I'm glad I waited 25 years to play the longest Dragon Quest game

I didn't play Dragon Quest 7 when it first appeared on Sony's PlayStation back in 2000. It was an expensive import RPG (even in its translated US form) in my part of the world, and as I already had plenty of those clogging up my shelves I was happy to leave it alone. By the time the 3DS remake came around the one and only thing I knew for sure about the game was that, whatever I happened to play it on, it was long. Really long. Somewhere around "You've got to be kidding me" long.

At the time of writing, the average rushed completion time for the main story on Howlongtobeat is comfortably over the 60 hours mark. And the honest truth is, I just didn't want to play a game that long that badly. I already have plenty of other, shorter Dragon Quest games to play, and my shelves and Steam library are filled with RPGs famous for being complex, engaging, exciting… basically anything other than ridiculously time consuming.

But what if Square Enix reimagined the game? What if they took the whole thing apart and rebuilt it from the ground up? What if major quests were heavily rewritten and extraneous plotlines eagerly discarded? What if it had been modernized by a team who dared to imagine Dragon Quest 7 could be something other than really long? I like the sound of that.

And I love playing it even more. By the end of my first casual hour's play I've collected my first four island-unlocking stone fragments, had a few fights, and been whisked away to goodness knows where for another adventure.

I check a few old FAQs and videos just to see what I've missed by this point in the original, and it turns out to be a whole lot of nothing at all. Instead of being made to go back and forth between various people and places for knickknacks of genuinely no use during the opening, new pal Kiefer shows up with them already in hand. My "trial" before the game introduces its central island-hopping feature is a pair of breezy puzzles, instead of a gauntlet so bloated I was exhausted just watching someone else's video of them going through all the pushing, pulling, rafting, and item collecting it used to involve.

For all the cuts and changes, Dragon Quest 7 Reimagined doesn't play like a game made up of edited highlights or impatiently tapping its foot before hastily dragging me off to the next scene. There's still plenty of time for private conversations between best friends, fun secrets hidden down seemingly ordinary wells, and heroic posing as powerful monsters attack peaceful towns. The Reimagined difference is my experience now has the same forward momentum and boundless energy as the adventurers in my party. Kiefer's enthusiasm for exploration only feels more sincere when I'm as excited about seeing what happens next as he is.

There's not a single aspect of the game that's been left untouched. Some challenges riff on their original concept, but give it a more obvious and logical refresh. The old bumble around the Sullied Sanctum's puzzle room, the one filled with nothing but weird statues and darkness, didn't look like much fun to me, but I enjoyed the replacement that involved revealing shining paths of light. Others have been completely redesigned.

The old puzzle to free the high priestess of Alltrades Abbey used to involve dropping a limited supply of blocks from the floor above off narrow paths, the difficulty of this task appearing to stem from the combination of an unhelpful perspective, an inability to see exactly where a block's dropping until it's too late, and the general tedium of shoving heavy things about an awkward room. Now? It's a classic light beam/twisty mirror puzzle laid out on a single level, with the start and end mirrors locked into place, making sorting out the short middle part just that bit easier—and more fun.

Another event soon after demonstrates a more subtle yet no less welcome bit of Reimagined's streamlining, the clash for Nava's soul in the arena finishing after four, instead of the six, battles it used to.

Thanks to the game's new swift pace, plot twists and fun boss fights come thick and fast, and as soon as one adventure's wrapped up I'm off on another. I'm always busy dealing with the fallout of the latest dramatic event, and will probably pick up a vital piece of something I'll need later as I go. I soon learn to not just enjoy, but trust, the game's pacing. If I know I'm not going to have to strain every last gaming muscle in my body just to drag myself across the finish line, then I know I can afford to spare some time and energy enjoying the little things along the way.

When a villager wants to take a moment to demonstrate their flying ability or starts waffling on about something they need in a charming take on a regional British accent I stand and listen with a smile on my face, because I know this isn't the prelude to a lengthy quest that's going to take me an hour or so of bouncing around multiple NPCs, villages, dungeons, and even timelines just to get to the good bit.

Taking the long way around in a dungeon isn't a chore when I already know I'm not going to be stuck in there for ages, navigating contrived obstacles and overly long paths placed between me and wherever I need to be.

Under these less demanding circumstances (and the nigh-constant option for free worldwide teleportation) the often mandatory re-exploration of any islands that have been restored in the present feels like a delight rather than an asset-recycling chore, a chance to quickly see how my actions in the past made big and small differences in the future, from grateful villagers telling tales of mysterious heroes of legend (spoilers: my party) to statues sharing the name of a young friend I saw just a few moments earlier, and inevitably the occasional flower-strewn gravestone.

Some previously mandatory quests have been transformed into optional extras, and Reimagined's so enjoyably easygoing I find myself choosing to experience some of them anyway. I know I wouldn't have enjoyed the sad story told in Regenstein, the island where almost everyone has been turned to stone, if I had to play it through, as used to be the case. It may be a memorable tragedy with a bittersweet resolution, but it's also a small and simplistic tale that feels like it's got "sidequest" written all over it, and I seemed to spend more time standing around and being told a story than taking part in one.

By daring to leave the "if" and "when" of these additional tales entirely up to me, I ended up approaching this relatively hands-off story in a more favourable mindset, a little extra treat if I felt like taking a break from the main quest.

Considering the series is often treated as nostalgia in RPG form, I'm impressed to see a Dragon Quest game given such a thorough and ultimately unsentimental makeover. It's more critical about its own old flaws than any fans, and brave enough to admit that not everything needs to be preserved just because it was there the first time around.

But it's full of love, too.

Reimagined wants to show this story off in the best possible light; reworking and rearranging key events until they sparkle as brightly as the endless sea surrounding the hero's home. It's a wonderful nonstop adventure, and knowing I'm getting less, in terms of the basic number of hours and unskippable quests standing between installing and the ending, only makes me want to play it more.