Dragon Quest VII Reimagined Review – Searching For Adventure

My relationship with Dragon Quest VII is a weird one. I love the Dragon Quest series, but I disliked Dragon Quest VII. It was the game that required the most grinding to progress, and it had so much going on all the time that you would forget things constantly. I was surprised to see myself excited about a Dragon Quest VII remake, but here we are with Dragon Quest VII Reimagined. It is promised to be a reimagining of the original game. Will it fix the problems I had with the original?

Game Name: Dragon Quest VII Reimagined
Platform(s): PS5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch, Nintendo Switch 2, PC (Reviewed)
Developer(s): Square Enix
Publisher(s): Square Enix
Release Date: February 5th, 2026
Price: $59.99

Dragon Quest VII Reimagined has you playing the role of the protagonist, as he joins his two childhood friends, Kiefer and Mirabel, as you discover a secret shrine. This secret shrine requires stone tablets to be put together, and once they are assembled, it creates a new island. The shrine will send you back in time before a big event happened to send the island into oblivion, but you can stop the island from disappearing. If you do, then the island will show up in the present. Your goal is to figure out what happened to all these islands, put them back together, and make the realm whole once again.

The Heart Yearns For Adventure

The themes of Dragon Quest VII Reimagined are centered around adventure. All three of the main kids have a path set in front of them that they don’t necessarily want as a focused path in life. Keifer is a prince and is the heir to the Kingdom of Estara, Maribel is the mayor’s daughter who is bound to follow in her father’s footsteps, and your main character is destined to follow in the family role of fishing. None of the three kids wants that for their life, or at least not that alone. Maribel tries to get onto fishing boats so she doesn’t have to stay inside all day, Keifer runs away from home constantly, and your character goes into the cave to help fix up a large sailing boat without wanting to use it for fishing.

This aspect of adventure is integrated into the gameplay. In Dragon Quest VII Reimagined, you can go anywhere on the island without much hassle. You can go into houses, break pots, look into drawers, find caves, and discover optional locations without needing to progress the story. There is also something different about this Dragon Quest than most other entries in the series: the removal of 90% of the random encounters. You will get random encounters on the ocean as you sail in your boat around, but on the island, there are none. Enemies can be seen while traveling, and you can attack them to dish out extra damage before combat starts, or you can dodge them entirely.

Even though there is an overarching narrative in the game, Dragon Quest VII Reimagined’s storytelling aspect is rooted in the adventure mindset. Each island you visit to restore has its own narrative that isn’t focused on the main game’s narrative. You will be traveling to these islands and meeting brand new people to care about and understand. Some islands have very straightforward stories that give you simple solutions. Other islands have more morally ambiguous stories that make you think about the solution you wish you could have had. Some of the solutions might just not be the solution to the populace’s problem, but they will solve the island’s problem.

Fixing The Pacing

Dragon Quest VII originally had, I believe, the worst pacing of all the Dragon Quest games initially. I can confidently say that Dragon Quest VII Reimagined might have the absolute best pacing of all the games now. The only one that might come close is the Dragon Quest II HD-2D Remake or Dragon Quest XI.

Removing the random encounters makes the dungeons a lot more manageable to traverse. There are a lot of dungeons, as almost every island will have at least one of them. They were intended to be bite-sized exploration areas that became bigger due to the hassle of grinding. Removing the need to grind, as even on normal difficulty, fighting and defeating the mobs present will be enough to put you on the level you need to be to defeat the bosses. Dragon Quest VII did remove the random encounters in the 3DS remake, but they also made it so that enemies would spawn literally on top of you at times, which makes it still seem random. Even if enemies spawn on top of you in Dragon Quest VII Reimagined, they won’t trigger, so you can quickly run away without fighting them if you don’t want to.

The normal 18 islands have been cut down to 15 islands, and 4 of those 15 islands are now optional. If you were invested in all the islands, then that would be a bad change, but from a pacing standpoint, I think it worked. The only thing I wish had changed is the order in which you get the AllTrades Abby. The Abby is the 6th island and requires you to get through the other five to get all the stone tablets necessary to restore the island. You also have to put the island together and finish the island’s mission to get access to invocations.

That means for one fourth of the game, you only have access to the starting invocations. It may not seem like a long time, but it’s about 20ish hours before you get access to the AllTrades Abby. And for 10 of those hours, your starting invocations will be maxed out, with you not gaining any more new skills or stat boosts from the invocation leveling up. Once it is unlocked, though, there is one big game-changer that is amazing: the Career Sphere. The Career Sphere can be used at any time period on any island to change your invocations.

Visual Spectacle

From the moment I first saw the Dragon Quest VII Reimagined trailer, I was enchanted. My favorite remake of a Dragon Quest game was the PS2 Dragon Quest V remake. It had a more clay character approach, but still from a top-down view like traditional Dragon Quest. Future remakes, like on the 3DS, were going to be more cell-shaded since it was the safer bet. The clay graphics approach kind of disappeared for the series. Seeing it make a comeback in Dragon Quest VII Reimagined was a dream come true.

The art design from Akira Toriyama translates well to clay graphics. The models, the faces, the area aesthetics, everything was beautiful to my eye. If you loved the look of the Blue Dragon game on Xbox 360, then this is the style for you! Everything is pristine, and at the highest settings, I absolutely loved everything about it.

That said, the PC port isn’t all it’s cracked up to be if you are planning to run this on a handheld PC. I initially started my playthrough on Nintendo Switch 2, where I loved the gorgeous visuals. I then moved over to the Steam Deck when I got my review code for the game, and it was not a good transition. The settings on Steam Deck make it run at 60 FPS, but the quality of the fabrics, the hair, and the facial animations were abysmal.

I soon transferred over to the ROG Ally. Graphics were better, but were fluctuating between 40-60 FPS. I decided to try it out on the handheld that I had with the most power, the MSI Claw 8 AI+, and it was a much smoother experience on a 35-watt power setting. I could get a locked 60 FPS on medium, and on the highest setting, it would be around 50-60 FPS. On my beefy PC, I could get it running at the highest setting locked for 120 FPS.

That said, there is a good amount of custom settings you could utilize if you were fine cutting quality in some areas for better quality in others. My PC runs an NVIDIA RTX 4080 Super, so I had no doubts about my build and its ability to run this game.

Dragon Quest VII Reimagined Indeed

Dragon Quest VII Reimagined is a much better recommendation to players than the original Dragon Quest VII. With the fixes to the pacing, the better difficulty curve, and a very friendly and generous normal difficulty, this is the Dragon Quest I will recommend to newcomers to the series. I do still have some hangups about the order and placement of events, but overall, those just me nitpicking, as this is an amazing reimagining of a flawed but beautiful game.

Dragon Quest VII Reimagined will release on February 5th, 2026, for PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S, Nintendo Switch, Nintendo Switch 2, and PC.

Review Disclosure Statement: Dragon Quest VII Reimagined was provided to us by Square Enix for review purposes. For more information on how we review video games and other media/technology, please review our Review Guideline/Scoring Policy.

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