Dragon Quest VII Reimagined - Switch 2 Review

I never played the original Dragon Quest VII on the original PlayStation, but I put a whole lot of hours into the Nintendo 3DS remake 10 years ago. I put 40 hours into that version until I lost the cartridge, and because of how long that game is, I never went back to it. That was until Dragon Quest VII Reimagined was announced for Nintendo Switch and Nintendo Switch 2, a full remake overhaul of an entry that sorely needed it.

For the uninitiated, Dragon Quest VII follows the story of the young protagonist (commonly named Auster) and his companions who hail from a solitary island where it is believed that they are the only ones in existence. That is until they find stone fragments and place them in the Shrine of Mysteries, where they become portals to islands in the past. Each island has its own problem to solve and upon solving it, the island appears in the present day. But why does this happen? And who was behind all of this in the first place? That's the problem our heroes face in their adventures.

The Good

Dragon Quest VII is notoriously known for being tedious and long in the tooth. In the original PlayStation version, there was not a single combat encounter until approximately five hours in, and while the 3DS did improve on this, the end result was still a slog, to say the least. Dragon Quest VII Reimagined remedies this wonderfully with a much more streamlined story and various quality-of-life improvements, like being able to speed up combat and the ability to attack and instantly defeat enemies you’re significantly stronger against, as well as having the option to chat with party members that allude to what you need to be doing next. This last point is especially important, as the original versions are incredibly obtuse in this matter and I remember getting quite frustrated on multiple occasions, so these additions feel like a godsend. I mean, the 3DS remake starts at 78 hours on howlongtobeat.com, and Reimagined starts at approximately half that. That’s a whole lot of streamlining!

With the recent passing of the late great Akira Toriyama (known for his work on games and anime series like Dragon Quest, Chrono Trigger and Dragon Ball), this may well be the best his character designs have ever looked. The development team created real wooden dolls of all the classic characters and scanned them into the game, and that attention to detail shows spectacularly. It also works wonderfully with the series’ seventh entry, considering the small islands coming to life and everything looking a little diorama-esque.

And lastly, had I reviewed the original or the 3DS entry in 2016, I would be saying the same thing in that Dragon Quest VII is a very unique entry in the series. While Dragon Quest fans are generally divided on its seventh entry, the concept of finding scattered stone fragments like puzzle pieces and fitting them together to be teleported to a new island in the past is genuinely fun and exciting.

TL;DR

• Streamlined gameplay helps with bloat
• Wooden doll art style is striking
• A unique entry in the series (unlocking new islands is fun and exciting)

The Bad

Where Dragon Quest VII Reimagined struggles is arguably no fault of its own. With Dragon Quest VII’s big hook being the ability to go back and forth in time to lost islands, you are then greeted with individual stories that focus on their struggles. While it does all come together in the end, a good 60% of the game feels like a series of fillers you would expect in a 500+ episode anime. While the original entry was far worse with this, considering its excruciatingly slow pace, the core of the game still remains the same.

Revisiting dungeons and cities can start to feel repetitive. While it’s occasionally rewarding to return to islands and see how they’ve evolved over time or changed through the player’s actions, backtracking through previously explored (and often sprawling) areas ultimately feels, much like my earlier criticisms, like filler rather than meaningful progression.

For this last point, I wish to start off by saying that the English voice acting is wonderfully delivered by their respective talents. However, and I’m not sure if this is the case in other languages, but the audio mastering is a bit hit and miss, where some lines are almost unhearable. It almost seems like the actor was told to trail off at the end of random sentences. I went into the settings and lowered the music and SFX volumes (as I usually do), but even still, the issue is persistent and a strange one at that.

TL;DR

• Source material makes for a somewhat superfluous story
• Reused dungeons can become repetitive
• Dialogue audio mastering issues

Final Score: 8/10

Dragon Quest VII was always thought to be a very interesting choice to be remade in 2026, considering it recently got the treatment on Nintendo 3DS 10 years prior. While I’m personally glad it did, seeing how I lost my 3DS copy all those years back and finally got to finish it, it also seems like a strange decision considering there are other entries that are currently more deserving. But nonetheless, Square Enix have done a fantastic job with it and have fixed (as much as they could) many annoyances the original and the 3DS remakes were heavily criticised for. This is, by far, the definitive version of Dragon Quest VII.

Thank you for checking out our Dragon Quest VII Reimagined Switch review, thank you to Square Enix (via Bandai Namco AU) for providing the review code and thank you to our Patreon Backers for their ongoing support:

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