Dragon Quest 7 Reimagined review: Streamlining an underrated epic

The classic RPG series' longest journey is cut down to size - was that the right move?

Dragon Quest 7 is an interesting case. If you look at it especially in the North American context, it didn’t have much of a chance to thrive. Published by the struggling Enix over a year after the PlayStation 2 came out, even the RPG sickos of the time may not have known it existed. That’s on top of the game itself being wildly experimental, with a focus on puzzle-solving, vignette-style storytelling, old school visuals, and long stretches without combat. Famously, it takes multiple hours in the beginning before you fight your first slime. A 3DS remake also struggled to find firm ground in North America, with an effort to streamline the story itself, but a hesitant localization came quite close to the Nintendo Switch’s launch. Dragon Quest 7 Reimagined is a second attempt to make a case for this game on a broader scale, and this time almost feels like an overcorrection.

Restoring the world, one landmass at a time

At first, the world of Dragon Quest 7 is a single island, the people living on it inhabiting a castle town and simple fishing village. But a crew of local kids, one of which being the prince of the local kingdom, aren’t convinced that’s all there is. A discovery at a mysterious ruin leads them to the truth: a dark force, operating in the past, destroyed everything else. But by gathering Stone Fragments and repairing magical tablets, the party can travel to the past, solve the issues plaguing each region, and restore its place on the timeline. Thus ensues a journey about helping people, fighting against destiny, and pushing back against constraints in one’s personal life as well.

If you look at Dragon Quest now and Dragon Quest back in the 90s, you can kind of clock Dragon Quest 7 as an unintended transition between styles. With this game’s experiment with fragmented storytelling, you can see the future of the series, which later found ways to strike a strong balance between telling a traditional fantasy story and making space for smaller, but strong vignettes along the way. The balance is a little off here, with the main characters and larger “plot” taking a backseat to the smaller parts. There are ups and downs, with some islands having much more compelling stories than others, but the bigger issue is the exploration between beats.

When a big, obtuse adventure goes under the knife

That’s what Reimagined is attempting to address, and what the 3DS remake before also went after. While trying to keep the original’s concepts and structure intact, various streamlining efforts have been offered, such as cutting down what happens in the game’s introduction, and making the Stone Fragments easier to find. Reimagined goes hard with both, yanking hours and hours of story out, keeping what was deemed important, pushing some things from required to optional, and perhaps most importantly, liberally deploying waypoint markers. Admittedly, this makes the story progress at breakneck speed, with some folks able to get through at a “golden path” pace around 40 hours. A huge change from my time with the 3DS version at over 100 hours, and… much more with the PS1 original.

It’s not just about story streamlining, though. The pace at which Reimagined moves is also crucial to this formula. Running at a silky smooth frame rate on everything but the Nintendo Switch, this game cruises along. Monsters are fought on the field, and there’s even an EarthBound-like battle shortcut that lets you evaporate weaker enemies on the map without an actual battle. Combat speed options exist of course, but even the default speed moves at a crisp pace, making time for Bird Studio’s lovely style to live and breathe, but not taking the time you’d usually expect from Dragon Quest. Difficulty is another noticeable shift from the norm.

Recent HD-2D remakes have experimented some with difficulty options, but Reimagined goes the “modular” route we’ve seen many big games employ in recent years. You can tool around with sliders for various pieces of Reimagined’s systems, such as exp and gold rate. There are presets that resemble classic settings, but even within those you can tweak things. Also, the “normal” settings are significantly easier than normal, especially coming off those HD-2D outings, the most recent of which is only a few months old as of this writing. Folks who aren’t interested in going out of their way to tweak settings for a challenge might be surprised at how much they don’t have to try here.

Vocations, Dragon Quest’s version of a “job” system, are also tweaked here. While previous versions let you grind up skills and vocations cumulatively, Reimagined puts on the breaks a bit, letting you pick one main vocation and “Moonlight” with a secondary choice. You get the skills that come with those, but once you swap off you lose them. That said, grinding and mastering vocations is important to unlocking new ones, but mechanisms are in place to make grinding those levels a breeze. It’s a little fumbly, but another example of sanding things down to make them fast and easy.

A massive makeover

Holding all this under the hood nonsense is a gorgeous visual style that feels in conversation with Square Enix getting a hold of Mistwalker’s Fantasian earlier in 2025. That game used physical dioramas, photographed and scanned in to make its environments. Here, physical dolls were made for the main cast, while the rest of the world and enemies were constructed to emulate that style. There’s a storybook style with a slight verisimilitude to everything that is fascinating to see in action, especially at a high frame rate and resolution afforded by modern hardware. I wasn’t sure about how this would look at first when it was announced, as Dragon Quest 7’s caricature-inspired style seemed to conflict with textured, realistic-looking assets. It looks good in your face, though, especially when playing on Handheld Mode with the Switch 2 version. That thing is quickly cementing itself as the ideal way to play RPGs, and Reimagined is continuing that work for certain.

Now that it’s all laid out, what I keep coming back to is feeling like something is off. Dragon Quest 7 is already kind of in a weird spot as part of Dragon Quest as a series, due to its experimental structure and uneven storytelling. I understand Square Enix and the Dragon Quest team’s interest in making 7 stand out more in people’s eyes, especially as the series itself is enjoying such growing success. But I’m not sure going through with a surgical knife and hacking off all the friction is the right answer. In “streamlining” Dragon Quest 7, you’re scraping away a lot of what that game’s identity is, for better or for worse. It’s a different kind of effort than adding and expanding story elements in Dragon Quest 2, which we’ve seen was an incredibly successful effort.

Perhaps it’s okay that Dragon Quest 7 is a bit of an odd duck. It’s because of that struggle that Dragon Quest found itself more in later entries, and became a series that could thrive and stand out as more than the funny, old school RPG with the goofy monsters. Perhaps this is a case of trying to cram a square peg into a round hole, making Dragon Quest 7 Reimagined feel “forced” in some ways. While it’s a gorgeous and fun adventure that feels quite good to play in a mechanical sense, it’s not one that’s leaving an impact on my soul the same way other entries have. It’s been nice to see these characters again in such a fascinating visual style, and some of the new additions are cool, but there’s a palpable Cliff Notes energy to the scenario that I can’t see resonating well with newcomers. I can’t speak for what actually happens when people play it of course, but my curiosity to see how that plays out is stronger than my actual emotional response to playing it myself.

Dragon Quest 7 Reimagined is available on February 5, 2026 for the PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch and Switch 2, and PC. A Switch 2 code was provided by the publisher for this review.

Review for
Dragon Quest 7 Reimagined
8
Pros

• Gorgeous visual style - this diorama thing really works
• Pace is crisp and breezy, especially in combat
• Fun cast of characters and vignette-style storytelling has some real bangers

Cons

• Streamlining feels like it goes too far in removing friction
• From the original to now, storytelling is inconsistent
• Modular difficulty style feels weird for Dragon Quest