TLDR

Dragon Quest VII Reimagined has so much that I love about it that it's hard to imagine someone who enjoys JRPGs not immediately falling in love with the unique art style, snappy quality of life improvements, and episodic story that has more interesting arcs than not. Dragon Quest VII fills the same void the Dragon Quest has always filled: to be simple gaming comfort food. A good vs evil story that has a young protagonist travel a vast world to get to the bottom of the evil. The game is sadly held back by an incredibly verbose story and a lack of music variety, which keeps it from being a game that I will be itching to return to in the near future.

The Things I Love

Most Unreal Engine games end up falling into the pitfall of all looking or feeling very similar, but Dragon Quest VII Re-imagined is able to sidestep that by sticking true to Akira Toriyama's original concept art and leaning into the more exaggerated nature of character design. I love the diaroma-like open world that has a very pleasing tilt shift, giving the whole world a nice sense of scale. The game also nails the snappy sensibilities of modern RPGs like fast travel early on, minimalistic and easy-to-understand UI for menus and dialogue boxes, and even quest markers for every main and side quest. So getting stuck for more than a few minutes is really not likely to happen, even for newcomers to the series. I actually think this game would be a great starting point for anyone interested in getting into the genre as a whole, as the experience really represents everything you expect from one of these games, boiled down to just the basics.

Surprisingly, the story had a few moments that ended up taking me by surprise. My favorite area is the first area you explore outside of the starting town in the prologue, but the game did continue to delight with a story that was mostly predictable and towns that feel incredibly cosy to explore and just interesting enough to keep me engaged for the roughly 50 hours it took me to get through the main content. I really liked the entire roster of characters on display, and even though some of the designs, Keefer, in particular, might end up falling into straight diabolical territory.

The Things I don't love

The game has the most repetitive soundtrack I have heard in any game since I played Dragon Quest XI 5 years ago. You will hear the same 10 songs on loop for the entire runtime of the game, leading me to play almost the entirety of the second half of the game on mute so as not to go completely insane. The biggest issue with music repetition is how the songs are looped and spaced out. The overworld song is no more than a couple of minutes long and loops every single time you go from town to town. There is one battle song that you will hear for more than 10 hours of your runtime. While I get that there is nostalgia and familiarity with the original soundtrack, I can't help but wish they had gone the extra mile to maybe give the dungeons or towns their own theme songs to help give each place its own identity.

While I never played the original Dragon Quest VII, I do know that they chopped off about half of the runtime while making this remake, and let me tell you, you would never know that. Every single story bit drags on a bit longer than it needs to, conversations that should take a minute end up taking five, and once I get the gist of the conversation, I find myself mashing the circle button to get through the conversation. The game has a fairly interesting story, but the wordiness gets in the way of what otherwise would be a very snappy and cozy journey in a vast open sea.

Final Thoughts

I am really glad that I played Dragon Quest VII; the interesting host of characters, lovely visuals, and a fun-to-explore world kept me excited to jump in every day. I love the core JRPG progression system of jumping into turn-based battles and slowly gaining experience and gold to out-level every single challenge the game can throw at you. While I would say this game is on the easier side, it still stands as a great classic re-imagined. I only wish they streamlined a bit of the dialogue and added more tracks to the game to make it feel more like a completely fresh and modern experience. I played the game on a mix of Steam Deck and my 4090 gaming PC and never once ran into any serious bugs or slowdown.