Dragon Quest 7 Reimagined's demo is a masterclass

Square Enix’s revival sells itself with this generous, save-compatible sampler

What follows is the platonic ideal of how a game demo should work — both for a fan and for a publisher’s marketing department. The player clicks download on the demo out of mild curiosity. Three hours later, they are completely locked in; at this point, not buying the game is inconceivable to them. It’s a perfect conversion.

This just happened to me this past weekend with the demo for Dragon Quest 7 Reimagined, which I downloaded and played on my Switch 2. (The demo is also available on Steam, Switch, PlayStation 5, and Xbox Series X.) The demo worked perfectly for three reasons, only one of which was that the game appears to be very good.

Firstly, it’s generous, showing enough of the game to hook me in, and feeling satisfying to play in itself. (But not too satisfying — we’ll come back to this point.) Dragon Quest 7 Reimagined is a faithful remake of Enix’s classic role-playing game, Dragon Quest 7: Fragments of the Forgotten Past, which was released in 2001 for the original PlayStation. Like most Japanese RPGs of its era — or, indeed, any era — Dragon Quest 7 takes a while to get going. Much of the first hour is spent to-ing and fro-ing, fetching and chatting, as the characters and setting establish themselves, and it’s an unconscionably long time before you’re lining up to battle humble Slimes in Dragon Quest’s time-honored, turn-based tradition.

A game like this needs breathing room, and the demo’s three-to-four-hour runtime is perfectly judged; by that point, your nascent adventuring party has had its first major escapade, battled a boss or two, and settled into the smoothly hypnotic grinding rhythm that is the hallmark of a well-tuned classical turn-based RPG. It hasn’t got complex yet, but there have been a few instances of battles where you’ve had think tactically. The characters have begun to charm and have levelled up enough to show some of their potential. The storyline has begun to intrigue.

Secondly, the demo chooses a good moment to stop. Dragon Quest 7 concerns a small fishing island (with a robust pilchard industry) whose population believes it to be the only landmass in the world. Pursuing an ancient mystery, three youngsters who believe there must be more to life find themselves transported to an unrecognized new island that seems to be trapped under a dark spell. There’s an obvious place to wrap the demo up, at the end of this opening chapter. But it actually runs just a little longer, showing the consequences of this discovery and leading the adventurers to the very brink of their next expedition. It’s a perfect cliffhanger, avoiding too neat a conclusion and stopping at the most tantalizing point possible.

Thirdly, and crucially, the demo’s game save will be compatible with the full version of Dragon Quest 7 Reimagined when it launches on Feb. 5. It’s surprising how many game demos do not offer this vital link to the retail version, and in a slow-paced narrative game like this, it’s essential. (One recent offender is the demo for Trails in the Sky 1st Chapter.) Just the idea of repeating the game’s opening hours, as enchanting as they are, might deter a purchase. Conversely, the feeling of already having a substantial time investment in the game, its story, and the characters is a strong incentive to shell out and return. Square Enix has a cast-iron policy on save-compatible demos, and it’s much to the Dragon Quest publisher’s credit.

Overall, it’s a perfectly executed demo. Happily, the game itself — a co-development between Square Enix and experienced remaster specialist and support studio HexaDrive — also seems to be perfectly executed. Dragon Quest 7 came out in the dying days of the PS1, and employed an aesthetic quite distinct from contemporary rivals like Square’s Final Fantasy 7: nostalgic and toylike, referring back to the genre’s pixel-art roots but presenting 3D dioramas that could be turned around, like a snowglobe in your hands. The fixed-perspective, proscenium-arch-style presentation of the HD-2D engine wouldn’t be able to capture this, so Square Enix and Hexadrive have instead expanded on the 2016 Nintendo 3DS remake with a full 3D presentation that’s close to the spirit of the original, and that brings Akira Toriyama’s lively character designs and the gorgeously miniaturized overworld to colorful life.

Like all the Dragon Quest games, Dragon Quest 7 Reimagined does not pretend to modernize a game design that already had a nostalgic feel 25 years ago (beyond allowing you to handle grinding over to the game engine with an auto-battle option). The clean-lined, classical simplicity of its exploration and turn-based battling could be called old-fashioned, but it could also be called timeless. It requires only the tiniest amount of patience from the player to see how crisply and beautifully it still plays now.

So yes, you should definitely download and play the Dragon Quest 7 Reimagined demo. But only if you can also definitely afford to buy the full thing.