Dragon Quest 7 Remake Has Me Pining For A Similar Overhaul Of Chrono Trigger

Dragon Quest VII Reimagined was one of the most surprising announcements to come out of last week’s Nintendo Direct. It’s yet another remake for the often overlooked PS1-era Japanese RPG, and it’ll arrive amid a recent influx of other Dragon Quest remasters. This one has my full attention, though, and not just because the original game is a sprawling adventure I’ve always wanted to go back to and properly finish. It’s also the art style, which moves past the recent obsession with HD-2D pixel art glow-ups and offers a blueprint for how to revive tons of other beloved JRPG classics.

The new “hand-crafted” aesthetic is more akin to the toys-and-dioramas-style visuals of Yoshi’s Woolly World or the Legend of Zelda: Link’s Awakening remake than what we’re used to getting from Square Enix. Dragon Quest VII Reimagined sits somewhere between the HD-2D retro sensibility of last year’s excellent Dragon Quest III remake and the hyper-realistic, Unreal Engine visuals of the Final Fantasy VII remake trilogy, with detailed graphics that exaggerate the storybook whimsy of Akira Toriyama’s original designs rather than running away from them.

The big secret to this new look? Scanning actual dolls. Hi-res captures of IRL toys for characters like Hero, Kiefer, and Maribel helped ground the new art style while retaining all of the whimsy. “For this game, we scanned figurines, like this one here, to create the in-game models,” the remake’s producer said in a short overview with series creator Yuji Horii. “They’re very well done. Using a graphical aesthetic we call the ‘diorama style,’ we’ve depicted the stories and the characters’ emotions in an entirely new way.”

The game isn’t far away either. It comes to PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X/S, PC, Switch 1, and Switch 2 on February 5, 2026 (one small bummer is that the Switch 2 physical version is a game key card only and progress doesn’t transfer between the two console generations).

Alongside exploring dungeons, engaging in familiar turn-based battles, and tinkering with a meaty job system, Dragon Quest VII revolves around an island-hopping adventure that sees its heroes time-traveling between the past and present as they confront the Demon Lord Orgodemir. It’s a very, very long game, clocking in at up to 100 hours just for the main story. Despite the heft, it was mostly overlooked when it first came to PlayStation due in part to its dated-looking graphics. It didn’t get localized in the West until 2001 after the PS2 was already out and just a month before the arrival of Final Fantasy X.

Dragon Quest VII got a second look when it was remade for the 3DS in 2013 as Dragon Quest VII: Fragments of the Forgotten Past. It completely overhauled the graphics into 3D polygons and abridged much of the story to shave dozens of hours off the average runtime. Reimagined will make further improvements, including an even more streamlined story and new quality-of-life features like a redesigned UI to make the game easier to navigate. But the most pivotal change will probably be the new “Moonlighting” mechanic that lets characters use abilities from two different jobs simultaneously.

Looking at new screenshots of Dragon Quest 7: Reimagined, it really looks great. I wish they'd use this to make new games.

It looks almost like a diorama. They could push it further and have claymation-like style in the future pic.twitter.com/bMMzU2rhyn

— Dream's Longest Day (@Dreamboum) September 15, 2025

We’ve seen Square Enix take all sorts of different approaches to reviving its back catalog in recent years. While FFVII got the full remake treatment, other PS1 games like Chrono Cross and Legend of Mana have simply received HD resolution boosts and additional features that would be considered barebones even by the standards of a third-party emulator. Then there’s stuff in the middle like Dragon Quest III and Final Fantasy Tactics which are ground-up overhauls that still try to remain as faithful the originals as possible.

Dragon Quest VII Reimagined offers a fourth alternative that would be perfect for other games like the original Chrono Trigger, which Toriyama also designed the characters for. It even looks perfect for seemingly impossible-to-remake RPGs from other publishers like Earthbound. Players have been sharing fan art of that SNES classic in the style of Reimagined for decades now. We even recently got new clay models of the main cast that are perfect for scanning. I hope the Dragon Quest VII Reimagined model proves to be viable for projects beyond Square Enix, though I could certainly see it working for something like the long-rumored Final Fantasy IX remake as well.