Game Details Developer: ArtePiazza/Square Enix

Publisher: Nintendo

Platform: Nintendo 3DS

Release Date: September 16, 2016

Price: $39.99 / £35

Links: Official Website (UK) ArtePiazza/Square Enix: Nintendo: Nintendo 3DSSeptember 16, 2016: $39.99 / £35

It’s hard to be a Dragon Quest fan in the English-speaking world. The series is phenomenally popular in Japan, but outside of its homeland its audience is definitely of the dedicated-but-small variety.

This means that getting DQ games localized is always a crapshoot. The series enjoyed a US revival in the mid-'00s when Dragon Quest VIII was released for the PlayStation 2, which was followed by a series of Nintendo DS remakes of IV, V, and VI (it was the first time either of the latter two had been released in English). That rush of games capped off in 2009 with the generally excellent Nintendo DS-exclusive Dragon Quest IX, but so far this decade English releases have been few and far between.

Case in point, Dragon Quest VII (officially subtitled Fragments of the Forgotten Past). It’s a 3DS remake of a 100-plus-hour PlayStation JRPG that was wildly popular in Japan but mostly overlooked in the US, due in part to the fact that it was a primitive-looking retro-style game that came out on the PlayStation just as the Dreamcast and PlayStation 2 generation was really heating up. The Japanese 3DS remake came out in 2013, but the game’s gargantuan script and its small Western fanbase meant that we didn’t hear anything official about a localization until earlier this year.

So Dragon Quest VII is a new localization of a three-year-old remake of a 16-year-old game from a franchise that intentionally (and lovingly) keeps one foot stuck in retro 1980s JRPG gameplay. The result is a quirky title that has a lot to offer that small corps of Dragon Quest die-hards, but it might be just a little too inaccessible for a wider audience to enjoy.

Gameplay, graphics, and sound

Square Enix

Square Enix

Square Enix

Square Enix

Square Enix

Square Enix

Square Enix

Square Enix

Square Enix

In case you have never played a Dragon Quest game, the main thing you need to know is that even Final Fantasy hasn’t birthed quite so many JRPG tropes.

You control a party of characters that spends its time walking through towns, talking to non-player characters, forwarding the story, searching for loot, and buying new equipment. As you travel between towns on the expansive world map, you’ll run into monsters that you will do turn-based combat with. Your characters can all equip different items and have different skills, and eventually you’ll gain access to a reasonably fun and deep job system to customize their attributes and abilities even more.

The visuals are a huge upgrade over the PlayStation original, which used ugly sprites against a 32-bit 3D background on the world map and sprites against a flat 2D background for battle sequences. The 3DS version’s battle scenes, world map, and characters are all fully 3D, and even if this isn’t the best-looking game on the system (pop-in on the world map is particularly distracting, as is reuse of NPC character models and those models’ wooden and repetitive movements), it’s still a solid upgrade. As usual for a Dragon Quest game, Akira Toriyama’s monster designs are a definite highlight.

But some things about the game remain firmly rooted in the past. Remember, for the Dragon Quest series, that's actually considered a feature, not a bug. Many of the game’s sound effects are 8-bit beeps and bloops with extra reverb on top. The archaic, text-only menu system is clumsy at best and enraging at worst, especially since you’re constantly finding new things and doing regular inventory management. The more attractive and modern graphical menu systems from Dragon Quest VIII and IX apparently weren’t considered important enough to backport.

One concession to modernity: Dragon Quest VII does away with the series’ traditional random battles. Monsters can now be seen wandering in dungeons and on the world map, giving you a chance to at least try to avoid them. This is most helpful on the world map, where there’s a lot of open space to run away from monsters that rush you; most of the game’s dungeons have lots of narrow hallways and choke points that make it more difficult to avoid encounters.

One mild disappointment for anyone who has tracked the game since its Japanese release is the localized version’s soundtrack, which was fully orchestrated in Japan but returns to MIDI in this version. The tracks are mostly pleasant and memorable anyway, but the orchestrated versions all elevate them.

Battles get more fun and deep once you unlock the job system 20-or-so hours into the game. Characters can all hold one job at a time, and your job level increases separately from your character level as you fight monsters. As your job levels up, you gain new, job-specific skills, and as you master a wider variety of jobs, you get access to more classes. For instance, mastering the Warrior and Mage classes gives you access to the Armamentalist class, which can imbue strong physical strikes with elemental damage.

Certain monsters will also drop “hearts” when defeated. These give you access to special classes based on those monsters’ skills and are a replacement of sorts for the monster-training features in Dragon Quest V and VI.

Picking classes that complement your characters' natural strengths and then combining those classes to learn skills that will wipe out monsters is essential, since even without random battles, the encounter rate is pretty high, and the difficulty is continuously ramping up with every new island you visit. Some grinding may be required, though if you’re smart about the equipment you’re buying and don’t actively avoid conflict, you should mostly be able to level up at a natural pace that keeps the game challenging without overwhelming you.

Delayed… gratification

Dragon Quest VII is an infamously long game, and in the PlayStation version, it takes well over 100 hours just to complete the game’s main story arc—and it takes much, much more than that if you want to complete every sidequest and find everything in the game.

You and your friend Price Kiefer live on the island of Estard, which as far as anyone in the game world knows is the only extant landmass anywhere in the world. No one else seems to question this or even think about it very much, but the two of you (along with your neighbor friend Maribel) are Restless Youths, and you’re sure that there’s more out there somewhere.

Turns out, you’re right (otherwise this would be a very boring 100-hour game). You investigate a mysterious shrine on the island and find some magic pedestals. On top of these pedestals, you piece together stone tablets from fragments that you’ve found scattered across an island. Complete a tablet, and you’ll be whisked away to a whole new island. (It’s not Banjo-Kazooie, but it’s not not Banjo-Kazooie.)

The catch is that there’s also a time travel element, and you and your friends just happen to have arrived on the island at a crisis point. Whatever happened on that island to make it die out and disappear is just about to happen, and it’s up to you to save it. Do this, and the island is restored to the future. Hunt for more tablet fragments on the new land you’ve uncovered, assemble them on a new pedestal, rinse, and repeat.

Especially early on, the game does a great job of mixing up the sorts of calamities facing each island. Yes, they’re often monster-related, and yes, killing the monsters is often the answer. But sometimes you’re saving a village that’s about to get wrecked by a volcano, and sometimes you’re saving a kingdom that’s under siege from an army of killer automatons, and sometimes you’ll need to rescue a town where the people have turned into animals and the animals have turned into people. All of these disasters feel different enough from one another to keep things interesting. It’s also fun to see how story threads between individual islands start to tie together as the game goes on and to have things you’ve collected or done on one island be crucial to saving another. Most RPGs are built out of mini-arcs that form a larger arc, but in Dragon Quest VII you’re literally building the game’s world one island at a time.

The major hurdle to clear in getting to all of this is that the momentum takes a while to build. The beginning is quite streamlined compared to the same sequence in the PlayStation original, but it still takes a good two hours before you save your first island and start fighting monsters. Most of that time is spent performing basic fetch quests that have you running from one end of the island to the other, doing things and then going to tell people that you did them.

Once you do get into the meat of the gameplay, you’ll also find the game’s mini-arcs all end with a shorter second leg in which you travel to each island in the present and explore it again. This is occasionally fun, but all too often it ends up feeling samey. Maps can change and new areas can open up, and the past and present will occasionally interact in interesting ways. But more often you’ll find things just about where you left them—the problem you solved is a distant and unpleasant memory, you yourselves have entirely been forgotten by history, and you’ll need to talk to everyone all over again to get the fragments you need to build a new island and move on.

This happens after every single island you save, and the process of retracing your steps each and every time really slows things down. I played the game for more than 20 hours before I was able to use the job system at all, which is ridiculous compared to a more nimble modern 3DS RPG like Bravely Default or its sequel. And while your party eventually grows beyond the ragtag band of misfits you leave your hometown with, they’re doled out at a frustratingly leisurely pace.

Fun if you like Dragon Quest, but not a great introduction

If you’re a Dragon Quest fan hoping to introduce the franchise to someone new, Dragon Quest VII is not a fantastic way to do it. It’s slow to start and more than a little repetitive once you get going. While I personally enjoy devising strategies to wipe out monsters, balancing my party’s jobs and skills, and getting that steady DQ nostalgia drip, gamers with more modern sensibilities can and probably should pick one of the 3DS’ many faster-paced JRPGs.

The good news is that a remastered version of the PlayStation 2’s Level 5-developed Dragon Quest VIII is also coming out later this year, and the series’ eighth entry is probably its most accessible game to date. It features the same basic gameplay (but with a point-based character-specific skill tree system in place of the free-for-all job system) in a package that is both faster-paced and more immediately satisfying.

If you’re looking for a Dragon Quest game to give to someone who has never played the series, start with VIII and then direct them to VII once they’re already hooked. As a fan, it’s great to finally have a translated version of the series’ most esoteric entry. But this game will have trouble holding anyone else’s interest for long enough to come anywhere close to finishing it.

The good

A nice-looking remake of the series' largest game, finally brought to the US after three long years.

Old-school JRPG gameplay, if you're into it.

Varied story arcs.

Fun job system.

Dragon Quest's art direction and monster designs remain a delight 30 years later.

The bad

Job system takes forever to unlock.

Lots of repetitive talking, backtracking, and digging in dressers for loot.

Archaic menu system.

The ugly:

This game takes a long time to get going, and once it does get going the pacing is still a problem.

Verdict: A love letter to die-hard DQ fans. See if you like Dragon Quest VIII when it comes to the 3DS—if you do, circle back around for this one.