Dragon Quest VII Reimagined Special Game Preview

Dragon Quest is one of the most established and recognizable RPG franchises in the world. Not only are there over a dozen games, but a few of those games have even seen remasters or remakes on different platforms. Hell, in the case of this installment, some have seen more than one remake! Dragon Quest VII Reimagined is a remake of Dragon Quest VII: Fragments of the Forgotten Past for the Nintendo 3DS, which in turn was a remake of Dragon Quest VII for the original PlayStation. Anime News Network was allowed to try out the game at a special preview event in New York City, but did this preview leave us with enough to get excited? I would say that it did.

The number one thing that sells me on this remake is its aesthetic. SQUARE ENIX took the classic character designs done by the late Akira Toriyama and perfectly translated them to a 3D aesthetic. Before trying out the demo, a small presentation was done explaining the process of remaking the game from the ground up. The studio created real 3D models of the characters and scanned them into the game to make a toy aesthetic. I don't know if they did this for all of the character models in the game, but I know they were at least done for the main playable characters that comprise your party. In-game, everything runs smoothly, and traversing the overworld definitely invokes this feeling of being a kid running around with miniatures in a diorama. The textures are rich and detailed with a slight blur at certain angles to create this interesting sense of death perception. The character designs and overall style might not look the most realistic, but little presentation techniques definitely create this sense of depth that made me feel like I could just reach in through the screen and play around with the scenery, especially on a big TV.

Admittedly, I wasn't able to enjoy a lot of the larger story. As with most RPGs, it's expected that this game is going to feel pretty involved. I was relegated to one specific story mission and just forty-five minutes of playtime. However, in those forty-five minutes, I went from a small town to a large tower dungeon filled with monsters, to a flooded overworld, to a small underwater sanctuary where I promptly got my teeth kicked in by a rather difficult boss. My party was already assembled with their own levels, classes, and items accumulated, though I was able to purchase a few additional items using the money that I already had.

This is where things get a bit more standard, with every member representing a different class that allows them access to specific techniques or abilities. The game seems to offer multiple ways of augmenting your characters for whatever specific play style you feel comfortable with. This seems to be most viable through the vocation system, where each character is allowed about two vocations, which can offer unique spells and abilities that you can use in battle. These vocations could augment your stats and also be used to help deliver finishers in the middle of combat once they are properly charged up, like super attacks. I'm not sure how this compares to the previous games, but based on initial impressions, it does seem like the options are well beyond what you would see in more typical RPGs.

It didn't take long to grasp what different enemies were weak to, and combat was incredibly snappy despite being turn-based. I was able to adjust the battle speed and even turn on auto-fighting so that I could just breeze through random encounters in the dungeon without much issue. Things only got really difficult once we took on the first real boss, Gracos, towards the end of my play session. I tried fighting him twice with assistance from a story-relevant NPC, and I was having a rough time. I'm not sure if I was under-leveled or if the boss battle was particularly hard. This is where it is a bit hard to say, without checking out the rest of the game or where exactly I was supposed to be at this point in the larger story.

Overall, despite that final impression, I am fairly optimistic about this remake. It does seem a bit redundant to remake this game for a second time, but this seems like a great opportunity to update a beloved game in an established franchise for more modern audiences. I will pick this up and invest multiple hours into it. Hopefully, I'll be able to give stronger thoughts by then.