Hands On: Dragon Quest 7 Reimagined Could Be the Series' Best Remake Yet

Dragon Quest 7 has long been one of the most divisive entries in the incredible RPG series, mostly thanks to the sheer length of its island-hopping adventure.

The original PS1 release and its 3DS remake both suffer from what we'd call rather severe padding at times, with a comical amount of backtracking often dismantling the story's pacing. Overall, it's an infamously, frustratingly slow RPG — but that's exactly why Dragon Quest 7 Reimagined has so much potential.

If the remake's PS5 demo is anything to go by, Square Enix and HexaDrive could be on to something special. This is very much a streamlined revival of a title that's always bared the hallmarks of a classic Dragon Quest journey, but they've forever been buried beneath the aforementioned pacing issues.

Case in point: the original game's opening — which was utterly glacial — has been reworked quite a bit in Reimagined, trimming a lot of the fat that slowed events to a crawl. Conversations have been condensed, and some seriously tedious questing has been stripped away.

In short, you're no longer slogging through about five hours of NPC yapping to sample your very first battle, and the hope is that the remake will continue to streamline things as you push further into the plot.

Now, there's an argument here that Reimagined is cutting content — that it's a lesser game than its predecessors. But in this instance we think context is important; again, we can't stress enough just how tedious the original Dragon Quest 7 could be.

As long as Reimagined doesn't mess with important bits of character development, or narrative beats that are tonally relevant, then we don't think there's a whole lot wrong with reshaping the adventure to better suit a modern audience.

And this is true of the remake's new quality of life enhancements as well. Things like objective markers have been added, so you're not just mashing X on every NPC to find out where you should be going next, and battles can be sped up to alleviate the grind.

Speaking of the grind, we're big fans of Reimagined's new difficulty settings. The default options boil down to easy, normal, and hard, but you can also create a custom difficulty by tweaking individual values, like incoming and outgoing damage.

Dragon Quest 7 was never a particularly challenging instalment — especially once you started getting to grips with the different character vocations — but it could get very grindy at times. Fortunately, in the remake, you can just bump up experience point, money, and vocation experience gains to make the whole thing way more agreeable.

Or you can, you know, be a masochist and make the entire adventure much more difficult. That's the joy of having options!

The bottom line here is that if any Dragon Quest game needed a modern kick up the bum, it was probably 7 — and Reimagined seems to be delivering on all fronts.

And that's without even mentioning the utterly delightful art direction, which, er, reimagines the RPG in a diorama style, complete with puppet-like character models. Admittedly, Kiefer's Team America face won't be to everyone's taste, but there's no denying that the remake's got a unique — and deeply cosy — look about it.

So, we can't wait to play more of Dragon Quest 7 Reimagined, if only to see whether the rest of the adventure holds up. In terms of ambition, this could easily be one of the best Dragon Quest revivals yet.

Have you played the Dragon Quest 7 Reimagined demo? What are your thoughts on it? Start collecting those tablet fragments in the comments section below.