How much money, for example, is too much money? Or power - where do you draw the line there? "Too much" is what folks say of others when they aren't getting enough themselves, it could be said. Excess is its own policeman; most things explode under too much internal pressure.

If that's the case, Dragon Warrior 7, the latest installment in Enix' venerable series, is a game that's starting to burst at the seams. Packing around 100-180 hours of pure RPG gameplay (said without facetiousness) in its unassuming dual CD case, Enix' flagship title for the year two-thousand-oh-one is as dense as any console RPG can get without collapsing in on itself.

Fortunately, Dragon Warrior 7 narrowly avoids becoming a black hole of fun, simply because the developers are so damn good at what they do - making Dragon Warrior titles. As the turgid bacterial evolution of the series' has progressed, it's developed in size and scope rather than innovation, and DW7 is the biggest chunk of raw RPG material the good folks at Enix (well, the combined efforts of designer Yuji Horii, artist Akira Toriyama, and musician Koichi Sugiyama's respective studios) have produced to date.

But first, perhaps a brief discussion of the series' history is in order. Influenced by the PC series "Wizardry" and "Ultima" of yore, Dragon Quest (as the series is known in Japan), is a distinctly Japanese homage and successor to those early titles. Spanning several console generations since the early days of the Famicom/NES, the DQ series has been not only incomprehensibly successful, but has established the very basic template for almost all console RPG titles subsequent to the release of its first installment. The same team (Horii, Toriyama, Sugiyama) has worked on each title, up to and including part seven. Sadly, the Super Nintendo canonical offerings of parts Five and Six never saw an English translation.

Seven, in many ways, is less of an evolution and more of a celebration of all things Dragon Quest. Very few new ideas have worked their way into the series, save for the requisite 3D graphics and camera. In fact, it could be surmised that DQ7 offers very little new simply because the designers chose to reassure their players that the essence of Dragon Quest was not lost when a third axis of view was added.

Not that they would've needed reassuring, regardless - Dragon Warrior 7 doesn't exactly break any new ground in the 3D arena, and it certainly doesn't appear particularly revolutionary, as rival series Final Fantasy did when it took a turn for the next generation with its seventh installment.

The story is likewise unambitious - you are the son of a famous fisherman in the town of Fishbel, on a tiny island surrounded by nothing but ocean. As intended, your first thought will be: where are all the other continents to explore, and how can this be a 100+ hour RPG if I only have about 10 square acres of real estate to wander about it?

This is when the meal is served. As the game progresses, you will discover an ancient fane which has the power to send your party into the past and unseal the lost land masses by resolving their fates for the better. Each land is a somewhat self-contained story that can be as short as a half-hour or as long as fifteen, depending on the scenario. Solving each area rewards you with enough tablet fragments to permit travel to another one or two continents, and the resulting scenarios, while perhaps a bit cliched, rarely disappoint from an adventure perspective. The variety and characterizations alone will surely please nostalgiacs, and newcomers to the series may find the changing perspective refreshing, if lacking a bit in any initial epic quality. And if it sounds a bit like the premise for a puzzle game rather than a typical story-driven RPG, then you might be a little closer to understanding the appeal of Dragon Warrior after all.

As the game meanders on, an overarching plot contrived by demonic forces becomes apparent, and true to the Dragon Warrior stereotype, the main character likewise emerges as the hero of legend. It's not exactly riveting fare, but Dragon Warrior has rarely been about story. In the case of Part Seven, the plot is pure a functional framework for the real substance of the game: battling, upgrading, puzzle solving, and exploring. That's not to say that the plot is bad, because the substories that dwell beneath its tired auspices are often fresh and fun in a weirdly traditional way, especially since they're augmented by such classic-styled graphics and effects.

If you aren't into RPG nostalgia, Dragon Warrior 7's graphics will offend. The environment graphics are downright klunky, with garish colors, swimming textures, and very low-poly structures. The character sprites are straight out of a SNES-era RPG, only this time they're scaled in to almost indistinct levels, all pixels and blotches of color. The overland character animation is embarassingly low-tech, and the few FMVs that occur defy description - there just aren't enough terms in all of HP Lovecraft's works combined to describe how hideous they are. Trust me on that one.

Ah, but there's also a charm there - the same gaudily-hued castles are also quite large, full of strange nooks and crannies to explore, with many secrets to ferret out. At the price of graphics has come the sort of gameplay series' fans expected with a 32-bit installment: larger, more detailed environs, more complex puzzles, and cleverly concealed secrets that could only be done in 2D, and without the technical encumbrance that would stress the limited RAM of the Playstation One.

Also, the unambitious graphics add another benefit the designers' considered of utmost importance: there are almost no significant load times. Transitions between areas are virtually seamless, and battles load quite a bit faster than those found in more graphically intense titles.

Battles are better, visually; the monsters you encounter are clever and well-drawn, with many smooth animations. Spell effects (when you finally get any spells worth mentioning) look jazzy, with plenty of clean alpha effects.

Artistically, the game remains weak. The textures are too indistinct to carry any real weight, and the use of color isn't especially judicious. Akira Toriyama, never my favorite artist, turns out his weakest set of character designs yet: the green-hooded fisherhero has to be the least-inspirational protagonist I've run into outside of a Roger Corman flick. Your fellow adventurers are perhaps a bit better: Maribel, the upper-class friend-turned-mageling, is at least a pleasantly non-sexpot offering in a genre crammed with male titillation, and Kiefer, a predictably rebellious princeling, has a few good lines despite his massive cranium. Later characters include the dancer Aira, a gregarious child raised by wolves, and an old knight looking to recapture the halcyon days of his youth. Yes, it's stereotype central. No, there aren't any clever twists to make them more palatable.

If you MUST have decent visuals to enjoy an RPG, and you have a PS2, you'll find that turning on the texture smoothing effects has a fairly significant effect on the overall appearance of the game, de-chunking bitmaps, making enemies appear less aliased, making sprites seem more solid, and erendering environments more distinctly. Do turn this feature on the first chance you get, PS2 folk.

The game is also equally boring in the sound area, from a technical perspective: the music, despite what some Sugiyama fans would have you believe, is not especially evocative or eloquent in its composition and orchestration, and most of the time it sounds painfully generic, with SNES-quality instrumentation. The sound effects are pure nostalgia: mostly clomps and clanks that sound downsampled directly from the originating NES titles. Personally, as a longtime DQ fan, I found that I liked the nostalgiac samples, but there's no denying that the technical quality is about as bottom of the barrel as you can get. All the classic Dragon Warrior fanfares and glissonders return, with perhaps a little aural oomph added.

After all this griping, even the least astute readers out there have to be wondering why this review doesn't sync up with the score to the right, which would indicate a quality offering.

Because - and I'm starting my sentence with a dependent clause to make a point here - it's bloody DRAGON WARRIOR.

It's not about graphics. If you want it to be about graphics, do NOT buy the game. Don't. That's my review. Run away and save your dollars for a Playstation 2 and Final Fantasy X. I say that without sarcasm because ANYONE that buys a Dragon Warrior title expecting an immersive visual/audio experience is going to be sorely disappointed. That isn't why folks play and love Dragon Warrior.

And it's not about story. Some games ARE about story, and some aren't. Dragon Warrior 7 may fall into the often arbitrarily-defined "RPG" genre, but it is a game of exploration, upgrading, puzzle solving, and character management first and foremost, and under that assumption shall the game be reviewed. The story is stupidly charming to series aficionadoes, but even the angsty, indulgent pen of Square's Sakaguchi scribes a better and more original tale. In Dragon Warrior, like many non-RPG titles, the story is a shallow framework that contains the gameplay without becoming the raison d'etre driving scenario design. Again: Dragon Warrior 7 is a game of exploration, not a game of clever plot dissemination.

With that established, let's talk about why Dragon Warrior 7 is a *good* game.

Dragon Warrior 7 is a game where thinking is required. Bosses are difficult, battles are often meaningful, and the puzzles are cunning. The land is very large and often times, very little direction is provided. This makes for a more cerebrally-engaging experience, which of course has been the design thrust of latter Dragon Warrior titles versus its more story-driven kindred.

The lands of Estard are big. VERY BIG. You will do a lot of exploration throughout vast maze-like dungeons, caves, palaces, and labyrinths. There are also a lot of characters you *must* speak to in order to find some skein of direction, and there are more hidden locations and secrets than I can count. EVen the towns can be fairly sizable. Many of these dungeons have elegant puzzles to solve, and will require you to do a little spacial reasoning along with taxing your memory. Very few of the dungeons were tedious, although the ability to save anywhere would've been greatly appreciated at times. Much of the gameplay revolves around finding tablet Shards and returning them to fane, where upon reconstruction a new land becomes available.

I can't emphasize enough how much of this game's playability revolves around the idea of adventure and exploration. The cities, environments, and dungeons are a joy to crawl around in. At every turn, there appears to be a door you hadn't seen, or a mysterious chest just out of reach, or a series of tunnels that leads to a hole new region. New towns with new personalities are always becoming available, with new weapons and equipment to purchase. Despite a few hitches, fans of discovery will never be bored: there's always a new horizon right around the corner.

Character management is a key play element. To succeed in this game, you'll need a team of heavy hitters, and you'll need to know their abilities intimately. There's a large selection of classes and their accompanying skills/spells, all of which have a surprisingly level of tactical value and often make the difference between a cakewalk battle and a potentially fate encounter.

Herein lies my only significant gripe with the play design of Dragon Warrior 7: it takes far too long to get to the point that new skills and classes may be earned, at around 20-30 hours. During this "initial" period, in which you'll visit several lands and solve a pretty wide variety of dungeons, you will find your characters with the same basic skill set - the hero has his cure spells and attack boost, Maribel has a fireball spell and a few status spells, Kiefer has his FireSlash, and Gabo has his incredibly useful array of wolf attacks. Boooo-ring. This odd pacing decision causes the game to really drag around hour 20, although the scenario in which you gain the ability to change classes is expertly designed and assembled. After that, it's upgrade madness as you build out your characters and tailor them into slime-laughtering swords, mages, mariners, bards, jesters, and what-have-you. As you grow your characterss, you'll find the combined mastery of several new classes opens new ones, such as the stout Dragoon, sexy Teen Idol, or the mighty Sage classes. Diligent types will find a final tier of classes, which includes the Summoner, Godhand, and (as expected), Hero jobs. Each class has a diverse range of statistical modifiers and learnable skills. If you want to make your characters as strong as they can be, you'll need to fight a lot of battles, which is ultimately good, seeing how nasty a few of the latter-game bosses are. Obtaining new classes and watching your characters grow in battle ability is, of course, a great joy, and after that initial slow pace of development, the game swings into full gear, absorbing you with new configuration options and statistical growth. Hooray for stats!

Classes grow as you fight significant battles (by significant, I mean monsters of a similar level - fighting weak slimes will not grow your character). To "master" a class, a certain number of battles must be fought. This might grow tedious were it not for the fact that skills and spells are quickly earned, and there always seems to be some new element added. Battles are also very speedy, since the combat engine isn't exactly taxing the ol' PSone hardware.

Again, the game teeters on the brink of being overwhelming in its scope: you will fight a lot of battles, and while I found that aspect to be well-balanced, there's no doubt that those folks less into bashing and more into emoting are going to get irritated at all of the character management activities needed. Bosses are especially brutal, and I loved that: there are a number of fights that will shut your party down by the second round if you aren't on the ball and fully understand the repertoire of tactical skills and spells at your command. Status and enhancement spells are absolutely vital to your success, as are pre-emptive tactics. Every boss encounter is grueling and will tax your knowledge of the Dragon Warrior skill system.

There are also a number of side games, including an island of pilgrims you assist in settling, and a fairly solid casino. If that's not enough, there are TinyMedals scattered about the world for to seek out and exchange for some fairly hefty rewards. While not of this is as good-naturedly gratifying as Dragon Warrior 3 GBC's board game, they still provide a good deal of engaging fun alternative to the main quest.

The primary menuing interface is a bit archaic, but several buttons can be used as shortcuts, invoking contextual actions such as "Talk" or "Look" without selecting the command from a menu (as was the case in early DW titles). There are a lot of extra options that allow automated sorting of backpacks and character inventories. Equipping and unequipping also features several shortcuts, and the now-mandatory "equip form the shop" behavior is pleasantly present. Overall, the interface and menuing system, while not up to the standards seen in many PC games, is solid, if a bit ugly.

Taken altogether, Dragon Warrior 7 can be too much steak, and not enough spice. For folks that love the sense of discovery that comes with large, open-ended adventures, and enjoy building characters from humble beginnings into monster-slaying machines, DW7 will seem to good to be true. Dragon Warrior 7 takes and extends the scope of previous offerings in the series, although it does little that is very new. Series fans will love it, but overall RPG fans should know their preferences before treading into the deep waters of Dragon Warrior.

If RPG gaming were a diet, Dragon Warrior 7 would be several truckloads of raw meat. It ain't pretty, but there is a lot of it and it sure does satisfy. It'll also give you a heart attack in large doses. Old-school and PC RPG fans looking to clog their gaming colon with heavy-duty character management and chunky puzzle-solving can do no wrong with Enix' RPG full-course offering; gaming vegans who look for story and soulful characters over well-salted statistics should stick with Final Fantasy.