Chopping one of Dragon Quest’s most notorious entries down to size.
Dragon Quest fans have been eating good over the last several years. Square Enix has filled the gap between 2017’s Dragon Quest 11 and the announced-but-not-yet-dated Dragon Quest 12 by producing some tremendous remakes of prior games in the series. 2024’s HD-2D remake of Dragon Quest 3 was an incredible experience and they followed that up with an insane glow-up for DQ 1&2 just 4 short months ago. 2026 is the 40th anniversary of Dragon Quest and we’ve already gotten an early anniversary present in the form of a total reimagining of the 7th game in the series, Dragon Quest 7: Fragments of the Forgotten Past.
Dragon Quest 7 is notorious for its intimidating length, howlongtobeat.com clocks the PlayStation original at 108 hours just for the main story and a whopping 266 for a completionist playthrough while the 3DS remake comes in at 75 and 130 hours respectively. For this new “Reimagined” version, the team has completely rebuilt DQ7 from the ground up and made some dramatic changes, including updates to the combat system, difficulty, and inventory system while also removing some optional content in an effort to streamline and modernize the game. These changes mean that this version of the game is not only more accessible and less daunting than it’s prior versions, but also likely now the most approachable mainline Dragon Quest game in the series for beginners. Whether or not that sentence makes you excited or cautious likely depends on your experience with both this specific game and the series as a whole, but in general I still found it to be an incredibly rewarding experience even as a grizzled veteran of the franchise.
MSRP: $59.99
Platforms: PC (reviewed), Xbox, PlayStation, Switch
Price I’d Pay: $59.99
The story of the game follows a boy from a fishing village called Pilchard Bay. He lives on the island of Estard, which as far as he and everyone living on the island are aware is the only land in the world. He and his friend Kiefer, the prince of Estard, long for adventure and dream of discovering what else is out there across the sea. As they sneak around, looking for a way off the island (much to the King’s dismay), they are also joined by their friend Maribel, the mayor’s daughter who can’t stand for them to have all the fun. Eventually they will meet several other characters in their travels, who join them in their quest to restore the world. The interplay between the main characters is great and is reminiscent of the banter between the main characters in the recent remake of Dragon Quest 2.
The three heroes eventually find a way to travel to the past of their world, through magical stone tablets that they find pieces of during their travels. These tablets take them to other islands, where they must solve mysteries, vanquish monsters, and save townspeople to restore the islands in their present. The discovery process for each of these islands plays out pretty similarly to each other. Find the tablet pieces, travel to the new world, complete the quest(s) on the island, and then travel to the island in the present to see what new and exciting things there are to discover. Some of the dungeons will include puzzles to solve in addition to combat encounters, including some truly memorable experiences. This loop makes the game feel like a short story anthology in practice, with smaller episodic stories making up a larger theme. Not only does this give the game a unique take on the standard RPG story formula, but it makes for an excellent gameplay loop. I found myself just as curious about what each island would be like in the present as I was driven to solve whatever problem was plaguing it in the past.
There are several islands missing here from the prior versions of the game, but the content is supplemented by a brand-new experience that is tied very closely to the main story, so for me the trade-off was minimal. You can see some of the seams of the missing content here however, including an island that (in previous versions) included the now-cut Monster Meadows quest which saw you building up a nature preserve of sorts for various monsters in the world. The island still exists and still has a mission in the past associated with it, but once it pops up in the present world just sits there dormant for the rest of the run-time of the game since the monster taming mechanic didn’t make its way into this version of the game. There are some other, more story related, seams that show up here and there that I won’t discuss because they’re spoiler adjacent. If you’ve played the original those will be a little more obvious, if not they just come off as a bit jarring. All in all I think the decision to cut content here serves the overall Reimagined experience well, but it does make it more of a shame that the 3DS version of DQ 7 didn’t make its way to iOS like 1-6 and 8. If you are interested in playing the cut content, finding a copy of the PlayStation original or the 3DS remake are your only real hopes.
The most obvious changes to the game for long time Dragon Quest fans will come in the battle and inventory systems. Battling in DQ7: Reimagined has been completely overhauled into a much more user friendly and simple experience. While battles with monsters and bosses still play out in the turn-based structure the series is known for, you’ll be fighting in far fewer of them (if you choose to) than you would in either of the prior versions of the game. The reason for this is that instead of getting ambushed by random battles from enemies that are invisible on the map, you’ll instead see monsters walking around and you can choose to fight them or to avoid them. You can even tweak the difficulty settings in the game to make it so they can’t attack/chase after you and only go into battle if you run into them. If you do choose to fight, you’ve also got a great secret weapon on your side, because pressing the A button allows your character to hit the monster on the map, taking some valuable HP off them before the battle begins. If your party is strong enough, you can even kill weaker monsters outright using this move. You’ll gain less XP and gold this way (about the equivalent of one monster’s worth instead of a full team) but it makes for much quicker movement around the overworld. I found that just by clearing the entire island of monsters each time I left a town/village/cave on my way to my next destination I was easily able to level up enough to take down enemies quickly and afford the best equipment each island could provide. This also makes for a much more simplified grinding experience at higher levels, although grinding isn’t nearly as necessary in this game as in previous iterations.
Dragon Quest 7: Reimagined also features a vocation system, like in several earlier games in the franchise. Like in Dragon Quest 6, the game features a tiered vocation system which unlocks stronger vocations as you level up beginner level ones. Each character starts with a vocation, and the full suite of beginner vocations are unlocked after reaching a certain point in the story. Mastering beginner vocations not only unlocks new skills for your characters and increases their attribute points, but specific combos of mastered beginner vocations will unlock advanced, and combos of mastered advanced vocations will unlock the ultimate vocation.
The vocation system is a great way to not only power up your characters but also to customize their skills for the role you want them to occupy in the team. Reimagined adds a new feature called Moonlighting, which allows you to have two active vocations at once. Not only that, but it provides bonuses to your mastery of one vocation if you have another mastered vocation equipped. This, plus the combat changes above, means it’s easy to get each of your party teammates up to mastery in the highest vocations by the end of the game without a lot of needless grinding. In addition to the skills and attribute bonuses associated with each vocation, they also each have a unique perk that can be “let loose” in battle once a character gets “worked up”. These perks are real game changers and include some cool attacks/buffs and summons.
Between the removal of random encounters, powerful skills and weapons to be unlocked/purchased along the way, one-shot kills on weaker monsters, and the ability to have two vocations at once combat in Dragon Quest 7: Reimagined as a whole is much easier than previous entries in the franchise. As a rule, I play review games on Normal difficulty. All through the main story in DQ7 I was able to fight every battle (including boss battles) on normal difficulty without needing to control any of my party members with the “Follow Orders” tactics setting. I kept my entire party (yes, even the protagonist) on “Fight Wisely” and had them auto-battle through the entire main game. During that time I didn’t have one party member die in battle. Some of that is from being smart about limited grinding (the aforementioned clear out of each island) but some of it is because the game just isn’t that difficult on Normal. Thankfully there are plenty of options to adjust difficulty to line up with your expectations. You can alter the damage dealt by both your party and the monsters you face along the way, you can increase the rate at which you earn XP, gold, or proficiency in each rank of your vocation, you can even set the game up to have your party’s HP refilled after each battle. This makes for a very accessible experience for new players while also allowing more seasoned players an opportunity to make the game a bit more punishing. The post-game content is much more difficult however, and that’s when some grinding becomes necessary. Thankfully the post-game opens up several new avenues for that, so don’t worry about getting your party ready for the post-game content before you’ve finished the main game.
There are some changes that can’t be turned off that longtime fans of the franchise might find a bit too simplistic. All characters have a shared inventory, which means that nothing in your inventory is “off-limits” for any character because it’s in the bag or on another character’s person. This removes some of the tedium of inventory management, but it also takes away some of the pre-battle strategy that is a staple of the series. Again, your mileage may vary on this change. As a longtime fan of the series I got used to it by about 10 hours in, but I do think it trivializes some of the items in the game. If one of your party members dies in combat, you won’t have to drag their coffin back to town to resurrect them at a church or cast a Zing spell to bring them back to life. They’ll automatically come back to life (with 1 HP) at the end of each battle. This is another change that lines up with what we see in other RPG’s but feels like a bit of an oversimplification for Dragon Quest.
Visually the game is incredible. The diorama style environments look fantastic, and the characters and enemies look like figurines in the Toriyama style come to life. The only character who doesn’t come off looking great in this style is Kiefer, who just looks like he has a massive, misshapen head. The rest of the cast looks really great though, especially in the exceptionally well animated cutscenes. Each of the main characters has voice acting, and you’ll be able to chat with your party during the course of the game to find out what they think about what most recently happened (although the party chat in this version of the game is somewhat limited compared to prior versions). The music is exactly the high quality you would expect from the series.
I really enjoyed my time with Dragon Quest 7: Reimagined. Even as a hardened DQ veteran I appreciated the streamlined changes that were made to bring the game’s substantial run-time down a notch. I completed the game with about 47 hours on the clock and polished off the post-game content at about 57 hours. I’ve got 1 achievement to go (find all items) but the in-game checklist for that one isn’t great, so it will likely wait until someone produces a guide. That feels to me like the right length of time for this game. Long enough that you feel like you’re getting a full experience, but not so long that it overstays it’s welcome. That said, if you’re a veteran of the franchise, I would definitely consider adjusting some of the difficulty settings. If I hadn’t been playing for review, I certainly would have bumped a couple of them up a notch. I can see where some folks who love the original might be disappointed in the changes (especially the cut content) but I think this version serves the story of the game well and will undoubtedly allow for more players to enjoy both the game and the series.
Review copy of game provided by publisher.
