The original Dragon Quest 7 is a masterpiece. But, despite its legendary status, even those who love it dearly should be able to readily admit that it is also highly flawed. One person who knows that acutely well is Takeshi Ichikawa – the producer at Square Enix in charge of shepherding Dragon Quest 7 Reimagined, an imminent remake of the game, to market.
“When the original was released I was in primary school,” Ichikawa notes. “It was the first numbered title I ever played.” The ideal man for the job to remake this classic, right?
“But,” Ichikawa adds with a sheepish grin. “Because the introductory section is so notoriously long, I was actually one of the people who gave out and dropped out of DQ7 halfway through.”
With this admission, made at the start of an extensive chat about rethinking the magic of Dragon Quest 7, Ichikawa instantly shows he gets it. When he was assigned the Reimagined project, Ichikawa then played the Nintendo 3DS version of DQ7 for the first time in order to get up to speed. From there, with these thoughts in mind, the project began.
Streamlined is the word. Dragon Quest 7’s greatest strength is arguably also its greatest weakness. It has a unique story structure for the Dragon Quest series, where the narrative is, in a sense, told through a series of relatively enclosed vignettes. Events do string together into a larger world-saving story, of course – it wouldn’t be Dragon Quest if they didn’t – but broadly, you’re sailing the oceans, landing on far-flung islands, and then experiencing a small episodic narrative of that island and its people. That story then resolves while also playing into a grand, over-arching plot.
In a sense -and excuse me for invoking one of the true gods of the genre in this – but it’s a little bit like Chrono Trigger. Except instead of travelling through time and learning of the dramas of each individual era and slowly figuring out how they tie together, you’re sailing across a broader world map. Admittedly, things don’t tie together in quite as satisfying a way. DQ7 is no Chrono Trigger, to be fair – but in places it does evoke some of the same magic.
The biggest problem with the original game, though, was pacing. The game is long. Arguably far too lengthy for its own good. It is paced glacially, and in a sense shows a supreme disrespect for the player’s time and attention. Thus Ichikawa – and many others – struggled to even make it through the intro. This core criticism of the original masterwork and even its 3DS mulligan
“Our goal was to preserve the original atmosphere and ‘feel’ while making the experience pacey, dense, and rich,” Ichikawa explains.
“We’ve put a lot of effort into restructuring three specific areas,” the producer continues. “Visual representation, scenario, and battles.”
The new doll-like art style is the banner bearer for the visual overhaul, and it’s one I honestly adore. Characters have been reimagined into cute proportions that vaguely resemble action figures. While this is something envisioned as new for Reimagined, Ichikawa is keen to point out that the new style has its roots in the game’s original art from the late, great Akira Toriyama.
“Akira Toriyama’s designs for Dragon Quest 7 have shorter, cuter proportions than the other titles,” Ichikawa notes. “We wanted a visual style that emphasized that adorable, or ‘chibi’, feel. We also saw that doll-like or puppet-inspired styles are popular in global media and felt it was a perfect fit for Toriyama’s DQ7 character designs.”
The designs aren’t just the work of brilliant character designers, though – the team behind Reimagined actually had real-life puppets of the characters created, which in turn were then scanned into the development tools to create the character models. Despite the expense, this was a challenge that Square Enix encouraged Ichikawa’s team to take on.
“We believed that to get the right texture and realism, we had to physically create the dolls and scan them,” Ichikawa reveals. “It wasn’t perfectly smooth at first; when we put the scanned models in-game, there were errors and glitches with the animations that the development team had to work hard to solve.”
A visual overhaul is a vital part of the experience, but it was never a part of why Dragon Quest 7 was subject to any disparagement from fans or critics. So, while effort and expense has been put into the visual look, it’s clearly reinvigorating DQ7’s pacing which has been the largest focus – and it’s a topic which Ichikawa becomes more animated when engaged on.
“The original is a series of short stories. To make the narrative easier to follow, we reordered some of these episodes. Others were changed into an optional experience, allowing players to tackle them in the order they choose,” Ichikawa notes.
“However, we didn’t just move elements around; we redesigned the scenario from scratch to find the optimum form for the storyline. To balance any cuts, we added completely new scenarios and backstory episodes to provide more depth to the characters. We worked closely with series creator Yuji Horii on every individual story to ensure we were on the right track.”
Fans will notice some storylines and entire islands have been excised from the game (something which, despite being intended to address past criticism, will doubtlessly concern). But the team has clearly made a huge effort to do this with a scalpel rather than a hatchet; and rather than just cuts without further consideration, the entire game has been carefully rebalanced around these changes.
Battles are also a key part of the pace. Here’s a big change: DQ7 Reimagined retains visible enemies over random encounters, a change first introduced in the 3DS version. This makes it easier to see what you’re getting into, and also makes it easier to avoid encounters when you’ve had enough of them or need to avoid them. This, alone, is a huge page-changer.
“Because the game is so long, symbol encounters [visible enemies] are the correct decision. It gives players the choice: if you want to focus on the story, you can skip battles; if you want to grind, you can seek them out intentionally.
“Our benchmark was that minor encounters should be fast, while boss battles should be deep and tactical. For the fast-paced side, we added adjustable battle speeds, auto-battle, and the ability to cut down weak monsters on the field map without entering a battle screen,” Ichikawa expands. “For bosses, we added ‘Burst’ super attacks and the ability to ‘moonlight’ in different job combinations to add tactical depth.”
It all amounts to a lot, and with some time in a non-final preview version of Dragon Quest 7 Reimagined, one can see how these changes might actually manage to thread the needle and accomplish the near-impossible – to make a classic, albeit a flawed one, better. Too often tinkering around the edges makes bangers worse – but that doesn’t look likely to be the case here.
“We are developing this to be the ‘Masterpiece’ version of Dragon Quest 7,” Ichikawa affirms. Soon, fans will deliver the verdict on if that goal has been achieved.
Dragon Quest 7 Reimagined is due for release on 5th February 2026 across Switch consoles, PS5, Xbox Series X/S, and PC (Steam, Microsoft).