Dragon Quest VII: Reimagined Review - Trimmed Sails, But Not Trimmed Enough

Quick Overview

Dragon Quest VII: Reimagined offers a successful modernization of the classic RPG, featuring a beautiful visual presentation, quality-of-life improvements like fast travel and customizable difficulty settings, but it retains the episodic, sometimes slow pacing of the original story.

Key Points: The reviewer spent 48 hours playing the game, noting the visual presentation successfully reimagines the world and aesthetics of Dragon Quest VII. The game includes quality-of-life features like fast travel via the Career Sphere and highly customizable difficulty settings in the System menu. Difficulty settings allow granular control over damage dealt, experience/proficiency/gold acquired, monster strength/activity, and whether HP restores after battle. The combat system remains a classic turn-based JRPG style, but features like Auto-Battling speed up mundane encounters significantly. The core narrative structure remains episodic, with individual island stories feeling distinct but sometimes contributing to a slow overall pace. The vocation (class) system is deep, featuring 20 base vocations and specialized Tiers 2 and 3 vocations unlocked through mastering combinations, offering significant build flexibility.

Context: This video presents a review of Dragon Quest VII: Reimagined, an updated version of the original PlayStation RPG. The review focuses on how the modernization impacts the game's visual presentation, pacing, combat mechanics, and the deep vocation system, contrasting the new features with the original's episodic structure.

Detailed Analysis

The review concludes that Dragon Quest VII: Reimagined is a good modernization, scoring it a 7/10, praising its visual overhaul and extensive quality-of-life options while noting its inherent slow, episodic narrative structure remains largely intact. The reviewer highlights that the game’s aesthetic is charming, featuring updated character models and environments that feel both nostalgic and fresh. Key improvements include the Career Sphere for instant world travel and granular difficulty adjustments accessible via the System menu, allowing players to tweak experience gain, gold acquisition, monster strength, and even whether HP restores after combat. The combat itself is classic turn-based JRPG, but the introduction of Auto-Battling drastically speeds up routine encounters, making grinding much less tedious. The vocation system is deep, offering 20 base classes and further advanced tiers unlocked by mastering specific combinations, providing ample character customization. However, the core story remains divided into short, self-contained island arcs, which the reviewer found sometimes felt drawn out, resulting in a final verdict of 'Good' rather than 'Great' due to the pacing.