Dragon Quest VII Reimagined

Written by Eric Hauter on 2/3/2026 for PC   PS5   SW2   XSX  

There are very few sounds in the world that get my blood pumping like the introductory orchestral score in a Dragon Quest game. When I hear that swell of music that quickly bursts into the main theme song, my heart starts beating faster and my mind starts racing with ideas of adventure. I get pretty excited at the prospect of starting one of these games. 

And I was a little more excited than usual about starting Dragon Quest VII Reimagined, because I never got the chance to play the original Dragon Quest VII. Released on PlayStation 1 in 2000, the game slipped right past me, as I had already moved onto the PlayStation 2, and was distracted by the allure of shiny new PS2 titles. And though I was a huge fan of the 3DS, I somehow missed the 2016 3DS remake. So this newest version of Dragon Quest VII marks the first opportunity I've had to embark on this particular adventure. 

For those who did play the original Dragon Quest VII and might be balking at the idea of taking on such a lengthy story again (I’ve seen reports of over 100 hours spent on the PS1 version), take heart. The new “Reimagining” has been streamlined to the point where it is much more manageable. Don’t get me wrong, this is still a meaty Dragon Quest game, but once I settled into the title and the flow of the game was revealed, I was quickly satisfied that I was going to be able to get through it. Square-Enix put a lot of effort into making this game approachable and modern, foregoing a more traditional “remake” in favor of stripping the game down to the studs and then rebuilding it from scratch, giving the heave-ho to anything that might bog down the experience.

Unlike most Dragon Quest titles, which offer a massive open world to explore, Dragon Quest VII shocked me with a more episodic structure. The story quickly falls into a pattern, which once discerned, is pretty reassuring. It is possible to play through the game’s capsule-like episodes in just a couple of hours, which makes the entire adventure feel much more achievable.

The player hero (I creatively named my guy “Eric”) starts the game on a small island where he has lived his entire life. The rest of the village seems to be perfectly happy with their fishing lifestyle and are resigned to the fact that there are no other landmasses anywhere in the world—just this tiny island, which also houses a castle, a cave, and very few other points of interest, floating in an eternal sea of blue.

The hero and his buddies—the prince from the nearby castle and the village mayor’s daughter—are convinced that there is more to life than fishing and set out to discover whether or not they are really alone in an endless ocean. Before long, they discover a cave with a number of time portals, each of which shotguns them back in time to a different lost island on the verge of disaster. It is up to the little team to figure out the situation on each of these islands and solve whatever mystery or problem is facing the local populace, thus preventing the island from being destroyed and disappearing from the map.

Once the crisis is averted, the heroes can pop back forward in time, where the now-saved island appears in the current-day ocean. The team then revisits the island in the present to see how their actions impacted the present day (beyond keeping the island from being destroyed). Eventually, more characters are added to the party while the map expands out, giving the game a nice feeling of progression and growth without ever feeling overwhelming.

This flow—go to the past, solve the mystery, come to the present, revisit the island—forms a comforting loop, and gives the player a sense of real progress throughout the game. Though the islands become progressively larger and more complex, they are still mostly manageable enough to get through in one sitting, and you can clearly see where you are by noting how many islands are left to visit before you hit the end stretch for the big finale. The little episodic stories told on each island are clever and fun, and it’s a hoot to land for the first time on each new landmass and figure out what weird disaster is underway that will require your intervention. 

Foregoing the HD-2D art format of the other recent remakes, Dragon Quest VII Reimagined opts for a very different approach, using an art style that renders the game’s worlds like little dioramas, with the characters moving across them like living dolls. Indeed, it turns out that the developers at Square-Enix actually created physical dolls and scanned them into the game to be animated. It’s a lot of fun to see the primary characters rendered this way, but what I really loved was seeing the iconic Dragon Quest monsters as they showed up. From the ubiquitous slimes to the “muddy hands,” all of the baddies in this game look the best they ever have. I know that it is too much to hope for, but the art style here would look absolutely stunning in VR—the design is screaming out for a 3D conversion. But even in handheld mode on the Switch 2, Dragon Quest VII Reimagined is pretty great looking.

Unlike the Final Fantasy series, which reinvents the wheel with every release, the combat and other systems in Dragon Quest remain fairly consistent from game to game. Indeed, I recently played through Dragon Quest I & II Remake and was struck while playing Dragon Quest VII just how much of the original game design is still present six games later. Yes, the vocation system does add a lot of flexibility to how you develop your characters, but much of the turn-based  combat system from Dragon Quest II is still the same in VII, giving the series a continuity that many others lack. If it isn’t broken, don’t fix it.

If you have played any of the mainline Dragon Quest games, you will feel quite at home here, and if you are a newbie, this is a perfect place to jump in. A ton of options allow players to tune the game every-which-way to make it more accessable. Which, of course, leads to some of the issues that I have with the difficulty settings.

My Problem with the Difficulty Settings

Let me tell you a story from my JRPG-playing past. Stick with me here, I promise it is relevant. 

When the original Wild Arms—a fantastic turn-based JRPG—released on PlayStation 1, it was quickly discovered by players that an in-game glitch could be used to instantly generate 255 copies of any object in the game. Wild Arms, like most JRPGs of the era, included little items that could slightly raise your characters’ stats. In this case, they were “stat apples” which you would find in chests or as loot drops. When used, these Stat Apples would give your Power, Hardiness, Agility, or Magic attacks a small, permanent boost.

After playing through about half the game as intended, I grew tired of grinding through every battle. So, I gave into temptation and generated thousands of apples. I spent an hour or two spamming them for each of my characters until my entire party was maxed out. Now, instead of needing to employ strategy or thought in battle, I could simply stroll through the game, spamming Attack and watching my enemies fall before me. I became a Wild Arms god, and it completely ruined the game for me. My newfound power did not feel earned. I had cheated myself out of the satisfaction of slowly growing my strength, so each subsequent victory felt hollow. I don’t think I ever finished that first run of the game, and when I played it next, I purposely ignored the apple glitch. 

And no, I don’t want to talk about how many diamonds I generated in The Legend of Zelda: Tears of the Kingdom before Nintendo patched out the “jump off of something and throw all your stuff on the ground” glitch.

My point is that when offered a way to take the easy way out in a game, I’ll usually take it, even to the detriment of my own experience. As an older player with hand problems, I regularly bump the difficulty level of games down to Easy without a second thought. I still feel that the games offer enough friction to make my playthrough satisfying. Which is why I have to question the quality-of-life improvements that Square-Enix has been building into its Dragon Quest remakes. These features have been a long-time coming, but now that they are here, I’m not certain if I appreciate the ability to allow the game to play itself for me.

There are a lot of ways to fine tune the difficulty of Dragon Quest VII, and I’ve been struggling to find a configuration that will allow me to move through battles more efficiently while still maintaining the satisfaction that I get from actually playing and beating a game. I started off on the Medium difficulty level, which, for the record, isn’t terribly difficult to start with. And like most JRPGs, if battles are too tough, you can grind for a little bit and beat up on a bunch of basic enemies until you level up a few times, and then everything is easier. 

But before long, I started turning on quality-of-life features, and it quickly became a “death by a thousand cuts” situation. First, I turned on the feature that would automatically heal my entire party after every battle. I hate going back to an inn to sleep all the time to heal up, so this seemed like a reasonable solution. 

While I was in the menu, I noticed the settings that would give me extra XP and gold for each win. Who wouldn’t want that? So I turned it on. I started looking into the auto-battle system, which allows you to configure individual characters (or the full party) to adopt different behaviors. This one can focus on magic, that one can stick to melee, another can fight in a way that is more balanced. But when using magic, I realized that I was running out of magic points too quickly, so I set the auto-battle system to “Don’t Use MP,” which allowed my guys to just automatically battle through trash mobs by whaling on them with weapons. I figured I would turn the feature off for boss battles, which would require a bit more thought and strategy, so I would still have all of my magic left to use for healing and special attacks.

But lo and behold, combined with the setting that speeds up battle animations, this combination of settings made common battles so easy and quick that I never avoided them. I could just grind super quickly through every monster on the screen, and then maybe circle back for another round. It took no time at all! By the time I got to the boss battles, my guys were so overpowered that I didn’t need to disengage the auto battle system at all. I could just let it roll and melee every boss to death without even thinking about it. 

After a couple of hours of that, it started dawning on me that I was barely even playing the game at all. Sure, I was tapping buttons to move through dialogue scenes, and I was steering my characters around, but I had used the systems in Dragon Quest VII Reimagined to convert it from a JRPG to an adventure game. In other words, the systems in the game were built in a way that allowed me to “apple glitch” myself to death. I had done it once again. 

I started rolling back settings to make things more difficult for myself so I could actually get some enjoyment out of the game’s progression system. Once I did that, I realized that I had no idea what different skills and abilities my characters had gained. The game had become so easy that I didn’t have to care—I could beat any enemy with one tap of a button. My guys were merrily progressing through the various vocations in the game, and I didn’t even know what any of it did, because I didn’t need to. So, then I had to spend some time experimenting around with my characters to figure out what all they could do.

I’m someone that really doesn’t understand the concept of "cheating" in videogames. Intellectually, I think people should play games in a way that adheres to the desires of the designer. And if that means that a game is too hard for you, so be it. But on the flip side of that coin, whenever I’m presented with a situation where I can make the game easier, I can’t resist at least trying it. I will make a game so easy that I don’t enjoy it anymore, and then I start wondering why I’m wasting my time. It’s a strange dynamic, I admit it.

Look, I’m not saying that the quality-of-life settings shouldn’t exist. I know that this is a me problem, and I haven’t allowed my issues with the difficulty settings to impact the score I'm giving this game. It’s like setting a game to Hard difficulty and complaining that it’s too hard. 

I know I might be in a minority here as someone that doesn’t appreciate the quality-of-life settings because they are too tempting and they can kind of ruin the game. But I will advise any new player to tread lightly: play the game for a while on the default without messing around with the settings. There is something to be said for playing Dragon Quest VII Reimagined the way it was intended to be played, even if that means slowing down and taking longer to get from point A to point B. At least that way you will actually be engaging with the game’s systems instead of button-mashing through to the end. 

But, setting aside my own seeming inability to avoid temptation, I do feel that Dragon Quest VII Reimagined is a fantastic JRPG. It is accessible, fun, and avoids the trap of being slavishly committed to its original—perhaps overwhelming—version. The island/episode structure is perfect for gamers that want to play for brief periods of time, and the ability to have some idea where the finish line feels refreshing. Just avoid the temptation to ruin the game for yourself. With a game this good, you owe it to yourself to actually play it.