Dragon Quest 7 Reimagined - first impressions

It wasn't until I typed the title that i found that that "reimagined" isn't actually a word. Huh? Well I guess you have the chance to learn something new each day.

This game is something that I was always going to try and so far anyway, I don't think I played the original. Anyone that has ever played Dragon Quest games of any sort knows that they have a very particular style in that it is quite colorful, normally very long, and rather child-friendly in its presentation.

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These games are generally very easy to walk into and over the course of the past 40 years the gameplay hasn't changed a great deal. it is simplistic turn-based RPG tactics that basically anyone can master pretty quickly.

It tends to be quite easy but a lot of that depends on you and what difficulty you select and how quickly you decide to go through the story.

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You start the quest out on a small island when your dad finds some sort of map in the ocean. You then join up with your friend the crown prince and seek to go and find other parts of the map in order to spice up your lives a bit. The island you live on is absurdly small and it is a little bit hokey that something this small would actually be a kingdom. As far as the inhabitants of the island are concerned, there is nothing else across the sea and this plot of land is all that exists. You and your buddies Maribel and Kiefer (the prince) set out to find a bit of excitement in the world and this is found in nearby ruins and immediately revealed to you, of course.

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Just like all other Dragon Quest games I have played in the past the combat sections at the start of the game are remarkably easy. The only time I died was when I walked up on an enemy in the field that was well above my level. There were clear indicators that this was the case but I guess I skipped through the tutorial a bit fast thinking that I already knew everything.

Just like all the others, tactics will exist later on but at the start you basically just throw everything you got at whatever you are fighting against in order to make it to the end of whatever dungeon you are working on, while collecting things from chests on the way to the boss. They are not re-inventing the wheel here, this is RPG'ing at its most basic.

As has become kind of the norm in the over-saturated gaming market right now though, this is not a new game but merely an overhaul of the original that was made back in the year 2000. I don't recall every playing it in its original form which was on the PS1 and 3DS.

One thing I have been really enjoying about this game thus far is that the graphics are crisp and wonderful but since this is a Square-Enix game they of course go absolutely bananas with the voice acting and cutscenes. If you are entering this game get ready for a ton of cinematics and stuff that is constantly interrupting the gameplay for progression of the story. I am already kind of getting tired of it myself.

This game is well known for being absolutely huge as well, even by Dragon Quest standards. It is estimated that even if you only do the base main quests and ignore all optional and side missions that it will take around 100 hours to accomplish this and honestly, I don't really know if I have it in me to do that. I don't know if I find it engaging enough to actually go through all of that... I suppose we'll see.

Right now the only thing that truly bothers me is that after every battle you are presented with a ton of stats about how much XP and loot you received and there is no way to make this go any faster. It only takes like 8 seconds or something like that but if you multiply this by the hundreds of battles I have already been in after just facing a single boss, this time adds up. It really would have been nice if they had a one-button skip for all of this because outside of main boss battles, the amount of XP and loot you are getting is of very little consequence.

At the moment I feel as though this game is overpriced at $70 but this is the norm for Squaresoft and Enix. They know that they can take advantage of the early adopters with any price that they want. In just a few months that will likely drop quite a bit. I am currently playing it on a jailbroken Switch and paid nada for it. But as is always the case with me, if I end up liking it, I will purchase it. In my mind piracy is a bad thing if abused because it discourages development. That's a moral argument for another day though. In the meantime Dragon Quest 7 Reimagined is quality, but IMO not worth $70.