We recently had the pleasure of being able to spend some time with Dragon Quest VII Reimagined at the legendary Square Enix offices in Los Angeles. In a few private terminals, surrounded by adorable Dragon Quest slime plushies and more video game awards than one could imagine even existed, we took a lean 45 minutes to sample what this clever remake had to offer. This, like other Dragon Quest remakes we’ve written extensively and lovingly about—such as Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake and Dragon Quest I & II HD-2D Remake, released in that unusual order to snap the story into chronological storyline sequence—is a lavish and luminous re-envisioning of a previously released Dragon Quest title. For the uninitiated, some extra explanation is worth doing. In the USA, the Dragon Quest series was for many years referred to as Dragon Warrior due to concerns of another tabletop game usage of the name until in 2004 when Dragon Quest VIII was released. Subsequent releases and rereleases all have reverted to the original Japanese title, Dragon Quest. Confusing nomenclature aside, Dragon Quest VII does just as the HD-2D remake of I, II and III did recently, improving mightily on the original in terms of accessibility and speed but not losing any of the trademark visual aesthetic that made these titles famous.
Originally entitled Dragon Quest VII: Warriors of Eden in Japan and Dragon Warrior VII in the USA (released on the Playstation 1), Dragon Quest VII Reimagined takes game lead Yuji Horii’s vision and Dragon Ball creator Akira Toriyama’s unmistakable character design and gives them vibrant life in the modern age. We enter the game with our party consisting of Arus (a.k.a. Hero), Maribel, Aishe and Ruff. We head through the Hardlypool region to the village of Wetlock. There we’re able to blissfully indulge in the town-centric amenities consistent with role playing games of the era, shopping for weapons/armor, sleeping at the inn, conversing with townspeople, learning about local lore and perusing item shops. Out context it’s hard to know how serious a threat paralysis is, but the item shop has Mooney Bulbs in addition to holy water, antidotal herbs as well as strong medicine to patch us up if the going gets tough.
The town folk are enthralled by an elderly bard present named Old Man Riffer. It’s not long before after our first night at the inn, our team awakes to see the madness of this riffer hypnotizing the whole town and luring them into a portal. Too late to save them from this alluring lullaby, we choose to follow into the portal. This leads to our first “dungeon crawl” in the tongue-in-cheek-ly named Highendreigh Tower. We begin our ascent fighting a bevy of cool, cute and hilarious monsters using the upgraded combat system. Foes we encounter include stone golems, notso machos, caper tigers (which may have been a person in a tiger costume, or a tiger with a human mask inside his mouth), literal bag of laughs and yes, no Dragon Quest title would be complete without slimes. We were lucky enough to run into the adorable little buggers in the form of regular slimes, king slimes and even metal slimes once. Naturally, the famously elusive metal slimes got away before we could visit even a scratch upon them.
The game allows you to either manually direct each character’s actions, attacks or spells, or you can set the action to one of several programmatic choices. You could opt for the characters to show no mercy and relentlessly try to win, be defensive and favor healing, or even be strategic and let them use the system’s own choice of the best ways to win the fight. This is strangely kind of a nice feature as in keeping of the grind of RPG-tittles from the classic era, there is a lot of grind. Battles are frequent, and while piloting is unabashedly fun, it’s nice to have this quality-of-life updated feature where when you’ve had enough of the grind, you can let the characters do the fighting until you’re ready to manually make the choices again. Each character has their own strengths, and some do better with physical attacks and others excel at magic area of effect damage. Ruff, riding atop his surrogate mother wolf was particularly fun to use. The game has incorporated a new “Let Loose” mechanic where the character can do powerful attacks when they get worked up enough. And naturally, many of the animations for the special spells and attacks are worth the price of admission alone.
As we climbed the Highendreigh Tower, we collected treasure and gear, upgrading our characters’ equipment and occasionally leveling them up individually as well for better magic and buffs. The vocation system of the game has been updated to allow characters to use two separate vocations for each character. Vocations we saw in this hands-on preview included: sailor, martial artist, priestess, mini mayoress, wolf boy, warrior, destiny’s dancer and troubadour. Some were obviously more applicable to specific characters, but it was worth dabbling to see how each changed things up. Once reaching the pinnacle of the tower, the villagers were discovered apparently imprisoned by Old Man Riffer. Once the singer turned abductor was found, he explained that he took this action only to save the villagers, as he foresaw that the merman / fish monster Gracos would flood the entire area. Sure enough, the prophecy is correct, and a giant flood consumes all towns in the area.
There’s only one logical thing to do at this point, and that’s to take the only rowboat at the tower and head out into the drink to find Gracos and put a stop to this world-drenching event. Some citizens weren’t so lucky and are floating adrift on boxes or other worldly possessions. A conversation with enough of them leads the party to the undersea Sunken Citadel. It’s not long inside there before the showdown with Gracos himself. The animations of everything are massively modernized. And while the earlier battles ascending the tower are not too challenging, Gracos is a bit more of a tank. We failed to stop him before our time ran out (even joined by the bard Old Man Ripper for the fight) so fear not intrepid RPG lover. This game isn’t one you will just bowl over easily. It will be challenging in just the right places. Dragon Quest VII Reimagined does the implausible as the franchise’s other remakes did. It takes something that is hard to imagine outside its original era and boosts it with the tricks and tech of the modern era. Something plucked out of its time and technological limitations might seem unwieldy, but it really works here.
Dragon Quest VII Reimagined comes out on February 5th, 2026 for Nintendo Switch 1 and 2, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and Steam.