It’s unlikely to blow your socks off from a technical perspective, but with its fantastic use of 3D, gorgeously colourful world and utterly charming art design, you’d never guess that this was based upon a 16 year old video game. Considering this is based on a PS1 game, this really does look fantastic and certainly doesn’t look out of place next to many of the more visually impressive games on the 3DS. The first thing that will strike you upon starting up your adventure is just how good the game looks. It still plays much as the original did back in 2000, but by removing random battles, improving the visuals and streamlining the notoriously slow introduction (something Nintendo might have considered *cough* Twilight Princess HD *cough*), Dragon Quest VII: Fragments Of The Forgotten Past represents a splendid middle ground that will play as well to newcomers as it does to genre veterans. If anything, this carefully upgraded version of a criminally overlooked classic (overlooked in the West at least – this, like all Dragon Quest games was massive in Japan), is a perfect combination of old and new. Of course, that’s not to say that this is some effort-free port of an old PS1 game – far from it. Don’t get me wrong, I am one of the few that loved Final Fantasy XIII and its more streamlined approach, but equally, it’s nice to have the option to return to the warm embrace of something a little more….nostalgic. I’ve always been a big fan of more traditional JRPG mechanics, and while I’ll admit that many of the changes to the genre over the past 15 years or so have been for the best, it does feel like some of the that old magic has been lost along the way. So yeah, it was old fashioned then and, for the most part, it’s old fashioned now, but then, that’s half the fun. With its relatively traditional battle mechanics, charming but undeniably quaint story and seemingly unending content, this was arguably old fashioned when it was released back in 2001 (a time when the rest of the world was shifting gears for the recently arrived PS2). Released at the tail end of the PS1’s lifespan, Dragon Quest VII (or Dragon Warrior as it was known is the States), was basically the last hurrah for the large scale 32-bit JRPG. Of course, there’s a good reason why it feels so similar to those PS1 era JRPGs, because, well, that’s what it is……ok, what it was. With over 100 hours of content, this decidedly old fashioned JRPG is one of the biggest games of all time and a brilliant throw-back to the kind of unending JRPGs that used to be relatively common back on the PS1. If we had one of those old school review methods in which we individually scored a games’ longevity, you can bet your ass that this mostly fantastic remake would get a perfect 10. Dragon Quest VII: Fragments Of The Forgotten Past is huge.
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