Miku's role in the game is something like this. You can replace the BGM of the game with her songs, the lyrics of which gives interesting insight into your current situation, if not outright Foreshadowing.
• Guns Akimbo: The gun-wielding Trickers. They are mechanically similar to Dragoons from Final Fantasy: they enter a hard-to-attack state and start attacking with impunity.
• Healing Checkpoint: Green save points recover your life and mana just by walking through them.
• Helmets Are Hardly Heroic: If a combatant character matters in the story, they don't wear a helmet. This even applies to JSDF personnel such as Rin and Gatou!
• Hey, You!: Your characters are rarely referred by their name, only "Unit 13". For the civilians, you're simply "Murakumo".
• Hopeless Boss Fight: The first fight against Emperor Dragon War Cry in Chapter 0, but thankfully Neko and Daigo are there to bail your asses out. The second fight against him —Wounded War Cry— is difficult, but you can win.
• It's All My Fault: Rin blames herself on the catastrophic loss of the JSDF, which includes Gatou.
• Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: Yotsuya Evernight's ghostly phenomena. It's stated that High Dragon Lore-A-Lua uses inaudible sound waves to manipulate corpses like puppets, backing things up with its illusions. However not only does this not explain the dead Gatou's appearance to save the heroes, Yotsuya's eternal night and the zombies still persist even after the dragon's death.
• Mission Control: NAV3.6 (male, nicknamed Miroku), NAV3.7 (female, nicknamed Mina).
• Now, Where Was I Going Again?: If you don't remember where you're supposed to be going, consult the Terminal in your room.
• Patriotic Fervor: One of the item is the Flag of Japan, which increases your defense. (But then, stir-fried tofu also boosts your stats.)
• Phlebotinum: The Dz, which you use to rebuild your base. Only obtainable from Dragons, and there are only 200 of them in the game.
• Player Headquarters: Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building.
• Reasonable Authority Figure: The American President Jack Muller. While a bit dismissive of Japan's situation, he does promise to send aid after clearing up the invasion in his own country. It's largely thanks to his decisions that America has killed six High Dragons in the time it took Japan to slay three. And when facing annihilation at the hands of Mizuchi, he makes sure all the civilians and congress have evacuated safely before giving his place in the shelter to his young secretary. He then orders for the army to fire everything they have left and dies merely regretting he couldn't see things through to the end.
• Red Shirt Army: Downplayed. While they are no match for Dragons, the JSDF are portrayed as competent and sometimes even heroic.
• Sailor Fuku: The female samurai wears this.
• Scenery Gorn: Tokyo is absolutely devastated by the Dragon invasion. One area is nearly completely submerged in sands. And in some places, the laws of physics itself is a casualty.
• Scenery Porn: Dragonsbane-affected environments are brightly colored and crystalline, they would be nice places for picnic were it not for their temperamental wildlife.
• Shock and Awe: The dragon Jigowatt.
• Shout-Out: The designation the ISDF gives to the biggest and nastiest dragons are rather interesting, these includes Sleepy Hollow, Jigowatt, and Jabberwock.
• Skill Scores and Perks: The skill system has been made more flexible and less tree-like. New tiers of skills are unlocked by building advanced facilities, and only a few skills require investment in other skills.
• Stance System: The Destroyer (read: Monk) class combines this with Counter-Attack. They enter a stance that allows them to counter attack of certain kind (fangs, claws, breaths, etc). A party solely consisting of counterattacking Destroyers is one to behold.
• Status-Buff Dispel: If the enemy has a buff active, a Buddy Attack from one of your backline units can jump in to dispel the buff.
• Stripperiffic: The outfit of the female Psychic leaves very little to the imagination, consisting of a coat over a bikini.
• Taking Up the Mantle: This game is rather fond of this trope, because clearly Anyone Can Die. Rin takes Gatou's JSDF mantle, Emelle takes Natsume's Murakumo mantle.
• Total Eclipse of the Plot: The entirety of chapter 0 takes place during an extremely long solar eclipse, climaxing with the fight against Emperor Dragon War Cry with the eclipse as the background, over the falling-apart-upward Tokyo Metropolitan Building.
• Trauma Inn: You have your mess in the Murakumo HQ.
• Urban Fantasy: 2020 trades the fantasy setting of the original for a ravaged Tokyo, but there are still melee weapon wielders and casters mixed in.
• Video Game 3D Leap: Ditches the sprite-based graphics of the first game in favor of polygonal ones.
• Walking Wasteland: Each Emperor Dragon brings their own type of wasteland. Oceanos turns rain poisonous. Sleepy Hollow carries deadly pollen. But the god-emperor of wasteland is Fomalhaut, who brings Black Dragonsbane with him.
• We ARE Struggling Together: Dragons are invading, but Murakumo (your group) and SKY are at each others' throats.
• Wolverine Publicity: The game heavily advertised itself as featuring Hatsune Miku (specifically, Hatsune Miku Type-2020). Her role... is not as significant as expected.

7th Dragon 2020-II

• Arc Welding: This game links the Tokyo-arc games with the original 7th Dragon.
• Back from the Dead: The Black Dragonsbane spawned by Fomalhaut is able to bring most dragons back to life. Here we go again.
• Big Bad: Fomalhaut, which is closer to an Eldritch Abomination than a dragon.
• Big Brother Worship: It's very clear that Izumi sees her big brother Souji as the coolest person in the world. But then, everyone in SECT11 are awed by him. This hits her hard after Souji makes a Heroic Sacrifice.
• Big Damn Heroes: SECT11, who saves you from Mark of Fomalhaut in the Prologue. Idem ditto.
• Big Good Emelle.
• But Not Too Foreign: The very American SECT11 are led by the siblings Souji and Izumi Sakuraba. This is even given a lampshade by Group 13, in which they question the siblings Japanese spirit— being Americans, they simply shrug.
• Climax Boss: The fight against Drago-Satana at the end of Chapter 4.
• Combination Attack: Boss enemies may have combination attack of their own. Those SECT11 guys are especially brutal.
• Darkest Hour: Fomalhaut's invasion of National Diet Building, which forces everyone to go deep underground with no obvious way out. The invasion also lead to the death of Rin's troops, just about everyone in SECT11, and Emelle.
• Defiant to the End: Emelle, before Fomalhaut.
  Emelle: Listen, Fomalhaut! I won! Unit 13 shall continue my struggle!

• Demoted to Extra: Rin is largely outside the spotlight. The personal drama now centers around Emelle.
• Defeat Means Friendship: SECT11]. Unfortunately, SECT11 is almost immediately destroyed by Fomalhaut.
• Driven to Suicide: There's a sidequest where you have to prevent some refugees from carrying out a suicide pact.
• Eagleland: The real reason SECT11 is sent to Japan is to secure anti-Dragon weaponry, the Lucier. If they have to trample on somebody else's sovereignty, so be it.
• Earth All Along: One that applies retroactively: Eden is Earth, 7,000 years after the present time..

• Elaborate Underground Base: National Diet Building.
• Everyone Has Standards: Even Souji is appalled that President David of the USA decides to abandon Japan to the Black Dragonsbane, now that he's got a Lucier in his hands.
• Fossil Revival: Turns out that Murakumo has been reviving the Lucier this way, in order to use them as the sword that shall slay the Dragons, as they were in the distant antiquity.
• Graceful Loser: Souji admits his defeat at the hand of Group 13 in Kokubunji, and let them take the Living MacGuffin. It's not like SECT11 wanted to fight, anyway...
• Guns Akimbo: Souji's preferred fighting style.
• Here There Were Dragons: Turns out that there were Dragons invasion 12,000 years ago, which was fought by the Lucier.
• Heroic BSoD: Izumi, after Souji make a Heroic Sacrifice to break Fomalhaut's siege of Murakumo HQ. She only gets out of it after everyone gives her a Get a Hold of Yourself, Man! talk.
• Hey, You!: Emelle is about the only one who refer to your party leader by their name, which is rather touching.
• Hopeless Boss Fight:
  • The fight against Mark of Fomalhaut in the Prologue.
  • The first fight against Sleepy Hollow in Chapter 3.
• Hostage Situation: When it becomes clear that Murakumo can't be stopped from saving the Lucier clone in custody of SECT11, Souji gives Emelle two choice: either the Japanese allow his squad a safe passage back to the USA, or the Lucier clone gets it.
• Humanoid Abomination: What Emelle actually is. She is not human, but an entity from outer space known as Hypnos. She is interested in humans, because 'humans are strong'.
• Humans Are the Real Monsters: The conflict between Murakumo and SECT11 over Marina takes over a significant portion of the story. The portion that can be spent, you know, actually fighting Dragons.
• Idol Singer: The Idol class, naturally. Some of their skills even have them performing on a stage.
• Improbable Weapon User: The Idol class uses megaphones.
• MacGuffin: Orichalcum, which is required to forge Dragonslayer.
• Mission-Pack Sequel: The game is very similar to 7th Dragon: 2020, featuring the same graphics, gameplay style and selectable classes (plus Idol). Also, most dungeons, enemies and even some bosses were recycled.
• Power Nullifier: The Confucators(?). You need to install them throughout Shinjuku before you can fight Sleepy Hollow.
• Precursor: Even though humans and Lucier used to coexist 12,000 years ago, 2020-II clearly put the Lucier in this role. They were once advanced people, they repelled Dragon invasion, and the humans of present time uses Lucier technology to fight Dragon invasion of today.
• Recurring Boss: Those SECT11 folks aren't the type to give up, aren't they? They keep hindering you from saving Marina in Chapter 4. On the upside, their boss music (vs. human battle theme) is one of the best in the game.
• Refuge in Audacity: The Idol class. All of their skills are based on being a superstar on an ego trip. They even have a special gauge for this purpose, called Fever. An Idol with SS-level Fever is an unstoppable presence on the battlefield.
• The Rival: SECT11, American equivalent to Murakumo. They have other missions beyond slaying dragons.
• Shout-Out: Certain skills of the Idol make her do a pose similar to Travolta from Saturday Night Fever. And her special gauge is called 'Fever'!
• Sibling Team: SECT11's Souji and Izumi Sakuraba.
• Slap-on-the-Wrist Nuke: The Destroyer's EX-Skill, Sky-High Meteor is clearly learned from Dincht's school of pugilism. They launch themselves beyond the atmosphere and administer a meteoric kick to the enemy, which then explodes. The explosion engulfs (at the very least) the entirety of Tokyo, visible from outer space.
• Spell My Name With An S: Is it Emelle? Emeru? Omar? She's from America, at any rate. Her true identity is Hypnos, though she doesn't use that name anymore.
• Strawman Political: There is a quest chain where you have to justify the existence of Murakumo in a parliamentary hearing. The argument gets cut off by a Dragon attacking the daughter of one of the PM.
• Taking Up the Mantle: Kirino takes Emelle's Murakumo mantle, Izumi takes Souji's SECT11 mantle.
• The Very Definitely Final Dungeon: Tokyo Sky Tower, which has been occupied by Mark of Fomalhaut and its ultra deadly Black Dragonsbane. A significant portion of the game is spent looking for a way to walk into it without dying. It boasts a whopping 46 Dragons, about one fifth of total Dragons in the game.
• Villain Song: Battlefield - The Seven Threats [DIVA Ver.] is pretty clearly sung from the Dragons' point of view.
• We ARE Struggling Together: Repeated with SECT11.
• Wham Episode: Emelle know all along that the new super-secret weapons that the Americans are after are the Lucier. And that Murakumo has been cloning them for some time, trampling upon the sanctity of life itself. Souji mocks Emelle for her hollow moral posturing.

7th Dragon III

• Amnesiac Hero: The Previous Player Character Cameos from 2020 have lost their memories when you encounter them, yet are extremely capable of taking on dragons. Nagamimi expresses irritation when she hears the reason.
• Anti-Air: Buddy Attacks will remove, among other buffs, the "jump" effect, causing the enemy to slam back down on the ground and suffer Null Action until the end of the turn.
• Anti-Frustration Features: Two repeatable Quests available via Downloadable Content are meant to make it easier to beat the game via programmed encounters with Metal Slime enemies.
  • Underleveled? Need more SP for your Skills? Seed Outbreak! gives you symbol encounters with Queen Rabis for experience and Dragonsbane Seeds for SP.
  • Don't have enough money to buy something from the shop? Gold Rabi Outbreak! lets you hunt the little buggers for some quick cash.
• Anyone Can Die: Once you get to the final chapters of the game, characters start dying left and right until you enter the final dungeon.
• Art Evolution: While still quite cute, III's character models are more realistically proportioned than the previous games'.
• Assist Character:
  • Your backup teammates can jump in for attacks, possibly eliminating an enemy's buff and providing an additional effect.
  • An entire backup team can provide the frontline party with buffs.
• Bag of Sharing: Even if your party has to split up, they'll have full access to the inventory.
• Black-and-Gray Morality: It's obvious early on that Nodens isn't entirely on-the-level, and the ISDF isn't much better.
• Bland-Name Product:
  • Look at the full "Nodens" logo. Now look at the modern Nintendo logo. Yup.
  • The doors in Nodens HQ also have an extremely familiar multi-triangle pattern on them.
• Boss in Mook Clothing: The Bonus Dungeon has upgraded versions of every non-boss dragon as random encounters.
• Boss Remix: The battle themes of Hypnos and ND are both lyrical versions of event tracks.
• Boss Rush:
  • Unit 13 has to fight through souped up versions of Nyala and Haze in The Very Definitely Final Dungeon.
  • The Bonus Dungeon proceeds to pit the player against even stronger versions of every major boss in the game.
  • The DLC quest, "Allie's Death March", pits the player against incredibly strong versions of all minor bosses, followed by a souped-up Final Boss, and an even stronger version of Motherly Dragon Nodens. This is meant to challenge a fully-levelled party, and is only available in the postgame. It even has a mystery reward for completion: A certificate.
• Breather Episode: Chapters 3.6 and 5.1 are more lighthearted, involving Unit 13 going about and doing errands to advance the plot. Each chapter also occurs immediately after a battle with a True Dragon.
• Bribing Your Way to Victory: Two of the DLC quests, "Gold Rabi Outbreak!" and "Seed Outbreak!", provide an easy source of money and experience, respectively.
• Call-Back: The full version of opening theme of the game to the previous games. A little over halfway into the song, the lyrics uses the beginning lyrics from the opening theme of 2020-II, and the very last lines are the very first lines of the opening theme of 2020.
• Chick Magnet: The protagonist can be a gender-agnostic version, because Everyone Is Bi.
• Child Soldier: The default Duelist portraits feature middle-schoolers, because duh, they're card game players. And they're so good at card games they can use them to fight dragons with magic. These portraits can be applied to any other class, too.
• Chronic Hero Syndrome: The player characters can't resist saving everyone they come across, even if they're explicitly told not to.
• Combination Attack: Once you're able to form three teams you can perform Unison, in which all nine characters get to make a single attack at no cost.
• Cool Old Guy:
  • One of the God Hand-default portrait options features a Battle Butler with this exact atmosphere. Both of the male Banisher options also have this sort of vibe to them, despite one of them wearing full plate.
  • Yoritomo also comes across as this.
• Cute Kitten: In Chapter 3.6 you're tasked with rescuing stray cats for a cat cafe at Nodens. Once you're done with that, said cafe opens up and you can use cat food to rest with the cats to refill your parties' LF and MN as well as gain SP for each party member. You can continue to rescue cats from dungeons afterwards; they'll either populate the cafe or lurk around various parts of Nodens headquarters.
• Darkest Hour: Following the Wham Episode described below. Everyone in Tokyo is dying or dead, Dragonsbane is everywhere, leaving only Unit 13 to take down Yuma and ND. The cheerful Nodens BGM has even been replaced with a more somber track.
• Deep-Immersion Gaming: You essentially play as yourselves while in the 7th Encount game.
• Door to Before: Several walls of Dragonsbane act as these, requiring you to kill the dragon guarding it — which is often on the side you can't visit until later — to remove it. And unlike normal on-map dragons, these ones won't cut into battle if you're near them, meaning that the trick of intentionally getting ambushed by an otherwise-unreachable dragon to kill it won't work on these "guardian" dragons.
• Downloadable Content: In the form of quests that give you easy resources and extra portraits, among other things.
• Dual Boss: Rika and Chika. Thankfully, they're also the only bosses who don't get to attack twice per turn.
• Dual Wielding: The Samurai class is capable of dual-wielding katanas. The poster Samurai girl featured in various promotional art is frequently depicted with dual katanas.
• Duel Boss: A few are faced in the sidequests to unlock certain EX skills. The Dark Rabi must be battled by the Samurai, Blaster Raven with the God-Hand, and Eigur with the Rune Knight.
• Dub Name Change: The Vanisher class was renamed Banisher for the localization, likely because it sounds more menacing.^note It's worth noting that V and B are interchangeable in Japanese in much the same way as L and R, making "Banisher" a perfectly accurate translation of the original name's kana, though there is English text using the former spelling in that version.
• Easy Levels, Hard Bosses: The Random Encounters can be reliably ended in a single turn before long. On-map dragons, despite being reminiscent of Etrian Odyssey's F.O.E.'s, can pose a bit of a challenge, but don't require coming back later for them to be of reasonable difficulty. The bosses, especially True Dragons, will smash your party into a million pieces unless you're damn well prepared. Then comes the Brutal Bonus Level, where all of the random encounters are dragons and will turn any unprepared party into floor art.
• Escape Rope: The Escape Kit item beams your party back to the world map. Seeing as they're are dirt cheap, you pretty much have no reason not to go into a dungeon without an Escape Kit or fifteen, unless you're doing a Self-Imposed Challenge.
• Everyone Is Bi:
  • Due to the combination of being able to "date" almost every important NPC and the use of a Featureless Protagonist.
  • This also includes your own party members. While you cannot truly "date" the non-protag party members, you can have a brief hang-out with them at any time, they do have a kind of affection track that is affected by various things (including doing cooperative attacks in party), and the higher ones are very romantic... for both genders, regardless of what gender your protagonist is.
• Evolutionary Levels: True Dragons are described as the pinnacle of evolution, and any sufficiently powerful being is destined to become one.
• Experience Booster: The EXP Upper and SP Upper accessories boost experience and skill points gained, respectively.
• Expy: The Mage's skillset is nigh identical to that of Psychics from the previous game, and God Hands are very similar to Destroyers.
• Featureless Protagonist: The protagonist, as well as their fellow permanent Unit 13 members, are all completely player-defined. You're even freely allowed to mix class portraits, so you can use a Samurai portrait for a spellcaster or have a Meido hitting things with a lance.
• Gainax Ending: In the very depths of the Shadow Realm, the party encounters Blaster Raven and an immature True Dragon. Blaster Raven highlights a dilemma: Killing the True Dragon will doom the Shadow Realm to become stagnant and lifeless, while sparing it will let it perpetuate the cycle of growth and suffering in another universe. After a difficult battle to decide the fate of this universe, Blaster Raven leaves, and Iod appears to ask the party of their decision. Depending on what they choose to do to the immature True Dragon, Iod will speak of the future of the Shadow Realm, remind them that there will one day be a universe where Dragons will rise again, then vanish. Nothing else is elaborated on. Roll credits.
• Game Within a Game: 7th Encount, a game developed by Nodens and based of the Dragon Calamity of 2020.
• Gameplay and Story Segregation:
  • During parts where your party has to split up, nothing is stopping you from going back to the dormitory and rearranging your party so that the same team tackles all obstacles.
  • You can "change" a character, resulting in a character with a different name, portrait, and seiyuu but with the exact same functional properties (class, level, skills, etc.) of the character you just changed. While this could be explained by bringing in a fighter of similar experience, it doesn't exactly account for them somehow having the exact same Relationship Values with other registered characters. In other words, "changing" is really just the game's way of attempting to integrate cosmetic character changes into the story.
  • Whoever is the leader of the active team is treated as the leader of Unit 13 during cutscenes. Even if you hand the leader position to a level 1 fresh recruit that you registered two minutes ago, that person will be treated as the one who's been responsible for important developments involving Unit 13. This also applies to dates, meaning that you can have a different character for each date with a particular NPC and that NPC won't bat an eye.
• Grand Finale: This game is the last in the series. It even ends on a definitive note, with the Dragons erased from existence in a new universe.
• The Greatest Story Never Told: Only the player characters, Nagamimi, and Mio remember the party's heroic deeds in the new universe.
• Guide Dang It!: It is possible to complete the game without realizing you can date NPCs. Hint: If you see a brown package on the table between the two couches in your dorm, it's not just a decoration.
• Hand Wave: Your inventory limit is explained by your characters subconsciously throwing away excess items when full.
• Healing Checkpoint: Simply approaching a save point mid-dungeon is enough to fully heal your characters.
• The Hero: The character you create at the beginning is this as they become the one to save the world and are the strongest human alive.
• Hopeless Boss Fight: The first fight against Spectus. Your attacks do 1 damage to it at most, and it eventually performs an attack to wipe your entire party out.
• Humans Are Special: Allie notes that humanity is a special bunch; instead of accepting their place in the food chain and let dragons walk all over them, they instead choose to fight back.
• Incurable Cough of Death: The Dragonsbane illness is established as one — the infected are constantly coughing and in a deteriorating state of health, and medicine can only slow its progress. The only cure is to defeat the Dragon who's the source of the Dragonsbane. By the penultimate chapter, everyone except for Unit 13 and Nagamimi gets afflicted with this.
• Infinity +1 Sword: Zig-Zagged — By dating several plot-important NPCs they award you with special weaponry that is, at the moment, stronger than what you can buy. You can't sell them off either, which marks their importance. However, in the final chapter, you unlock the last tier of shop items, where you get equipment stronger than the date-obtained items. Then, in the Bonus Dungeon, you discover another set of weaponry that even outclasses them.
• Killed Off for Real: Everyone except for Unit 13 and Nagamimi succumbs to the Dragonsbane illness in the penultimate chapter.
• Last Disc Magic: The EX Skills are Purposely Overpowered Limit Breaks, but you only gain the opportunity to unlock them during chapter 5.1 — past that point, the endgame is set in motion.
• Last Lousy Point:
  • To access everything the game has to offer, including opening up the Bonus Dungeon which requires 50 Dz, the player has to hunt down every last dragon across all timelines and dungeons. This includes deliberately allowing unreachable dragons to ambush them mid-battle. Backtracking ensues if the player happens to miss out on anything.
  • Unlocking the Fortuner's EX skill requires rescuing all 30 cats scattered across all the dungeons and timelines. Unlike the Dragons, however, there is no indicator of how many rescuees are left in each dungeon. Even more backtracking can ensue.
• Late-Arrival Spoiler: Code VFD coming out in English first spoils a number of plot points for previous 2020 games, especially 2020-II, just by dint of its concept. The really big ones are the JSDF fighting back the dragons but being too heavily damaged to defend Tokyo on its own, Luciers being from 12,000 years ago originally, to say nothing of the existence of Atlantis, and the very first game actually being in continuity with the 2020 games as Earth's distant future.
• Lazy Backup: When your frontline party falls it's game over, even if you have reserve teams capable of fighting.
• Leaked Experience: Characters in your rear teams will still gain experience like your frontliners, making it trivial and safe to build up new characters once you gain access to your first rear team.
• Legacy Character: Your party is once again given the name "Unit 13", this time in honor of the legendary heroes of Murakumo.
• Legendary in the Sequel: Murakumo's Unit 13 is very highly regarded by the others.
• Let's Split Up, Gang!: At certain parts of the story your party has to split up in order to handle multiple tasks. Hope you've kept them properly outfitted. This will prevent you from using Buddy attacks, backup skills, or Unison attacks. Conspicuously, leaving the dungeon will regroup the party and you can even shuffle members around your multiple teams, and the game's cutscenes will treat your parties as if they were split the way they are the whole time.
• Level-Up Fill-Up: Your life and mana are completely restored when you level up. It can come in handy in a pinch.
• Luke, I Am Your Father: Yoritomo is Mio's dad.
• Mechanically Unusual Class:
  • Some of the God-Hands' skills inflict God Depth on their enemies, which they need in order to use their more powerful attacks.
  • Duelists have to use cards in addition to mana to use some of their skills.
  • Some Banisher skills use their secondary bomb resource.
• Mood Dissonance: In the final chapter, Nagamimi allows you to go back to pre-destruction Tokyo (and other areas as well). Yeah, most of the main cast and NPCs are alive and everything in general looks as if ND never kicked the Dragonsbane into overdrive, but given that this was made only possible with time travel and your current mission involves being fused with the souls of all of humanity and rebooting the universe so that the peaceful Tokyo you see becomes the present and reality once more, it all just feels wrong. Even moreso if you still have unfinished quests and you decide to do them.
• Mood Whiplash: Chapter 5.1 is a Breather Episode in which things are starting to look up: Professor Nagumo gives Mio a serum to halt the progression of Dragon Sickness (which she ultimately decides to use) and there's a party with Unit 13 and the representatives of Atlantis and Eden as invitees. Nagamimi even gives you a second day off so you can continue to relax and do sidequests that you haven't completed yet! Then Chapter 6 comes and all hell breaks loose, with most of the cast dying to the pink Dragonsbane and Allie revealing herself to be the 2nd True Dragon.
• My God, What Have I Done?:
  • Professor Nagumo has this reaction when infusing Yuma with the Haze and Hypnos samples turns him into a draconic Humanoid Abomination.
  • Julietta also has this reaction when Allie kills most of the world's population with her Pink Dragonsbane; he only wanted humanity to evolve through the Dragon Illness, not be driven to extinction.
• Now, Where Was I Going Again?: The Navi option in the menu will allow you to speak with Nagamimi (or whoever is your Navigator for the moment) and they'll remind you where to go.
• Oddly Named Sequel: This game follows the 2020 series, but goes for direct numbering instead of indicating that it's a 2020 follow-up. Granted, it takes place long after 2020, but it can still seem odd. This is due in no small part to the fact that it's continuing 2020-II's plot point of Eden being part of the setting and specifically a possible future of Earth, and is meant to bring the series as a whole to a conclusion - though properly speaking, in this sense it should really be 7th Dragon IV.
• Ominous Latin Chanting: The final boss themes are loaded with nondescript chanting.
• Point of No Return: Going to the terrace to speak with Allie after the second intermission, after which Allie reveals herself as the 2nd True Dragon ND and kills most of the cast. Nagamimi subtly warns you of this by asking if you've finished everything before finishing your day off, but it's easy to miss. Once you reach Grateful Seventh Nagamimi will create a portal to Nodens before everybody died, allowing you to finish any unfinished business, ultimately subverting this.
• Population Control: The Dragon Sickness spread by the Dragonsbane is meant to weed out the weaker humans and single out those strong enough to eventually become dragons themselves.
• Previous Player-Character Cameo: There's DLC that lets you use some character portraits from the 2020 games. In the quests that unlock them they're explicitly recognized as members of Murakumo's Unit 13.
• Rainbow Speak: Important names are highlighted in orange or green, depending on what or who they refer to.
• Relationship Values: Affection stats exist between your party members and NPCs, and they affect the quality of bento they make and can unlock powerful weapons if they're high enough.
• Reset Button Ending: The Main Character uses all the entropy released by VFD to reset the universe into one where dragons never existed, which means that Yuma and Allie don't exist, and only the Main Character, Nagamimi, and Mio remember the events of the game.
• Ret-Gone: During the universe reset the dragons, Yuma, Chika, Rika, and Allie are erased from existence.
• Sad Battle Music: The theme of the Chapter 5 boss fight, which despite its fast tempo manages to keep a feeling of melancholy and desperation.
• Scienceville: Preloma makes a reappearance in the future in Chapter 5, being ravaged by dragonsbane.
• Serial Escalation: You fight many more True Dragons in this game, and eventually the stakes are raised beyond those of the previous games.
• Sequel Hook: While dragons were erased from existence after defeating VFD, Julietta is still working on his time machine, the ISDF is still around in some form, and it's stated that your other party members remember the old universe. Nagamimi also speculates that Yuma may have been reborn in the new universe, but admits that you shouldn't get your hopes up. Iod, at the end of the Shadow Realm, also reminds Unit 13 that there will eventually be a parallel universe where Dragons will rise again.
• Sexy Discretion Shot: Going on a third date with an NPC will end with the two of you going somewhere where you can be alone and the screen fading to black, with a line or two of dialogue suggesting that you're doing more than chatting. Perhaps the most blatant is Mio, who asks you to "make her an adult."
• Sharing a Body: The player characters share a body with the souls of humanity in the final chapter.
• Shoo Out the Clowns: You know things have gotten super serious in Chapter 6 because ND's Dragonsbane kills even the cats you've rescued and Chika and Rika leave their posts to take up their true duties leaving only a computer to serve as the shop.
• Shout-Out:
  • The Duelist class is a big one to the Yu-Gi-Oh! franchise, right down to the title. The Shadow Realm bonus dungeon's name is also a reference to the anime. The end of the description for unlocking your Duelist's EX Skill has you be told "Believe in the heart of the cards!"
  • The resident nurse is named maimai.
  • The doctor is named Hori. Hori is a manufacturer of various video game controllers and peripherals.
  • The male Agent class is one to Jet Set Radio, both wearing a JSRF shirt and having a color scheme reminiscent of Beat's. He also has a Virtual-ON button.
• Skill Point Reset: Changing a character's class refunds all the SP you've spent on them, letting you redistribute them for their new role.
• Skill Scores and Perks: You gain SP in battle which you can use to learn and enhance skills. Through developing the Nodens facility you can unlock more skills to learn.
• Stripperiffic:
  • Female Agents wear catsuits with Absolute Cleavage and thigh highs.
  • Female Rune Knights are bursting from their Chainmail Bikinis.
  • The Female Fortuners wear dresses with rather high hemlines. Those dresses are also made out of cloth starbursts with visible gaps.
  • Ulania's outfit consists nothing but a robe covering her huge breasts and leaves her black underwear in full view.
• Superboss: Massively buffed versions of the game's major bosses are faced throughout the Shadow Realm. At the end is a final battle with Blaster Raven.
• Suspicious Video-Game Generosity: Chapter 5.1 seems like it ends after a heartfelt cutscene with Mio, but then Nagamimi lets you enjoy a second day off, even asking you if you really want to end the day when you try to hit the bed again. Because if you advance the story any more after this, a Wham Episode ensues that kills off most of the cast and prevents you from doing most NPC-related things for a while, including dating, construction, and whatever sidequests you haven't finished yet.
• Taking You with Me:
  • The people of Atlantis sunk their city to weaken the 3rd True Dragon Nyala; eventually you're tasked with stopping the people of Atlantis from commiting mass suicide by killing Nyala outright.
  • The Fortuner and Rune Knight have skills that can do this: The Fortuner's Sacrifice deals massive damage to all enemies in exchange for removing them from the battle (meaning they can't be revived until the battle ends) and the Rune Knight's Knight's Pride gives the Rune Knight a chance to deal massive magic damage to an enemy when their LF reaches 0.
• This Is Reality: Before you set out to fight the dragons for the first time, Nagamimi reminds you that you're not playing a game anymore, and getting hit will hurt for real.
• Time Travel: The plot has the hero's guild travelling between Atlantis in the distant past, 2100 in a Tokyo recovering from the events of the 2020 series, and Eden in the distant future.
• Unwitting Pawn: Allie, a.k.a. the 2nd True Dragon ND/Nodens, wants to create VFD (who doesn't exist) by fusing the Dragon Chronicle with a being strong enough to defeat the True Dragons, so that VFD can create a new universe, and manipulates others into gathering the True Dragon specimens needed for it. Julietta was also in on it, although he was also being used and only believed that humans would evolve, not die.
• The Very Definitely Final Dungeon: Grateful Seventh, the plane where VFD waits to be born and recreate the universe.
• Voice with an Internet Connection: Nagamimi serves as your navigator when you're out on the field. Mio and Julietta take over this position sometimes.
• Wham Episode: Chapter 6. Installing Hypnos and Haze into Yuma turns him into a bloodthirsty dragon-human hybrid, and Allie reveals that she is the 2nd True Dragon ND, revealing that completing the Dragon Chronicle was a plan to produce a person worthy of evolving into VFD and destroying the universe, and that she is responsible for the Dragonsbane in Tokyo and the Dragon Sickness, before killing nearly everyone in Tokyo. Moreover, she reveals that Chika and Rika are the incarnations of Tokyo's Dragonslayer and that they must be killed in order to recreate it. You also lose access to a large number of side activities such as sidequests and dates, and while you get them back in the next chapter, it's due to Nagamimi cracking open a portal in time rather than things actually being restored.

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