I live an extraordinary life. Our island of Esgard just got a lot bigger the moment we found those strange stone shards. With them, we could finally travel back to the past and discover new islands surrounding ours. It sounds like a relaxing experience but it’s far from that. Without knowing I stranded in my biggest adventure yet and I believe I haven’t seen it all yet.

Completely remade

Before we discuss the game itself, let’s take some time to appreciate the amount of effort that went into this remake. The entire game is rebuilt from scratch and even offers some new environments you didn’t see in the original. Even if you’re one of those lucky gamers that managed to play the original, you won’t recognize that game on your Nintendo 3DS. Square Enix made sure the game looks and feels like a modern game and they truly succeed. From the impressive introduction video to the sharp 3D environments and characters, this doesn’t look like a classic game at all. Thanks to this, you’ll get sucked into the huge universe of Fragments of the Forgotten Past before you know it. Hours will pass by like minutes and you won’t be able to put the game away soon. It’s one of the biggest universes we’ve ever encountered on the portable system and we haven’t seen it all yet. What we’ve seen so far is just the tip of the iceberg but it was a very impressive journey so far.

Slow start

The game starts off rather slow, it took us more than an hour before we faced our first enemies but that’s nothing to worry about. The first hour in the game is all about getting to know three of the most important characters. You play as a nameless hero (I named mine Lander because I was feeling heroic) that’s best friends with the local prince called Kiefer. Kiefer found an ancient looking tomb that’s supposed to hold a secret. Both the hero and Kiefer are trying to find out what’s going on but they’ll need some extra information before entering the tomb. During your first hour, you’ll be running back and forth between locations a couple of time but it’s never boring since you’re solving the mystery piece by piece.

Do note however that this is a very classic role-playing game and there’s no tutorial or indication to where you need to go. If you want to know what you need to do, you’ll need to talk to a lot of random characters and remember what they just said. It’s an old mechanism and I noticed I wasn’t really prepared for it. During my first minutes, I talked to a lot of characters to know what I was supposed to do. Luckily, you can always see the last dialogue in your menu so you’ll never get stuck, even if you didn’t play for a while.

Prepare for your biggest adventure yet!

That being said, things get interesting when the hero finds his first stone shard. These shards can be used in the ancient tomb to unlock certain islands in the past. The shards are color coded so only if you have all shards from one color, you can enter the past. The first island is easy to unlock but the others are a little harder. The developers added radar on the map in this version to make it a little easier to locate those shards.

Just before you enter your first island, the third character Maribel, a rebellious lady, joins your party. The personalities of the three first characters are very different from each other so the conversations keep things light and are filled with great humor and even some frustrations. It’s nice to see how the team managed to bring these characters to life without actual cut scenes. If you talk to the others, you’ll just see them standing and the narrative explains how they are feeling, very old school but effective as well!

Time to defeat those monsters 

Shortly after you enter the first island in the past, you’ll face your first enemies in the game, of course, those are the iconic slimes. The moment you start fighting, you’ll see the true power of a classic RPG in action. Dragon Quest VII is a traditional role-playing game where your team and the enemies attack in turns. You see both your team and the enemies lined up on the field. Instead of controlling your party one by one, you only control the main hero and give a general command to the others. The other members of your party will automatically attack or defend based on the command you gave (such as ‘don’t hold back’ or ‘focus on healing’). This is a very interesting mechanism and it makes the battles more fluent and faster to complete. If you like things more traditional, you can switch to classic combat where you can control each character separately.

Of course, some might say that full control over the attacks would have been better but to be honest, I didn’t miss that feature. The AI of your team is strong and they really heal or attack at the right time. They won’t let you go down that easily. Each member of your party has its own strengths and weaknesses but they really take care of each other. The battles feel traditional but the pacing is about right, you’ll never get stuck in a battle for too long.

The game likes to throw multiple enemies at you at once, which is great. The characters and monsters are all designed by the talented Akira Toriyama and are a joy to look at. Besides the great designs, the enemies all have a different type of attack, making certain combinations more deadly as others. This adds another strategy to your battles; you’ll need to decide what type of enemy you’ll want to take down first. Combat is very deep and we’ve only see fragments of it in action, we’re convinced that we’ll learn even more about the tactics once we spend even more time with the game.

Early conclusion 

We can’t stress it out enough, Dragon Quest VII is huge! We’ve spent a couple of hours with it and it feels like we’re still only at the start of our adventure. It’s great to visit the locations in the past and revisit them in the present, seeing what your actions meant for the world. Sure, there’s a lot of going back and forth in the game but thanks to the great visuals, it never felt like a negative thing. The characters and environments are beautifully designed and we can’t wait to see more of them! Also note that you can even share Traveller’s Tables using Streetpass to get access to new monsters and dungeons while you’re walking around in the real world. These tables unlock exclusive gear for your main game. With that being said, we concluded this preview to dive deeper into the gorgeous world of Fragments of the Forgotten Past.