Square-Enix on bringing Dragon Quest VII 3DS stateside, changes from Playstation version

A portion of a USGamer interview with Yuu Miyake, executive producer for the Dragon Quest series, and Noriyoshi Fujimoto, the producer for the remake...

USG: Both, really. DQVII was a very very popular game in Japan, one of the most successful in the series. I'm curious how you approach it for the home audience that already loves the game, versus the American audience, which... there wasn't a very big audience at that time for Dragon Quest. It had been forgotten by a lot of Americans because the series hadn't been localized for so long at the time.

Square Enix: For the Japanese version, we decided, after 10 years, to produce a remake. For the longest time, we didn't think we could remake DQVII, because the game was so big. So, we kind of went back and forth, back and forth for a while. We weren't really sure how to revitalize the game. Should we add new content? Should we change how the game would be presented to players?

When 3DS was announced, we realized that users would be able to basically pick up and play for a little bit, which made a really good match for how Dragon Quest VII plays out — it's is a sequence of short stories. We realized that if we didn't take this opportunity and run with it, then we wouldn't be able to create another remake, so we decided to do this.

Up until Dragon Quest VI, it was very easy to do a remake... but Dragon Quest VII, because it was so large, we were a little bit hesitant at first. And we also wanted to respond to the Japanese fans who were so used to getting remakes, they were able to get the remakes of Dragon Quest IV, V, and VI, and so they were like, "Where's VII"? We really wanted to answer to that need.

For the U.S. and European versions, there were a lot of fans that were requesting the remake, so we decided to localize it as well. Because of the business side of it, we actually didn't have any plans to create a remake of DQVII for the longest time, but a lot of fans used Facebook and social media and approached us and requested us, so we decided to move forward on that. And then, we were also able to get support from Nintendo, so we were able to do this as well.

USG: But it's not just the visuals which have changed for this remake. I played the first few hours of the import version, and, the beginning seems different from the original PlayStation version, much faster. Can you talk about how much the actual play has changed, and how you came to the choices that you did in terms of changing content and changing up the flow of the play and so forth?

Square Enix: 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 focused on the functionality... well, not functionality, but the benefits of 3DS, where users are able to pick up and play. We tried to create more of a bite-sized story, where users would be able to pick up and then finish that sequence and move on to the next.

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.

There's also that little creature at the very top left corner [of the box art] — that is a new character that was introduced in this title that [character designer Akira] Toriyama created. Part of the feedback we saw following the original game was that players weren't able to find all the tablets [necessary to unlock new areas of the game]. So we created this new character. He's a little spirit, a faerie, and he introduces a beacon that flashes when the players are close to a tablet. So, they'll be able to find it more easily.