Nearly every Dragon Quest has added something unique to the gaming landscape as a whole, but Dragon Quest VII: Fragments of the Forgotten Past is one of the best of the lot. There’s also a few slight balance changes, like some cut tedium for the game’s opening puzzles (which help make the first few low-key hours more engaging), and what feels like an overall slight decrease in difficulty. I haven’t even discovered the new endgame dungeon that was added in for the remake and I’ve played it more than the vast majority of 2016’s releases. There’s a casino, a recruitment minigame (which was reworked for 3DS), and a ton of other activities beyond just grinding and mastering each class. If you like extra shit, this is going to be your new jam, because that linearity really opens up if you’re in the mood for exploring.

Repeat that process for roughly 100 hours, culminating in a final boss, and you have one massive game.

After discovering that many islands once existed years before your time, the player and his crew will actually go back to the past to save the future, one island at a time. VII has an unconventional loop that not many games have replicated over the years that’s a tad more linear than you’re probably used to. It was already ahead of its time as one of the most ambitious projects ever (so much so that original developer Heartbeat went on hiatus, and eventually closed down entirely after the game’s development). Pop-in also occurs frequently, which is not a good look given the overhaul.īut that same criticism can’t be levied at the adventure itself. Those elements look smudged and not optimized in the slightest, though it might have something to do with the fact that there were hundreds of lines of dialogue to re-translate.

A lot of townsfolk blended together and the character models were all wide chibi renditions of the beautiful art, but it had a really smooth quality to its isometric feel, which was a wide departure from its predecessor. It’s great that you can finally see a lot of the characters fully realized in the 3DS version (specifically the enemies, which look at lot more pronounced), but there’s still a dated feel to it - mostly in regards to the UI and text. Call me crazy, but I actually liked the Lunar-era spritework in the original.

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