It doesn’t help that many of the people you meet look the same, with frequently recycled character models. Rather than spending a short time in a new place and then moving on, as in most JRPGs, I sometimes felt stuck in a holding pattern for just a little too long. Even within each island there’s a lot of back and forth between areas. The downside is that while you’re supposedly helping the world get bigger, it doesn’t really feel like you’re expanding its boundaries because you’re often contained within a relatively small part of it. But while purists might be unhappy with some of the name changes, the writers haven’t gone overboard with the puns and the writing adds humour and texture. It repeats a trick we’ve seen before in previous Dragon Quest remakes by using dialogue inflections to convey a range of accents, from Texan to Italian, Irish to German. In inviting you to observe each island’s quirks and rituals, Dragon Quest 7 sends a positive message about embracing other cultures, conveyed by an excellent localisation that works hard to distinguish each settlement from the next. The effect is like playing through a series of unusually expansive side quests, and that’s not necessarily a complaint - though one or two could have perhaps been trimmed and not much would be lost. Dragon Quest 7 sends a positive message about embracing other cultures. You’ll be asked to convince a god-fearing community not to go ahead with a dangerous ritual, witness a thorny love triangle, and defend a city against an army of automatons (with a surprisingly moving coda). You do lose something of the party’s personal journey, but these intimate little vignettes are nicely told and offer plenty of variety. At times it’s like watching a season of a favourite TV show that spends the first two-thirds on mystery-of-the-week episodes before belatedly bringing in the big bad for the closing stretch. Where most JRPGs have a strong plot that drives you forward, this is essentially a collection of small, self-contained stories. This structural shift makes for a very different kind of journey. In each new place, you’ll arrive at a time of crisis with a problem to solve once you’ve done that you’ll find the island is now accessible in the present day. The title gives the goal away: as you explore you’ll find stone fragments that, when placed on plinths at a mythical temple, unlock portals to new realms from a forgotten time. If every JRPG journey is essentially a coming-of-age tale about the world getting bigger – their youthful heroes learning and growing as they’re exposed to different places and people outside their home – Dragon Quest VII takes the metaphor more literally. It might seem an unusually slow start by modern standards, but it helps establish its central trio and why they’re so keen to leave their home: your young avatar, the rebellious Prince Kiefer, and inquisitive local girl Maribel are all certain there must be life beyond their lonely island, despite the protestations of others that nothing lies beyond its shores but an endless sea. It’s still quite some time before you’ll face your first monster battle, but you don’t have quite so long to wait until you’re exploring the wider world. I’m not convinced it always manages to justify such volume (you could say that for most JRPGs) but even if it takes its sweet time on occasion its payoffs reward your patience.ĭespite its formidable size, one of the first things seasoned JRPG fans will notice is that the introduction has been intelligently streamlined. Completists, meanwhile, might be advised to clear their schedule until December. But for most players the runtime will extend well into three figures. If you know exactly what you’re doing and where you’re going, you could conceivably finish the story within 75 hours – those who remember playing through the 2000 PlayStation original (released in North America a year later as Dragon Warrior VII) will find little to hinder their progress. New players should be warned that this game is, even by JRPG standards, a huge commitment. Dragon Quest VII is a sensitive update of a 16-year-old JRPG that captures the spirit of the respected original, though it doesn’t quite fill in all of the wrinkles of its outdated design. In a fast-moving medium like games the passage of time can be particularly cruel, but remakes give us the opportunity to revisit games as our fallible brains recall them rather than as they actually were, and introduce them to new generations without having to look past stale graphics and design.
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