Maybe I just don’t get it: I never played the original Dragon Quest VII, first released for the PlayStation in 2000, and then remastered for Nintendo’s 3DS in the 2010s. I know it has a somewhat infamous reputation for length, which is the sort of thing that can be charming when contemplating a video game that exists in the hazy distance of the past, where it was busy helping teenagers churn up a miserable today and transform it into a bleary-eyed, higher-leveled tomorrow. It’s an altogether different thing to contemplate as part of a brand-new video game being presented to the players of today, where designers at Square-Enix have apparently responded to both modern attention spans and the source material’s own creaky structures by transforming it into the video game equivalent of one of those slow-moving people movers at the airport, eternally transporting themselves to nowhere.
I say this as an unabashed defender of idle games, a tried and tested acolyte of the Church Of Number Go Up: I don’t think I’ve ever encountered a video game less interested in being played than Dragon Quest VII Reimagined. Once the game finally starts letting you fight—a brisk hour or so into its very basic depiction of the Hero’s Journey—it throws every trick in the “We know our fighting isn’t actually that fun” playbook at the player, desperately hoping to make them forget they’re playing an old-school Eastern RPG. Speed controls, automatic combat options, abundant healing resources, all in service of battles that require absolutely zero rigor beyond “Use the biggest attacks you can reliably pay the MP for in every single fight.” And once you’ve gotten your level to a certain point—which happened naturally for me pretty early on—almost every fight you encounter will be of low-enough level to trigger an auto-kill on the world map that skips the battle outright. Boss fights are ostensibly there to force players to make an actual decision or two, but the times that I actually had to pause the automatic combat in order to alter the outcome were slim enough that I could count them on a single hand (that was also busy checking my phone, because Reimagined was doing nothing to hold my interest).
Well, okay, you say, maybe this is one of those RPGs that’s all about setup, not the actual combat. This sucker has a job system, after all, doesn’t it? And you’d be right about all of that, Reader, except for the part where selecting your party’s classes has even the slightest layer of strategic depth to it. (Once you’ve graduated past “Someone should probably have a heal spell—although there’s free healing like every 50 steps, so…”) Gloss over the fact that changing classes from your starting set doesn’t kick in for the first 15 hours or so of the game—streamlined!—or the irritating menu tax you have to pay every time you want to swap something out, and you’re still left with a group of classes that have shockingly little mechanical rigor to them: A stat distribution, a set of combat moves, and nothing else. No passive abilities, no equipment considerations, no fascinating little ways to break the rules of the game. And this is the part where I can actually get a little mad if I’m not being careful, because there are few things I adore more than a good job system in an RPG. Customizing characters through the various perks picked up by trawling through different jobs—finding ways to bend the rules of the game and discovering synergies that crack whole new builds wide open—is pure brain candy for me. The fact that Reimagined look like it’s going to do this (up to adding the ability to run two classes at the same time) and then presents this system in the most boring incarnation possible is something I resent even more than those moments where I could literally feel the life draining out of my decrepit body while playing it, second by second, squandered vocation point by squandered vocation point.
I love role-playing games, for the reason I love most types of video games: They contain the potential for interesting choices. (Even if those choices tend to be embedded inside grinds that I have a waxing and waning patience for.) But Dragon Quest VII Reimagined contains nearly no choices, because choices would interfere with the conveyer belt. I won’t say I had zero fun with it—there’s a certain state of mindlessness that comes from running through a dungeon and mowing the monster-shaped grass that’s about as close as I get to meditation, and I didn’t hate every moment of its Saturday morning cartoon-ass story. But what it mostly made me feel like, if I’m being honest, was the slow and inexorable process of dying—with an additional layer of chores.
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