The 3DS version’s battle scenes, world map, and characters are all fully 3D, and even if this isn’t the best-looking game on the system (pop-in on the world map is particularly distracting, as is reuse of NPC character models and those models’ wooden and repetitive movements), it’s still a solid upgrade. The visuals are a huge upgrade over the PlayStation original, which used ugly sprites against a 32-bit 3D background on the world map and sprites against a flat 2D background for battle sequences. Your characters can all equip different items and have different skills, and eventually you’ll gain access to a reasonably fun and deep job system to customize their attributes and abilities even more. As you travel between towns on the expansive world map, you’ll run into monsters that you will do turn-based combat with. You control a party of characters that spends its time walking through towns, talking to non-player characters, forwarding the story, searching for loot, and buying new equipment. In case you have never played a Dragon Quest game, the main thing you need to know is that even Final Fantasy hasn’t birthed quite so many JRPG tropes. The result is a quirky title that has a lot to offer that small corps of Dragon Quest die-hards, but it might be just a little too inaccessible for a wider audience to enjoy. So Dragon Quest VII is a new localization of a three-year-old remake of a 16-year-old game from a franchise that intentionally (and lovingly) keeps one foot stuck in retro 1980s JRPG gameplay. The Japanese 3DS remake came out in 2013, but the game’s gargantuan script and its small Western fanbase meant that we didn’t hear anything official about a localization until earlier this year. It’s a 3DS remake of a 100-plus-hour PlayStation JRPG that was wildly popular in Japan but mostly overlooked in the US, due in part to the fact that it was a primitive-looking retro-style game that came out on the PlayStation just as the Dreamcast and PlayStation 2 generation was really heating up. That rush of games capped off in 2009 with the generally excellent Nintendo DS-exclusive Dragon Quest IX, but so far this decade English releases have been few and far between.Ĭase in point, Dragon Quest VII (officially subtitled Fragments of the Forgotten Past). The series enjoyed a US revival in the mid-'00s when Dragon Quest VIII was released for the PlayStation 2, which was followed by a series of Nintendo DS remakes of IV, V, and VI (it was the first time either of the latter two had been released in English). This means that getting DQ games localized is always a crapshoot. The series is phenomenally popular in Japan, but outside of its homeland its audience is definitely of the dedicated-but-small variety. It’s hard to be a Dragon Quest fan in the English-speaking world. Game Details Developer: ArtePiazza/Square Enix
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