Square Enix continues their revival of their popular turn based IP, Dragon Quest. From 2024’s Dragon Quest III HD-2D, last year’s Dragon Quest 1/2 HD-2D, most thought that they would continue in order. However, fans were pleasantly surprised, that not only did they not continue with Team Asano’s HD-2D style, they skipped all the way to 7!

Originally released on PlayStation 1 in 2001 in North America, then later remade for Nintendo 3DS in 2016, Dragon Quest 7 received a new lease on life as Dragon Quest 7 Reimagined for Nintendo Switch 1/2, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series, and PC.

With the name “Reimagined”, this instalment was meant to bring this game into the present, with modern Options, Quality of Life systems, as well as more streamlined narrative, from the original’s 100+ to 50 hours. 

A tale Reimagined through time

Dragon Quest 7 Reimagined story centres around a trio’s, Hero, Kiefer, and Maribel, desire for a grand adventure. They live in the solitary island kingdom of Estard; peaceful and pleasant, all alone in the middle of a vast blue ocean. 

Sneaking off into adventure within their small world, the trio stumble upon a secret within their ‘Forbidden Place’ , later called “Shrine of Mysteries”. There they meet the Caretaker. With his instructions, they place the stone tablets they found onto a pedestal allowing them to travel to brand new, unknown places. 

They quickly find that they are time travelling. The world used to be vast, filled with many other lands. However, due to strife encountered within these many lands, they ended up ceasing to exist. Helping out the people, they found that going back to the present makes the islands exist. 

The majority of the narrative is “Monster-of-the-day”. This means, that each island offers a story in the past, complete it, quickly visit it in the present. Collecting more tablet fragments along the way, until you repeat the process. While JRPGs, especially older ones, usually follows the simple-yet-things-aren’t-as-they-seem pattern, DQ7 Reimagined (or the IP as a whole) typically takes this to a whole new level. While this version of the game has been Reimagined, with some parts taken out in order to streamline the story, you still don’t find out the “grand scheme of things” until 30 hours into the game.

The story of Dragon Quest has always been a simple and predictable one. It’s always the adventure along the way that’s meant to keep us engaged. However, the time travelling idea is interesting, with only two or three islands that remotely makes use of it narratively, besides some flavour texts. It’s a means to an end. Luckily, Dragon Quest’s staple quirkiness of not taking itself too seriously saves this predictable story for me. Make sure you pay attention to the dungeon and town names, they’re almost always funny.

A Turn Based Classic

Dragon Quest has always had turn based battles, and this Reimagined version is no different. You take your party of four (with one extra to switch into at any time during battle), give them commands, and they perform these commands in order of their agility. You also have the option of turning on auto battle, letting the party decide their actions within five tactic options. They are smart enough to automatically choose abilities that enemies are weak against, and buff each other. They won’t use debuffs on enemies unfortunately. Due to the game’s length, it’s highly advised to use auto battle and only turn it off on boss fights (however, it is extremely plausible to play the entire game on auto battle, especially if you don’t actively avoid enemies often).

Speaking of avoiding battles, DQ7 Reimagined doesn’t have random battles, except while travelling the ocean by ship. Initially introduced in Dragon Quest 8, Reimagined (and the 3DS DQ7 Remaster) has the enemies visible on the over world and dungeons, allowing you to avoid them if desired. They’ve also implemented the ability to attack and defeat them without entering the battle if you are much stronger than them, saving lots of time but with reduced experience points and vocation proficiency points. This is a great Quality of Life addition, allowing you to better control when to fight and control the speed of your progression.

Unfortunately, character progression pacing is extremely slow at the beginning. You don’t get the ability to change your vocation until nearly 20hrs into the game. This means, your party members are stuck in their original vocations which you most likely max out in the first few hours of the game. Especially if you played the demo which allowed progress to carry over. This means many hours of your party fighting enemies, gaining vocation proficiency, that goes directly down the trash bin. 

Since the early narrative of the game is structured around discovering new islands, it makes me wonder why they didn’t just have the All-Trades Abbey storyline start earlier in the game?

My Quality of Life is TOO Good!

Quality of Life is meant to have a positive connotation, and it does! DQ7 Reimagined boasts new features that better respects your time. Shortcut buttons for certain skills like “whistle” to have enemies come to you, nose for treasure to tell you if there are treasure in an area, battle speed, and several toggleable difficulty settings are some they’ve included in this remake. They’ve even made teleporting from cities and dungeons (called Zoom) available right at the beginning of the game from the world map and it’s even usable while inside a dungeon. 

I am a big fan of streamlining gameplay, taking away the forced bloat that came with older games; features that respects a gamer’s time. Unfortunately, many of these QoL additions made iconic systems in the Dragon Quest series useless; they didn’t implement anything new within the game that balanced it out. 

This might be under the category of nit picky things, but having the ability to change vocations at any time made the earlier vocations useless, mastered only for the purpose of learning the later vocations. This is especially evident because you aren’t able to take specific skills learned from other vocations, allowing for unique builds. If they limited vocation changes to, let’s say, only at save points, this will ensure some thought is put into what vocations my party has before and during a dungeon delve.

That is what Reimagined took away: any semblance of strategy. In an attempt to make the game accessible, they’ve made the game quite mindless in terms of gameplay. The shot of endorphin only comes from seeing your party members master vocations (only to immediately move on the next), and level up. Overall, it’s serviceable, not bad and only mildly satisfying. 

What a Beautiful World

This is by far the most amazing thing about Dragon Quest 7 Reimagined. The artstyle of our party, every monster, the over world, and dungeons have been reimagined, turning this world from the past into a sight to behold today! It isn’t HD-2D, it isn’t cell shaded, but something that looks like little diorama models come to life. Partnered with the fantastically fantasy classic sounds of Dragon Quest, living in this world for nearly 100hrs looked and sounded amazing. 

The most fun I had with the battles and adventuring through the world is looking at every enemy, in awe of how goofy and cool the enemies look.  Having played many entries within the series, it was fun seeing the classic enemies return in this art style.

I wish I never played Dragon Quest 7

Unfortunately, because I loved seeing the enemies and knowing how they looked like before, I wanted more. There are an offensive amount, yet maybe done on purpose, repeated NPC models. Sure, the models are beautiful and the textures are amazing, and translating 2D models into 3D is a lot of work. However, we lost some interesting looking characters, replaced with colour-changed normal enemies.

This gets even more offensive when later in the game, you’ll meet several kingdom leaders along with their vassals. It becomes difficult to tell which kingdom you’re in because they all have near-identical character models. These are leaders, with voice acted lines, that you’ve spent time on visiting several times that look near exact to other kings. Again, this may have been intended to maintain the art of the original, however I just can’t see a world where people would complain if certain important NPCs received a new coat of paint.

Lastly, this again may just be a personal gripe, but I. WANT. CHARACTERS. TO. CHANGE. THE. WAY. THEY. LOOK. WHEN. THEY. CHANGE. ARMOURS! Have you seen how amazing chest and helmets art looks in Dragon Quest 7 Reimagined? How neat it would be for Maribel to don the bunny outfit set? Especially since in the 3DS version on Dragon Quest 7, the character models change based on their vocation? I would’ve loved to see that “reimagined” in 2026, especially with how beautiful this game’s art-style is. It truly makes me sad that they couldn’t even match the 2016 version of the game. 

In the grand scheme of things, graphics is not something I care too much about when it comes to games. However, when the main selling point of this Reimagined version is its beautiful art style (which I reiterate is AMAZING), these little gripes have no choice but to surface.

Saviours of the Forgotten Past?

Much like our party of heroes, Square Enix is bringing back games from the past and into the hands and minds of today’s gamers and this shiny new version of Dragon Quest 7 is no different. It’s difficult to attempt balancing the heart and soul of the original, while catering to today’s gamers. I feel they’ve fallen into the pit of catering to most, yet potentially alienating those who played the original.

While Dragon Quest 7 Reimagined is a sight to behold, nostalgic to listen to, and has great accessibility features that better respects your time, they’ve created a poorly paced game that’s taken away any semblance of strategy. 

Reimagined is overall a good game. However, it certainly doesn’t feel like a game created for those who grew up with Dragon Quest. This is because we’ve grown, and Dragon Quest 7’s gameplay is still, in its own way, very much stuck in the past. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, as now, this is a game I would love my kids to play, so they can fall in love with Dragon Quest and JRPGs in general. 

Dragon Quest VII Reimagined launched on 5 February 2026 on PS5, Xbox Series X/S, PC, Nintendo Switch, and Nintendo Switch 2.

The Game was reviewed on PS5.