I gotta play the PS1 version someday but I just love this game man it means a lot to me.

If Dragon Quest already was a series about having fun simplified RPG adventures this is like, literally a playable One Piece (or Shonen anime) with big story intrigue, lovable filler to add variety, and a cast that changes and grows over time.

It’s evident DQ changed after Chrono Trigger and this title shows that the biggest lesson they learned is that time travel can absolutely make for stellar world building even for small locations while adding epic stakes.

I love this game

I completely adored this game. I understand it has its naysayers due to its length and it does take a while for the plot to get moving, but there is a lot of great stuff here. The characters, the enemies, the towns and locations each have their own unique personalities and are a treat to be around. The thing about Dragon Quest VII is that instead of one huge contained story, it's multiple stories told on multiple islands with their own unique theme, unique accent / dialect, unique customs, etc. There's also a few stories here which are tearjerkers and make you feel really sorry for a number of the residents of this world and its cast. When you help the people triumph over evil it's difficult not to yell out loud in victory as this game does a fantastic job in lulling you into this world. DQVII does the same thing as the Windwaker in making you feel like like a child all over again and you're about to go on an adventure. According to my 3DS it took 90 hours for me to complete this game. On one hand that is quite a chunk of time, but I do still feel like I'd love to experience this adventure all over again. An absolute must-buy for the 3DS along with DQVIII.

A very long Dragon Quest game equivalent to DQXI in length. It took me around 100 hours to beat, but honestly with the repetitive nature of the game's structure, the areas that felt like padding (which hurt the pacing), the endless encounters, and the somewhat unsatisfying conclusion, I can't say I'm particularly glad I stuck with the game to see it all the way through.

This game isn't bad, though, probably a bit above average quality-wise, but I can't really recommend this game to anyone outside the hardcore DQ/JRPG enjoyer with 100 hours to kill.

To end positively, my favorite parts of DQVII are Maribel's snark, the game's mysterious atmosphere, the expansive class system (albeit too grindy), and the sheer amount of dialogue the party has at the smallest narrative changes (even talking to some NPCs).

Forgive me, dwardman, for I have sinned and played the remake instead of the original. In my defense, it’s way easier to fit the 3DS version into my life and there are two major factors that I think make for a general improvement here. One is the way that class outfits are reflected on the characters, particularly when it comes to the Goodest Boy Ruff. Yeah all the characters get their own outfits, but how am I supposed to argue with his Wolf Mom ending up in a sheep outfit when you make Ruff a shepherd? Or the wolf wearing a top hat if you make him a luminary? You may call me shallow for it but it’s incredible stuff. The other, I think, is that having everything on one cartridge instead of two discs makes a certain twist land a little better, I think. It wasn’t too much of a surprise, but I feel like the narrative moxie of it is better served without a second disc spoiling how much of the game is left.

With that said, since I haven’t played the PS1 version, I should start talking about this game on its own merits. It’s definitely as long and episodic as everyone says it is, but I actually enjoyed it for that. Sometimes you want a connected series of vignettes that are fun little adventures but will occasionally leave you mouthing “what the fuck, Dragon Quest” under your breath, you know? It’s good stuff. The playable characters are also all super endearing, and the party chat’s very fun. There’s genuinely something related to the cast that genuinely slots into one of those “what the fuck, Dragon Quest” moments, and I seriously haven’t been able to stop thinking about it.

I have to say, I only really felt the fatigue setting in at the end, and that’s primarily related to how the job system works. The game really does not reward fucking around and finding out; it definitely makes some role assignments pretty obvious, but I found out way too late from checking a guide that it’s much more lucrative to put all monster jobs on one character instead of trying to spread them around. Maybe it would’ve warned me if I checked a manual or something, but man. Also it sucks that you can only have a party of four at the end because I love all my silly party members, and no, I absolutely didn’t bother with the postgame content. I thought I might until I actually tried messing around with the casino, which is mandatory to get one of the postgame dungeon fragments, and lost like all my tokens because fuck if I have the patience to figure out which slot machine has good odds or not.

Anyway, this is the first Dragon Quest I’ve finished since Sugiyama died, and now that he is no longer able to contribute to fash movements in Japan I guess I can judge his work a little more fairly. Sorry dudes the man can write one hell of a jingle but overall his best stuff is from the 8 bit era and the more I play through the series the more I realize the songs I actually liked in 11 were pretty much all from old games. There’s a bit of coziness to some of the tracks, definitely, but honestly I think he ranks only slightly above Motoi Sakuraba When Really Phoning It In On a Tales Game Because He’d Rather Be Composing for Dark Souls for me.

Anyway, overall it’s not my favorite Dragon Quest but it’s definitely a fun game. Get it before the 3DS dies. Or don’t but do crimes to get it on your 3DS after it dies.

This game impressed me so much that it got me to start writing reviews for the games I've played and enjoyed, so I decided to look for and find the review I made for this game in high school which was my first ever game review. I refined it a little bit as I typed this up, but it is mostly the same as what I wrote back when I made it.

Back in Fall 2012, Square Enix announced Dragon Quest VII for the Nintendo 3ds. As someone who has wanted to play the series, I was hoping and waiting for this game to get released outside of Japan. I could have just undusted my old Ps1 and got a copy of the game on that, but I was more interested in playing this remake because of its beautiful 3d graphics. Then in November 2015, Dragon Quest VII and VIII were announced to be localized in 2016 and I was ecstatic when I heard this news while watching the Nintendo Direct they were announced in. When the game came out, I picked up a copy of the game at Walmart and began my playthrough of this masterpiece.

One of the pros that stuck out to me was that the places you visit in the game all have a distinct, different feeling that almost feels like you're playing a different game and makes it feel like a real adventure. This sense of immersion made me enjoy the game more than I thought I would and kept me coming back.

The soundtrack is also pretty good. There may not be a ton of songs and you'll probably hear some quite a bit but they are catchy and fit well in the game.

The gameplay can actually get pretty deep. Like other turn-based RPGs, you have the options to attack, defend, use abilities or magic, or flee from a battle. While that sounds simplistic, this game can get deep with the numerous amounts of classes you can unlock such as the fighter, sailor, wizard, dancer, and plenty more. You can even learn some monster classes like slime and healslime if you're lucky enough for them to drop. Once you level up some of the regular classes to the max, you can unlock even stronger ones like the pirate and paladin classes that take even longer to level up. They all unlock useful spells and abilities that will greatly benefit you.

One small con that sort of broke the immersion was that some of the NPC and monster models are reused quite a bit. The grinding is another one since I remember it taking up a good majority of my playthrough but that partly my fault since I leveled everything up a bit later than I should have. The last and most annoying flaw was the backtracking. There were a handful of times where I got lost and had to pull up a guide on YouTube to figure out where to go next.

It's a wonderful classic remade with beautiful 3d graphics. The three year wait it took for me to play this game was definitely worth it.

Dragon Quest VII is really Dragon Quest VI-2. I don't mean that it's a direct sequel like some of the other games in the franchise, it's completely separated from the Zenithian trilogy even, but in so many ways it feels like a direct retread of the foundations that DQVI laid down. From the mechanics, to the structure, to the writing this just feels like a more expanded and refined take on the ideas of its predecessor. All of this is not really a complaint, I enjoyed a lot of the things that DQVI did, and even though this entry doesn't do a lot of brand new ideas to the table it's still the biggest Dragon Quest game to date and getting to just vibe out in that world is enjoyable in and of itself.

From a mechanics side of things the job system is back and more fleshed out. There are many more jobs to pick from, including a ton of monster jobs that add monster-specific moves to your moveset, and more third tier jobs outside of Hero that give you more endgame options. The leveling requirements also seem much less absurd than in DQVI which allows you to try out different jobs without the pressure of needing to go grind for hours to get a basic set of abilities unlocked.

The writing is definitely a step up from DQVI, in that there is an actual plot outside of the episodic adventures. The plot is glacially paced, and still mostly occurs within the last few hours, but there are some interesting twists and turns. I won't say that this game pulls any super unique narrative tricks like the best games in the series are known for, but it's solid enough that it didn't bother me. I think the quality of the episodic stories is really great across the board here, and that's nice to see considering there are so many of them, and they're so much more involved than past games.

My main gripe with this game is the new twist on the two worlds thing that DQVI did. You're constantly travelling back and forth between the past and present, which does lead to some cool narrative moments, and I think that more than justifies having the two worlds. Unfortunately, there's way too many instances of you spending several hours in the past version of a location, only to go back to the present where you have to spend several more hours exploring the exact same location with minor changes. Early in the game this didn't bother me much, but near the end when you're doing lengthy dungeons multiple times it really starts to feel monotonous.

I don't think this is one of the best games in the series, but much like DQVI I think this is an entry that I can see myself coming back to just to turn my brain off and enjoy the vibes.

The last mainline game I needed to play (though IX remains the last I need to beat, technically, or at least try to beat considering that I'm dropping this one). I'd put this one off and been wary about it because of its notorious reputation as the longest and slowest game in the series, and now that I've played it, that reputation is well earned, and also perhaps even an understatement.

This is a tough one to rate because technically it really isn't that much worse than VI or IV, which are flawed games and previously sat at the bottom of my ranking, but have some positives in their favor. This game is just...really bland to me. The episodic design is unique for the series, but I didn't find most of the stories that compelling, and honestly even found some of the recurring themes to be a little off putting. Otherwise, it has all the slowness and flatness that I found troubling in VI, but drawn out even further. It's a game that's roughly as middling, but thrice the length, and that's just hard to justify.