Dragon Quest VII team on visual updates, new content and possibility of future remakes
USGamer has published an interview about the Dragon Quest VII remake with the producers of the title, Yuu Miyake and Noriyoshi Fujimoto. The interview goes into the history of the Dragon Quest series and its remakes, how the Dragon Quest VII remake is unique among those and how the team has tweaked the game for its 3DS release.
On the subject of the visual redesign and improved graphics for the Dragon Quest VII remake, the producers had this to say:
DQVII has the most magic, attributes, and jobs in the series, so we really wanted to reconsider how the users could have fun with it. One of the biggest additions, one of the things we wanted to show the fans was, how fun it was to change the occupations. To enhance that, we added different animations for these characters, for critical hit motions and whenever they change occupations, so there’s unique animations for each of them. We wanted the users to enjoy and experience these types of new additions through graphics by changing jobs and adding this new element.
In terms of new gameplay and making the title more accessible to new users, the producers said this:
One of the biggest things that we wanted to do… a lot of the players of the original Dragon Quest VII could not go to the ending. They could not complete the game. We heard a lot of feedback from the fans that they couldn’t find the tablets, or that the puzzles were too difficult. So, in terms of puzzle, we kept the essential puzzles, but for the other ones, we’ve sometimes gone and deleted them or revitalized them, and overall made everything a little bit more compact. And in terms of story, there were untold stories in the original version, so we did add a little bit of that into the main game.
We’ve also rebalanced the battle system. In the original version of the game, you had four or five vocations, and then there were 54 jobs total within those vocations. We noticed that a lot of users were only using a few of those job, and we felt it was a shame that they weren’t able to experience them. So, we realized that we wanted players to be able to change jobs as much as possible so they could experience all the different types of jobs and the special abilities for each. In order to change jobs you need to complete a certain number of battles, so for the remake we decreased that number, meaning that players will be able to change jobs a little bit easier.
When asked if there was a possibility of any more Dragon Quest titles being remade for modern systems, the producers said:
I think that when there are new consoles or a new market, then we’ll definitely consider new remakes.
