Hands on with Dragon Quest VII Reimagined – Preview

It’s a great time to be a JRPG fan, with so many new games releasing alongside remakes of classics in the genre. Dragon Quest fans in particular have been eating well lately, with well-received remakes of the first three games in the series being remade in a beautiful HD-2D style that perfectly captures the idea of combining the strengths of the classics with modern improvements. Another remake will be released next year, this time of the seventh game in the series – Fragments of the Forgotten Past. Dragon Quest VII Reimagined is actually the second remake of the PS1 game, with the first releasing for the 3DS, and it puts its own unique spin on refreshing the past. Quirky fantasy worlds are brought to life in 3D with a beautiful art style that combines doll-like characters with levels that feel like model dioramas, and the gameplay has been modernised with new features and quality-of-life tweaks.

Like the other mainline Dragon Quest games, DQVII is a turn-based RPG which sees a party of adventurers travelling the world to solve various crises afflicting different islands. A big part of the fun of games like this is levelling up your characters over time and using their new abilities to form new strategies in battle, so I was curious how a preview session would be handled. It ended up being split up into two parts – one in an earlier part of the game where your characters are just starting out, and one that had progressed much further and unlocked more characters and abilities. It gave a good sense of how the games’ systems would develop over time while not overloading me with too many options.

The first segment took place in Emberdale – a small town at the base of a volcano, whose citizens worship a fire spirit they believe lives inside said volcano. Every year they hold a festival in the spirit’s honour and perform a ritual to receive its blessing, but this time the local fortune teller has predicted that the festival will end in a big, fiery disaster! What’s interesting about Dragon Quest games is that, while there is an overarching plot, its story will be split up into smaller storylines and vignettes. Each area you visit will have its own problems that will inevitably lead you into a dungeon with a big boss fight at the end when you attempt to resolve them. It helps a lot with the pacing, because each section has its own self-contained story and new locations to explore.

In the case of Emberdale you’ll be talking with the townsfolk to learn about their festival and how it could potentially go wrong. Walking around the game’s cardboard model-like towns and talking with their quirky villagers feels nice and cozy, but things can get dark very quickly. That’s part of the fun with Dragon Quest – it gets your guard down with goofy enemies like the ‘Meowgician’ or the mouse/wasp hybrid ‘Mouseflap’ and then hits you with tense and emotional moments when you least expect it. I was finding a lot of optional dialogue and rewards hidden away for those who go looking around every nook and cranny, and was pleasantly surprised that characters would actually react to the dialogue choices I made.

There’s no branching paths or anything, but coming from Pokemon Legends: Z-A where everybody basically said the same thing regardless of my choices it was funny to devastate people by saying I wouldn’t help them. Obviously you’ll get roped back into things so the game can progress, but it’s nice to have that option, you know? There’s good voice work in the key cutscenes as well, with a whole variety of voices and accents rather than just the same American voices you hear everywhere else.

Before long I made my way to the volcano, Burnmont, which served as the first dungeon of my session. The dungeons that I played through weren’t slogs, and had treasure hidden away to find, but didn’t feature any puzzles. There’s been puzzles shown in the trailers so I know they’re there, but I didn’t get to experience any myself. Instead the focus was on fighting my way through enemies roaming the chambers of the mountain.

As has become common in RPGs now, enemies exist on the overworld and will initiate battles once you touch them. If you get the drop on them and attack them from behind, then you’ll start the battle with an advantage. Battles are turn-based, with each character having their own class that provides them with different skills (and this system would get built upon in the second half of my session). The player character comes from a line of fishermen, so he has water-based attacks and support skills, while your friends Maribel and Kiefer have more combat training which grants them access to magic and hard-hitting melee attacks respectively. The more damage that characters deal and receive, the closer they’ll get to being able to ‘Let Loose’. This is a sort of ultimate ability tied to their class, which could be a powerful attack, or a utility like healing your whole party or letting your allies act without spending MP for a few turns.

Enemies have different weaknesses and resistances which need to be accounted for, and the game now tells you whether your attack will be effective or not. I feel like this goes a little too far because it was telling me this when I was encountering enemies for the first time. I would prefer if the game waited until I discovered the effect of a move and then pointed it out for me next time, so that there was more of a sense of experimentation and discovery in battles. If you do get tired of the battles and want to move along with the story, you have the option of changing the battle speed and also setting your party to battle automatically. You can give each party member a ‘tactic’ which defines how they’ll act, and then they’ll attack and use abilities accordingly. You can change the battle speed and toggle autobattle at will, which I started to make use of as I got further into the dungeon. I didn’t want to miss out on experience points but as I was levelling up and learning the enemies’ weaknesses the battles were becoming a bit rote.

At the heart of the dungeon there is, naturally, a fight against a powerful boss monster. Even though the party’s combat abilities are limited at this point, the battle is surprisingly strategic. It’s not just a matter of selecting the attack option over and over until it dies, you need to be wary of your opponents’ attack and work out synergies between your party’s skills – not to brag… but a few people in my session died against this boss, but not me. Ok, I’m bragging a little. I need the validation. It was a really satisfying fight, with the boss switching its elemental weaknesses around at different points and pulling out powerful attacks that needed to be guarded against to avoid a party wipe. The possibilities of the class system were already starting to show themselves at this point – Kiefer’s Let Loose skill allowed him to deal heavy damage, but at the cost of lowering his defence. A liability… unless you use the protagonist’s skill that lets him buff a teammate’s defence, basically resulting in a free powerful attack.

With the situation handled, it was time to move on to the second segment. The action moved to the city of Wetlock, and our party had changed and grown to around Level 25. In addition to the hero and Maribel we now had Ruff, a wild young boy who rides a wolf, and Aishe, a dancer from a group of travellers. Here, our motley crew was investigating a Pied Piper-like figure called Old Man Riffer (heh) who was luring people away with magical music. Our adventure would have us climbing a ruined tower and sailing a boat across the oceans of the overworld. Most excitingly, I also got to take a closer look at the vocation system.

A change from the previous iterations of DQVII is that characters can now have two vocations active at a time, using abilities from both at once. For example, Maribel was a Priestess and a Mage. Her Priestess vocation gave her access to healing and protection magic, while the Mage vocation had more of an offensive focus with damaging elemental spells. When a character is victorious in battle not only do they get experience points and level up, but their equipped vocations do as well. You can switch between vocations at will from the menus and, while I chose to stick with what was given to me for simplicity’s sake, I did notice that there were advanced vocations you could unlock by mastering different combinations of the basic vocations.

The battles did become a bit more of a slog at this point, partially because I went from a handful of abilities between the party to each member having multiple pages of skills to choose from. I was also playing quite conservatively with my skills at first so that I didn’t run out of MP, but I came to realise that checkpoints and inns were spaced out well enough that I didn’t have to do that. There was enough space between them to make you manage your resources, but they’re regular enough that you don’t need to get in the way of your own fun.

Which is good, because you’ll want to be making regular use of each characters’ abilities. Each vocation provides tools to exploit enemy weaknesses and set yourself up with advantages. Elemental magic has its obvious uses, but against a sturdy golem of stone you might need to make use of the Martial Artist’s Leg Sweep which has a chance of lowering an enemy’s defence. The synergy between party members becomes clearer with access to more options as well. For instance, the Thief has an ability that grants you extra turns when you inflict enemies with status conditions, so if you load your party with skills that can poison or charm then you can quickly take charge of the battle.

One aspect I can’t comment on is the game’s performance – I was playing the PS5 version of the game and so, while I didn’t encounter any issues on that front, I can’t say whether the same is true of the Switch and Switch 2 versions.

Job systems in RPGs scratch an itch I have like nothing else. I love the level of customisation they offer, and the experimentation that comes with mixing and matching skills from each class. I haven’t played a lot of Dragon Quest games, but the vocation system in Dragon Quest IX was a big part of why I put so many hours into it, and so I’m keen to sink my teeth into Dragon Quest VII Reimagined when it launches next year.

Thanks to Square Enix for inviting us to check this one out.