A veritable obsession in Japan stretching back to 1986, Dragon Quest is relatively unknown in Australia, with the series remaining unreleased here for its first 20 years.
As it has also done with Final Fantasy, publisher Square Enix has been seeking to reintroduce this series for those who missed out, and Aussies can now access remakes of most of the games on smartphones and handheld gaming devices.
![Previously unreleased in Australia, a revamped version of Dragon Quest VII has arrived for Nintendo 3DS.](/web/20160916103239im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/r/h/l/d/2/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.grhki6.png/1473989312202.jpg)
The latest to get this treatment, Dragon Quest VII: Fragments of the Forgotten Past, is a game whose title and themes are unintentionally congruent with the experience those outside of Japan and North America will have playing it: it's an experience that's been revived from the past although we're seeing it now for the very first time.
Games in the series are all totally standalone, so don't be put off by the 'VII'. In fact in many ways this is the best place to start for those unfamiliar with the series – as it originally released in 2000, it doesn't have some of the weird old-school vestiges remakes of the '80s and '90s games have – even if in other ways it remains an oddity.
![Little screenshots on a big screen don't do it justice, but <i>DQVII</i> is one good looking 3DS game.](/web/20160916103239im_/http://www.smh.com.au/content/dam/images/g/r/h/k/p/d/image.related.articleLeadwide.620x349.grhki6.png/1473989312202.jpg)
The world has been totally recreated in 3D, with the characters and environments recognisably reflecting the style of original designer Akira Toriyama (creator of Dragon Ball), and the monsters in particular are adorable. The sight of some enemies — like a gnome suspended from a flock of owls or some variations of the series' iconic slime — actually made me laugh out loud, while attention to little details (like the way enemies react to status effects like 'sleep') help make the game look very modern.
Meanwhile the story is engaging as well, focusing on a group of kids who discover their island home hasn't always been the only chunk of land in the sea. Stumbling upon a method of time travel that lets them visit since-sunken parts of the world, they're tasked with averting disaster in the past and restoring the land masses to the present.
In familiar role-playing fashion, you'll be equipping your party, exploring villages and fields, striking up conversations (you can press a button at any time to converse with members of your party, which is a nice touch) and having battles. What's unique about DQVII is the structure of its world.
At the start of the game you're a fisherman's son on a lone island in the sea, but once you collect enough fragments to open a portal, go back in time, find a lost village and solve a task (often a boss battle), that village and its island will be appear in the present and you'll be able to travel there for new quests, characters, items and fragments. It's not a structure seen in many other games, and it brings an interesting pace to the formula.
Battles themselves have a lot of nuance and manage to stay fresh throughout, largely thanks to the variety of weapons and the vocation system that lets you totally change the potential of your party members. Spells and abilities you learn in one vocation will be retained by that character forever, so levelling up in various classes (including special vocations that give the abilities of the game's monsters) can result in some powerful combos.
Beautiful-if-repetitive orchestrated music, some nice character arcs and strong incentives to keep on exploring and battling combine with all the above to make a pretty fantastic game, but there are definitely annoyances that betray its 16-year-old roots.
The initial two hours, for example, are painfully slow, setting up the narrative by having you run back and forth across the island. Elsewhere menus, battles and interactions are presented in a plain text style that gets the job done but seems to ignore role-playing progress of the past decade and a half. The 3DS' lower screen has great sketch-style artwork of maps that show you where your characters are relevant to the dungeon or town you're exploring, and it would have been great to have more touches like this to soften the screens of information you're sometimes presented with.
These kind of issues are understandable in a remake of an older game that seeks to have some amount of reinvention while staying true to the original. However, in this case, any nostalgic appeal will be totally lost on Australian gamers.
Still, the series has persisted overseas for a reason, and DQVII is one of the best it has to offer. The epic journey, humorous side quests and engaging systems stand the test of time and for the most part can be enjoyed as though part of a brand new, gorgeous-looking Japanese game. A certain degree of patience, however, will be needed.
Dragon Quest VII: Fragments of the Forgotten Past is out on September 17 for Nintendo 3DS.
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