Making The Most Of Dragon Quest VII Traveler’s Tablets

Anyone who played Dragon Quest IX before heading into Dragon Quest VII will get nostalgic once the time for StreetPassing comes along. Like the Nintendo DS game, the Nintendo 3DS installment rewards you for connecting with other players. While Dragon Quest IX allowed you to collect treasure maps with its tag mode, Dragon Quest VII offers the opportunity to acquire Traveler’s Tablets.

First, you aren’t going to be able to get Traveler’s Tablets right away. Like much of Dragon Quest VII’s content, they’re locked away on a specific continent. You won’t be able to start taking advantage of these extra dungeons and the rewards they offer until you’ve made a dent in the game and unlocked The Haven and Monster Meadow. Fortunately, it’s easier to reach this location than it is the class-changing Alltrades Abbey. After handling issues in Ballymolloy and Emberdale, you’ll find yourself in Regenstein. Upon solving the issue there, The Haven and Carey will appear in the present.

Carey wants to make The Haven a home for reformed monsters. This is how you’ll acquire your first few Traveler’s Tablets. Each new resident will bring a tablet connected to their original race with it. Finding these folks is rather easy, though again requires you to reach certain points in the storyline before inviting them to move in. The reformed slime will set up shop right away, introducing you to proper Traveler’s Tablet usage with his gift. From there, you’ll be able to find someone in each town in the order they returned to the world. A man on the second floor of Estard’s inn, a woman in Ballymolloy’s tallest building, and a cook in Emberdale’s pub will all be ready to move in by the time you reach about the 25 hour mark. You don’t have to get clues from The Haven residents to find each new citizen, but can stop by if you’re stumped to see who’s next and if they’re ready to be recruited.

While StreetPassing is certainly an option for exchanging Dragon Quest VII’s Traveler’s Tablets, and can be enabled by talking to the old man who lives in Monster Meadows, the best way to take advantage of this feature is to go online. Like Bravely Default and Bravely Second, you can connect to the internet to collect Traveler’s Tablets. Of course, this only happens after reaching the point in the story when Phlegmrique, Gene, and Fuchsia are living in The Haven. That’s when the Download Bar will open.

At the Download Bar, you can send Traveler’s Tablets you’ve collected acquire them from other players, and collect official distributions. Memories of an Old Friend, Feral Forest, Tough Nuts, and Treasure Hunts are the first bonus tablets immediately available, with Memories of an Old Friend available for an undisclosed period of time and the other three ending on September 30, 2016. You can share one of your own Traveler’s Tablets every 24 hours and collect another from some other player, but the official distributions don’t count toward that daily limit.

Once you have some Traveler’s Tablets, it’s a good idea to investigate your new acquisitions. Especially since, again, you can’t start generating your own until another point in the story. (Have you noticed a trend?) You’ll be able to start collecting official tablets and StreetPass tablets before creating your own. In fact, you won’t even see any of the monsters you’ve tamed in Monster Meadow until after the caretaker is recruited. This is quite a bit after Alltrades Abbey, as you have to wait until Monster Park becomes an actual location you can visit in the present time to make your own.

You’re given plenty of extra things to do in Dragon Quest VII. This is a massive game, one which takes at least 20 to 30 hours to really open up. Traveler’s Tablets will begin to factor into gameplay after about the 10-15 hour mark, but you won’t unlock every element of it until you’re really established. Still, it’s very possible to take advantage of online sharing and offline StreetPasses while waiting for everything to become available. Enjoy what you can, while you can, and use officially distributed tablets to prepare yourself.

Dragon Quest VII is now available for the Nintendo 3DS.