DRAGON QUEST VII Reimagined

I played through the original for the first time after this was announced (haven’t played the 3DS remake) and fell in love with it. Incredible game to start with that has some aspects that’d scare people away. There are plenty of changes from the original that I outright disagree with (rip to the cut scenarios and shortened or removed dungeons) but overall there’s a lot of great stuff with this one. Love the art style here, seems like such an excellent way to capture the feeling of the original yet be modern and not go to that typical modern game 3d camera that just changes how you look at everything. The additional story content is pretty good- there’s tweaks to the original stuff that I think mostly works well and the added scenario feels like a lot of heart was put into it. The changes to how combat works are all interesting- I love the original (which sticks pretty closely to traditional Dragon Quest mechanics) but its fine to change things up- it’s a different game! It feels like they went out of their way to incorporate “quality of life” fixes for common criticisms of turn based rpgs- no random encounters, weak enemies can be defeated without going into battle, rather than actions being picked at the start of the turn you pick the action right before the character does it, more transparency and easy of access to the vocation system, and much more. It all feels incredibly fair to the player while still interesting enough. My one major complaint is I think while simplified the vocation system is just worse- abilities being locked to vocations makes it way less fun to build characters but its so easy to max out the vocations they probably realized you’d be too powerful if it still worked that way. The difficulty has been toned down to an extreme degree for normal mode. There’s so many difficulty options here it’s a shame that they couldn’t make the base difficulty more in line with the original game- you can tweak everything to your liking anyway if you run into trouble but you most likely won’t. Most encounters in new areas I’m already able to quick kill the enemies on the map and the auto battle tactics take care of 99% of any battles I have to do with no additional input from me- incredibly easy to coast through the game. I’ll have to give harder modes a go in the future but wanted to just go through with whatever they set to normal. This makes it an even bigger shame they cut out so many dungeons. It feels like in a lot of ways they want this to be a first Dragon Quest or RPG in general for people. Not sure if I personally would recommend it as a first Dragon Quest game or a first RPG even (it’s hard to do when the original absolutely isn’t that and I’d strongly recommend playing the original first), I think it absolutely aims to be and could be for some though! Definitely worth your time if you’ve played the original (and you absolutely should). Hope to see more remakes or original games with this approach.