This game is almost like a retro throwback before those were in. At a time when Final Fantasy was breaking records with blockbuster production values and incredible presentation, Dragon Quest 7 defiantly presented itself as a kinda-3D souped-up SNES RPG, complete with tinny sound effects. As was long the case with this series, Japan loved it while the west saw it as backwards.

The appeal of DQ7 in particular is especially niche given that on top of its simple presentation, it's like a hundred hours long. I'm not saying that as hyperbolic expression, I literally mean that the main story is, by most accounts, around one hundred hours long. You've got to be really into JRPGs and/or Dragon Quest to want to spend a hundred hours of your limited time on Earth experiencing this game. Personally, I tend to find JRPGs merely tolerable as games except when they have a strong hook, like an intriguing and well-presented story or unique combat and progression systems. This means I'm much more primed to be a Final Fantasy guy than a Dragon Quest guy, but the latter still has some undeniable magnetic charm to it, even as the games are usually more iterative than innovative past the NES era.

So I went into this game knowing full well I'd never beat it, but I was still intrigued in seeing what it had to offer. Indeed, "more iterative than innovative" describes my experience with DQ7. Rather than attempting something as ambitious as DQ4's chapters or DQ5's lifetime-spanning saga, DQ7 is mostly just classic Dragon Quest, but really big. The game's intro sequence is a couple hours devoid of any combat, which for me felt like an eternity of looking for the right NPCs to finally unlock the simple-but-sprawling first dungeon. By the time the first battle finally happened, I thought "Geez, finally."

If there is anything novel about this game other than it being backwards-looking and very long, it's the surprising Zelda influence. Obvious ways include the time-travel plot probably influenced by Ocarina of Time, the dungeons being more puzzle-centric, and the hero wearing a pointy green hat. Another example of Zelda's influence is that unlike previous Dragon Quest games where you can look in jars, here you lift them over your head, then chuck 'em. The puzzles are actually pretty enjoyable, but I personally think this more interactive world is more suited to a game with action combat, as combining it with DQ's traditional turn-based approach creates a harder separation between the overworld and separate menu-based battle screens, making it a bit harder to get engrossed in the world.

The charm is there in spades, but the abysmally slow pacing and absurd length combined with typical Dragon Quest simple gameplay and episodic story emphasis filters most, and I can't say I'm an exception to that. It's undeniably a well-made game that knows exactly what it wants to be, but it's not really a high point for Dragon Quest, RPGs, or the PS1. Look elsewhere.

A game that if not almost perfect, is perfect in every way. This game would set the standard for the formula of the following Dragon Quest games.
It can be a bit repetitive if it is your first game, but if you have been playing Dragon Quest for a while, you will immediately realize that the formula is the same one only presented with another layer of paint. Characters are fun, and the storylines of every island are fun enough too for the sake of keeping you entertained for a couple of hours each one.

I’m a sicko, so I prefer random encounters. That’s why I played the original PSX version over the 3DS remake. That three hour intro a lot to get through but once the game gets going, it’s very compulsive to play. This episodic approach to a JRPG story works well in the case of Dragon Quest VII. The writing (and localization) is pretty good although I think once the third act comes around and the story becomes more interconnected, my interest isn’t as strong.

The reason why someone would ought to play the 3DS version is that it’s easier to collect the Shards you need to unlock new parts of the game. I got lost a few times and had to consult a guide to find the missing Shard. I didn’t want to use the guide. There are a lot of locational abilities that don’t serve much purpose, like Smell which tells you how many treasures are still lingering but only on single maps. You are given a lot of abilities to navigate this game and they’re not very useful. Pamela is a fortune teller and she was never useful to finding Shards nor TinyMedals.

Obviously the star of the show is the class system, which is robust although I think the Monster Classes are superfluous and I wish there was more flexibility in builds since characters can pretty much either be strength-focused and pickup Warrior, Fighter, etc or they can be magic-focused and get Mage, Cleric etc.

I think the biggest knock against the class system, though, is how the game shuffled around its characters. You unlock the class system with three characters in the party, you journey with them a long time, and then the fourth member comes in grossly underdeveloped. Then one of the original characters is swapped out to be replaced with another underdeveloped hero. That one that swaps out only comes back late in the game so that’s only two characters that get a fair amount of time to grow as warriors.

Regardless of my complaints, I found this to be an exciting and engrossing RPG. I liked the challenge. I like the class system. The graphics and music are good. The story’s interesting although for how long this game is, the story is surprisingly basic. 100 hours on my completed save file with 70 hours clocked in on the emulator. I went back and finished the post-game (which involved me using cheats to unlock a lot of classes and speed up grind). The bonus stuff is pretty cool and having beaten the two bonus dungeons, I feel I can close the book on this legendary RPG.

I know this game's structure and pacing is not to everyone's taste, being a fairly divisive game as far as DQ games go, but I do think it is for me. It has an oddly melancholic feel to it permeating most of the stories surrounding the regions you explore, maybe I like it because the seeing the passing of time as something that affects people and places in such a direct way is a theme that always affects me, either way, I vibe with this game. I used to like it fine enough but this replay made me like it a lot more and yes, I do prefer the PS1 version mostly due to the graphical style.

The 2nd attempt at playing a Dragon Warrior/Quest game for me, after my initial experience with Dragon Warrior 1 on the NES.

It went a little better than my first experience... but not by much. The game felt so archaic, even for its time; it was as if I was progressing backwards in time, and it made me recall why I didn't enjoy the RPG genre on the original NES. I thought it was very generic/formulaic after experiencing the Final Fantasy games on PS1.

Also, the game's start did itself no favors. Coming from the bombastic opening of say a Final Fantasy VII, to this game, where the opening hours were not spent in a single battle... I didn't enjoy it at all, is putting it mildly.

First, the good: the world was one of the most interesting I've seen in an RPG, and the storyline gimmick of discovering and saving each town one by one made for some very compelling episodic storytelling. Each town had their own unique saga, and they made me alternately laugh, cry, think, and on one occasion gnash my teeth in rage and wish there were a way to destroy the town.

That said, it was a huge missed opportunity for the job system to shine: this is one of the few job system games I have absolutely no urge to replay, because even unlocking the job systems takes over 30 hours - more time than many entire games! I'm also not a big fan of the camera angles - they made navigation more difficult than it had to be, and detracted from the feeling of exhilarating exploration that characterizes the best DQ games. I also wasn't a fan of the combat (see here for more detailed thoughts: https://www.backloggd.com/u/gyoza/review/150377/) I don't regret playing it one bit, but I'm not sure if I'll replay it again!

After playing through Super Hero Operations, I managed to lose the Super Robot Wars bug (for now ;b) and re-catch the JRPG bug I had a year or two before that. Some other friends of mine across various friend groups also happened to be playing a fair bit of Dragon Quest around that time, so I thought what better time to finally get into the copy of DQ7 I bought last year. I played the Japanese version of the game on original hardware, and it took me around 105 hours.

The story of DQ7 puts you in the shoes of Hero (the main character whom you name), who in this game is the son of a fisherman on the one island in the whole world. You live in this tiny village with your family and play with your friends Maribel (the mayor’s daughter) and Kiefer (the prince of the nearby kingdom) and dream of adventuring one day. Your dreams are suddenly realized one day when a mysterious stone your good for nothing uncle finds leads you to the forbidden ancient ruins in the mountains north of town, where you’re flung back in time to a far off island to help save it (and eventually many others) from being sealed away by some strange dark force!

DQ7’s narrative is a very strange one among both JRPGs and DQ games I’ve played. Though it has named characters, such as Maribel and Keifer and a few others, instead of creating your own blank-slate party members as DQ3 and 9 do, they have very minor roles in the story compared to DQs 4-6 before or DQ8 after. Most of the narrative’s MASSIVE amount of text is taken up by the minor characters on the islands you’re visiting and saving. On each island, you’ll play through a little adventure to free that land from the darkness and allow that island to reappear in the normal world. You’re not only going into the little sealed worlds of these islands, but significantly back in time as well, and they get to have all their history play out by the time they appear in the real world again. Visiting these lands both in their far flung pasts of peril and in the safe present when your deeds are distant enough to have become legend is a really neat story conceit, but most of these stories (though not all) are more or less self-contained from one another.

The game has a vibe something like a playable shonen anime as a result, with each island being like a mini story-arc making up the larger story of the “series” that is this game. It makes it feel like more of an adventure for the sake of it than most other DQ games which usually have clearer stakes, but there are certainly larger things afoot beyond mere island saving. These stories really range a lot in tone as well, with some being more lighthearted and silly with others being quite emotionally affecting and some being truly harrowing. It gives a wide spread of stories to interact with, and they’re all so different from one another that I never felt bored going to a new island. It was always an exciting experience to see just what thing lay around the next portal~. There are just about 20 of these island to go through, and between that and mechanical things we’ll get to later, that’s where you’ll find principle blame for the game’s significant length. I ultimately quite liked the story, even though it’s pretty light on themes at the end of the day, but the sheer length and at time directionless-seeming nature of the story is definitely going to turn some people off, or at least be a significant obstacle in them sticking with DQ7 long enough to finish it.

Mechanically, this is very much a successor to DQ6 and how it handles its systems. At the base line, it’s very much Dragon Quest as you’ve always known it. First-person turn-based battles, you can control party members either directly or with pre-set general behaviors, you can cast spells: a very typical JRPG as DQ so loves to be. The monster recruiting from DQ5 is more or less gone, and instead (around a 30 hours into the game) you unlock a job system very much like DQ6’s job system.

The big caveat here is that unlike DQ6, the jobs here matter a LOT and affect your stats a TON. Being a bad or inconvenient class can really be a pain to play as, but you’ll need to play those classes a lot if you want to get past the weaker jobs and unlock the several tiers of prestige jobs in this game’s job tree. Once you get a skill (be it a spell or other special skill), you keep it forever in a continuously growing pile, and some jobs also have passives associated with them in general and most of them have a bonus for mastering the job. But when you master a job, you’re unlikely to stay as it for long if you can help it, as you need to get to your next job and start mastering that ASAP, because these things take a LONG time to master.

The base level jobs (of which there are about ten and you’ll likely be mastering three to five of them) all take from 130 to 180 battles to master, with the intermediate and expert jobs taking from 200 to 240 battles to master. Top this off with EXP and money being very slow to earn as well, and you have the recipe for a game with a LOT of grinding, and that’s not even factoring in the Monster Job system which is like the normal job system but with piles more stuff to grind through. I kept track, and about 20 hours of the 105 of my playtime were just grinding through the game’s job system stuff, and I never even touched the monster job system. The sheer amount of endless grinding in this game is easily one of the biggest factors that would make me hesitate recommending this game to anyone not already very familiar and comfortable with retro RPGs (and especially retro DQ), as that level of endless grinding is sure to turn of players with more modern sensibilities towards such things.

Speaking of putting lots of time into things, the signposting is another big sticking point for me with this one. I did my absolute best to play through this game never using a walkthrough. I used a guide for the jobs, but only a walkthrough near the very end when I was just so stuck I couldn’t fathom what to do next (and I’m glad I looked it up, because I would’ve been stuck forever otherwise XP). The game is usually pretty straightforward with how to progress, but that’s with the key exception of its main advancement mechanic: tablet fragments. These fragments are found in both the past worlds and in the present, and you use them to unlock new islands to travel to. These worlds aren’t particularly small or compact either, and you don’t even always find only the pieces for the very next island in the one you’re currently on. This means if you miss one or don’t realize what side quest in the present has suddenly progressed and that you’re meant to go back there, you’re up shit creek without a paddle.

Now there is a fortune teller on the main island who gives story progression hints, but they’re VERY general hints, and I basically never found them useful. There’s thank heck a fortune teller for fragment pieces, but she’s quite well hidden and you don’t unlock her location for a couple tens of hours into the game. I didn’t even realize she was there until significantly after that either. Her hints are better, thank goodness, but that involves even realizing she exists in the first place. While I could deal with the grinding, the selectiveness with how well signposted was another really big factor that made this game harder to enjoy than I wanted it to be, and this is almost certainly a game you’ll need to end up consulting walkthrough for at some point or another.

Aesthetically, it’s a very pretty mostly 2D game. Environments are 2D sprites on 3D-ish environments. Buildings and such are 3D, and you can rotate the camera either completely or a bit side to side depending on the area. The battles are entirely 2D and have some really nice 2D animations for the monsters (many of whom are completely new, as a good portion of this game’s monster roster is entirely knew from the comparatively quite homogeneous previous six games). I think some might be turned off by the 2D-on-3D aesthetic, but I really liked it. I think there’s a good reason they used this style for the remakes of 4, 5, and 6 on DS and then for the remakes of 1, 2, and 3 on 3DS (other than that the PS1 remake of 4 used this engine and in all likelihood they just ported that version to the DS and then that set the format for how the rest of those remakes would look :b). The music is also very good and Dragon Quest-y as usual. If you like DQ music, you’ll likely really like what’s here too~.

Verdict: Hesitantly Recommended. This game is a really mixed bag. The good stuff is really good and fun. It’s a lovely sort of swansong, in retrospect, to the Enix-era DQ games before they became Square Enix and so much changed. If you can get past the poor signposting and loads of grinding, you’ll likely have quite a good time with this, as I did, but if you’d like a more forgiving time in those regards, seeking out the 3DS remake will likely be better worth your time. DQ7 is a bit of an odd black sheep of the DQ series, but it’s one I think still has a lot of merit and charm to it despite its flaws.

This is the game I remember watching my brothers play before I knew what a video game was.

I've had the "Heavenly Village" theme stuck in my head for 20 years. It wouldn't be until quite a few years later I would learn that Akira Toriyama worked on the world of Dragon Quest. So his untimely death has got me reminiscing a little bit.

While I personally only played this game for a few hours maybe two or three times tops it left an everlasting imprint on my psyche.

Something about this game never left me.

Something about this game has bugged me for 20 years.

Maybe Toriyama's untimely passing really hit me.

But I started out this year literally saying "I want to play JRPG's" and everytime I picked one up I would remember Dragon Quest VII on my PS1.

This feeling I have, if not coincidental, then fate then

I will play this game to completion
I will finally finish what I started when I was 3 years old and couldn't even read.

I told my brother that Toriyama had a hand in Dragon Quest and it literally made him cry. It's making me kinda tear up right now so maybe I oughta finally get on with it.

I started a new game just to check if the copy still worked and when that menu booted up. When I saw that opening cutscene. When I heard Heavenly Village again for the first time in almost 20 years. I HAVE to play this game. Not for 22 year old James. But for that little kid who watched his brothers play this game over and over again only to forget to save or lose the memory card or pick up a new game. I owe it to me, to them, and to Toriyama to see this through.

This is literally the game I haven't stopped thinking about for 20 years. It has been there for as long as I remember and I'm not even sure we ever got to see combat since that's apparently at the 2 to 3 hour mark.

i really like how a lot of this game feels like a huge adventure with your pals. just me, my gf, and our dog travelling to the past and righting wrongs

the story was fun with some genuinely great moments and the gameplay loop of "save town in the past, go to the town in the future to see what changed" is satisfying and fun, there's a ton of optional content and also some superbosses

great game glad i dedicated a month of my life to it (yeah this bitch is a long one)

One of the more boring and annoying Dragon Quest games, which is honestly astounding. I went in with extremely high hopes, just to be met with one of the worst Dragon Quest stories.

The entire game is kind of like playing a children's cartoon. Imagine playing the Inuyasha show, where each episode is just the main characters getting involved in some random village's troubles and then solving them. Every once in awhile, one of the episodes exposes some details about the big bad evil demon lord of hell, but the next episode just continues the endless loop of solving random problems for random people.

The actual episodes themselves are ultimately inconsequential. The characters you meet and struggles you go through in each one amount to essentially nothing in the end.

I can't believe I invested over 10 hours of my life into this game.