Dragon Quest is one of the most recognizable names in classic RPGs, and also one that has recently leaned heavily on the past to attract new fans. Square Enix has remastered the first three classic DQ games, dubbed the Erdrick Trilogy, and is now skipping ahead to the seventh installment with Dragon Quest VII: Reimagined. It’s an unexpected move, but partially explained by DQ7 having such a notorious reputation among fans. Namely, it was a slog. Even its own key developers acknowledge that much, which made it ripe for a remake that trims the fat. I played a little over an hour of Dragon Quest VII: Reimagined and talked with producer Takeshi Ichikawa. My limited time was not enough to get a feel for the full scope of the cuts, but I was impressed by the other ways it’s being modernized.
It starts with the art style, which is immediately striking. Square Enix noted during a presentation that to establish the revised look, it constructed physical dolls for each of the major party members, giving them the ability to focus on small details like the texture of their clothing. Those dolls were then scanned in to act as digital puppets, and the rest of the game was developed to match their style. That gives it a handcrafted look that is, I dare say, cozy. The perspective is still primarily following your characters from above, as you’d expect in a classic RPG, but the character detail is readily apparent even there, and you get a closer look at them in cutscenes and battles.
Ichikawa said that the doll-like art style was an homage to the late Akira Toriyama, the renowned manga artist who also created the visual style for all of the Dragon Quest games before his passing in 2024. When Toriyama designed the characters for DQ7, they were given a more “cutesy, adorable aesthetic” compared to other Dragon Quest games, with more squat designs that differed from his usual art. The company researched ways to maintain and update that visual style and found inspiration in other media, like movies and TV shows, that have used a doll motif. That inspired the creation of physical dolls to define the look, which he says helped create realistic fabrics and textures that influenced the overall style.
Despite the cozy appearance, though, the story in Dragon Quest VII is remarkably dark for the series. As Ichikawa said, that contrast was one major motivation in remaking the game for modern audiences.
“The overall goal, or what inspired the creation of this remake, was we really wanted to tap into the unique and dark world in storytelling of Dragon Quest 7 and these adorable characters,” Ichikawa said via translator. “We really wanted to bring it back to the modern audiences again.”
I played just one story mission, and it was as dark as I had been led to expect. The party began in the small seaside town of Wetlock, where the people are enamored of an old traveling busker. After being prompted to sleep at an inn, you’re awoken to find the town has been emptied, lured into a portal by the busker for some unknown purpose. Something sinister seems afoot, so you follow them into the portal and confront him–only to discover the old man was actually attempting to save the townspeople from disaster. An evil creature named Gracos was planning to flood the continent and consign everyone to a watery death. Some people were even feared to have been left behind and presumably drowned. The busker, Old Man Riffer, was actually a hero trying to atone for his own past mistakes by saving the town. You then venture into the sunken lair to confront the monster.
The dark subject matter is somewhat softened by the cute art style and voice performances, so it never felt too scary or intense for kids to enjoy. The voices, especially, are played with the melodrama of living cartoons, so it all works thematically with the art style.
Inside the dungeon, I was able to battle through hordes of monsters, familiar from other Dragon Quest titles, but given a new figurine-like look. The monsters didn’t get dolls of their own, but the studio was able to follow the art style established by the character models to make them consistent, and the result is beautiful. The maze-like dungeon was a delightful way to engage with the monsters, too, as I could see them roaming around and carefully sneak around them or look for safe paths if needed. Within the battle interface, you have a similar behind-the-back perspective to traditional Dragon Quest titles, but pulled in close enough and with some cinematic movements to really let you soak in the lovely art style.
“I remember thinking, ‘When am I ever going to get to the monsters?'”
Battles are traditional and turn-based, but they’ve been given a slight twist with revisions to the vocation system. Instead of your primary vocation defining your skills, Dragon Quest VII: Reimagined introduces a “Moonlighting” system that lets you set a secondary vocation. I was able to experiment with the secondary jobs by either augmenting my party’s natural talents or filling in gaps, and while my brief demo didn’t allow me to see the full breadth of experimentation, it was enough to see how this will have a major impact on strategizing your party composition.
“It is going to be a bit easier to start for the players, but we also reworked the entire balance of the battles too,” Ichikawa said. “The battles are reworked based on the assumption that the Moonlighting system is going to be implemented. So it’s not going to be too easy for our players. It is going to be a challenging experience for them. The team does feel that the battle and the vocation system overall has balanced up very appropriately.”
The ultimate confrontation, against the fiendish monster Gracos, was an appropriate challenge to end the dungeon, forcing me to balance my healing, skills, and special abilities, and search for opportunities for synergies. It was a satisfying culmination to the fights, even thrown in with a party I hadn’t developed myself. The old man Riffer chimed in to help as well, and the crisis was averted.
So why follow up the first three Dragon Quest games with a remake of the seventh? For Ichikawa, it’s personal. He said his first Dragon Quest game was Dragon Quest Monsters. When he tried to play Dragon Quest 7 in its original incarnation, the task was just too daunting. It took an average of three hours to even reach the first battle, which tested the patience of Ichikawa and many other young RPG fans.
“I was very young back then. I was still in elementary school, but it is kind of a painful experience because I had to give up,” he said. “I remember thinking, ‘When am I ever going to get to the monsters?’ I couldn’t even carry on before even getting to that part.”
He didn’t know at the time he would go on to work on the Dragon Quest series, joining Square Enix and developing Dragon Quest Builders 2. Times have changed since Dragon Quest VII was first released in 2000. Ichikawa said he and Dragon Quest creator Yuji Horii discussed the changing landscape of RPGs, and how players now have expectations that games will better respect their time.
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“Back then, it was more acceptable to have a longer form of entertainment, especially in video games where you get to sink in so many hours. It was just more acceptable and standard back then,” Ichikawa said. “But fast forward 25 years later; that’s not really the case anymore. There’s a lot of video games out there, there’s a lot of forms of media and entertainment out there. So naturally people just have an upper limit about how [much] time they can put into one single form of media or entertainment. So that was in the initial discussions that I had with Horii-san, so that was why we wanted to streamline some of the elements and the game to ensure that we are able to grow a smoother gaming experience for Dragon Quest 7.”
Dragon Quest VII: Reimagined appears to be a different kind of remake than Square Enix’s other recent output. It isn’t an HD-2D makeover like the other Dragon Quest remasters, which have been mostly careful to keep the original mechanics intact, or a full reboot like the Final Fantasy 7 trilogy. Instead this appears to bereimagined, in a true sense, by borrowing the core concepts and philosophies that drove that original game and modernizing them for today. It’s being reverent but not overly precious, which just might be the right approach for a lauded, but divisive, part of Dragon Quest history.