The original Dragon Quest 7 is widely considered a masterpiece. However, despite its legendary status, even its most devoted fans should be able to admit that the game has significant flaws. One person who understands this perfectly is Takeshi Ichikawa, the producer at Square Enix responsible for guiding Dragon Quest 7 Reimagined to market. This is an upcoming remake of the classic title.
“When the original was released, I was in primary school,” Ichikawa noted. “It was the first numbered title in the series I ever played.” He seems like the ideal person for the job of remaking this classic, doesn’t he?”
“But,” Ichikawa added with a sheepish grin, “because the introductory section is so notoriously long, I was actually one of the people who gave up and dropped out of Dragon Quest 7 halfway through.”
With this admission, made at the start of a long discussion about rethinking the magic of Dragon Quest 7, Ichikawa instantly shows that he truly understands the game’s issues. When he was assigned the Reimagined project, he played the Nintendo 3DS version of Dragon Quest 7 for the first time to get up to speed. From there, keeping these thoughts in mind, the project began.
Streamlined is the key word here. Dragon Quest 7’s greatest strength is arguably also its greatest weakness. It has a unique story structure for the Dragon Quest series, where the narrative is told through a series of relatively enclosed vignettes. Events do connect into a larger world-saving story, of course—it wouldn’t be Dragon Quest if they didn’t—but broadly, you are sailing the oceans, landing on far-flung islands, and then experiencing a small episodic narrative about that island and its people. That story then resolves while also playing into a grand, over-arching plot.
In a sense—and excuse me for invoking one of the true gods of the genre here—it is a little bit like Chrono Trigger. Except instead of traveling through time and learning about the dramas of each individual era and slowly figuring out how they tie together, you are sailing across a broader world map. Admittedly, things do not tie together in quite as satisfying a way. Dragon Quest 7 is no Chrono Trigger, to be fair, but in places, it does evoke some of the same magic.
The biggest problem with the original game, however, was the pacing. The game is long. Arguably far too lengthy for its own good. It is paced glacially, and in a sense, shows a supreme disrespect for the player’s time and attention. Thus, Ichikawa—and many others—struggled to even make it through the introduction. This core criticism of the original masterpiece and even its 3DS version remains a major focus for the team.
“Our goal was to preserve the original atmosphere and ‘feel’ while making the experience pacey, dense, and rich,” Ichikawa explains.
“We have put a lot of effort into restructuring three specific areas,” the producer continues. “Visual representation, scenario, and battles.”
The new doll-like art style is the banner bearer for the visual overhaul, and it is a style that many find adorable. Characters have been reimagined into cute proportions that vaguely resemble action figures. While this is something envisioned as new for Reimagined, Ichikawa is keen to point out that the new style has its roots in the game’s original art from the late, great Akira Toriyama.
“Akira Toriyama’s designs for Dragon Quest 7 have shorter, cuter proportions than the other titles,” Ichikawa notes. “We wanted a visual style that emphasized that adorable, or ‘chibi’, feel. We also saw that doll-like or puppet-inspired styles are popular in global media and felt it was a perfect fit for Toriyama’s Dragon Quest 7 character designs.”
The designs are not just the work of brilliant character designers, though. The team behind Reimagined actually had real-life puppets of the characters created, which were then scanned into the development tools to create the character models. Despite the expense, this was a challenge that Square Enix encouraged Ichikawa’s team to take on.
“We believed that to get the right texture and realism, we had to physically create the dolls and scan them,” Ichikawa reveals. “It was not perfectly smooth at first; when we put the scanned models in-game, there were errors and glitches with the animations that the development team had to work hard to solve.”
A visual overhaul is a vital part of the experience, but it was never a part of why Dragon Quest 7 was subject to any disparagement from fans or critics. So, while effort and expense have been put into the visual look, it is clearly reinvigorating Dragon Quest 7’s pacing which has been the largest focus. It is a topic which Ichikawa becomes more animated when engaged on.
“The original is a series of short stories. To make the narrative easier to follow, we reordered some of these episodes. Others were changed into an optional experience, allowing players to tackle them in the order they choose,” Ichikawa notes.
“However, we did not just move elements around; we redesigned the scenario from scratch to find the optimum form for the storyline. To balance any cuts, we added completely new scenarios and backstory episodes to provide more depth to the characters. We worked closely with series creator Yuji Horii on every individual story to ensure we were on the right track.”
Fans will notice some storylines and entire islands have been excised from the game. Something which, despite being intended to address past criticism, will doubtlessly concern some players. But the team has clearly made a huge effort to do this with a scalpel rather than a hatchet. Rather than just cuts without further consideration, the entire game has been carefully rebalanced around these changes.
Battles are also a key part of the pace. Here is a big change: Dragon Quest 7 Reimagined retains visible enemies over random encounters, a change first introduced in the 3DS version. This makes it easier to see what you are getting into, and also makes it easier to avoid encounters when you have had enough of them or need to avoid them. This, alone, is a huge page-changer.
“Because the game is so long, symbol encounters are the correct decision. It gives players the choice: if you want to focus on the story, you can skip battles; if you want to grind, you can seek them out intentionally.
“Our benchmark was that minor encounters should be fast, while boss battles should be deep and tactical. For the fast-paced side, we added adjustable battle speeds, auto-battle, and the ability to cut down weak monsters on the field map without entering a battle screen,” Ichikawa expands. “For bosses, we added ‘Burst’ super attacks and the ability to ‘moonlight’ in different job combinations to add tactical depth.”
It all amounts to a lot, and with some time in a non-final preview version of Dragon Quest 7 Reimagined, one can see how these changes might actually manage to thread the needle and accomplish the near-impossible: to make a classic, albeit a flawed one, better. Too often, tinkering around the edges makes bangers worse, but that does not look likely to be the case here.
“We are developing this to be the ‘Masterpiece’ version of Dragon Quest 7,” Ichikawa affirms. Soon, fans will deliver the verdict on if that goal has been achieved.
