Dragon Quest VII? Why? That was the question when I heard about this remake. Square Enix had successfully made HD-2D ports of Dragon Quest III, and a combined package for I-II. It seemed intent on reviving classic Dragon Quest games, in particular for newcomers who missed them the first time around. I was one of those newcomers, having only dabbled in a handful. But why skip ahead to Dragon Quest VII, by reputation one of the most notoriously off-putting and bloated games in the series? After more than 40 hours, I’m still not quite sure. Dragon Quest VII: Reimagined does a lovely job in presenting the world and spiritual aesthetics of Dragon Quest, and its suite of quality-of-life tools and shortcuts are appreciated for how they speed up the flow of the game. But it can often feel meandering and old-fashioned, in spite of itself.
Dragon Quest VII follows a pair of friends–Auster, the son of a humble port town fisherman, and Kiefer, the princely heir to their kingdom. The two are convinced that there’s more to the world than their one humble kingdom, but when the adventure begins, there actually isn’t. Your island is the only landmass on the map, and the world is isolated and lonely. This is essentially a world in which the villain has already won and wiped out nearly the entire planet. As the adventure unfolds, the two are joined by more companions and begin to find magical tablets that transport them back in time, helping to right some historical wrong or overcome an evil in the past, which then restores that island in the present. This structure sometimes goes to dark places, since each island is a place that was ultimately doomed in the past, often by their own hubris or inability to come to an understanding.
On one level, this time-hopping premise carries echoes of Chrono Trigger, another game famous for its Akira Toriyama character designs. You get to see what’s gone wrong in the past and fix it, and then discover how your own intervention has manifested itself in the present, where inhabitants of the restored island have been living peacefully for centuries, unaware that they had previously been blinked out of existence. Some of the scenarios even have playful touches subverting expectations about what you’ll find after centuries of the new land’s culture left to its own devices.
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