I was so excited for the demo that I played the whole thing in one sitting. Took about 4 hours on normal difficulty (by the way, what happened to calling it Draconian, Dragon, and DRACKY QUEST?). I've... never played DQVII all the way through. I bought the 3DS remake back when it came out, but I got stuck at the part where you lose all your equipment and skills. Reimagined is pretty smooth so far, and of course I will do my best not to let that happen again! Thoughts and spoilers below.
I looove the art direction. Adorable miniatures! I especially like how the human models look. ...........for the most part. I get that it's thematic for the story, but I really disliked how gray and washed out all the colors got while Ballymalloy was cursed. Felt like AAA gray slop. Of course color returns to the land after you save Ballymalloy, but I really hope every cursed island doesn't look like that.
I played with the voice acting set to English. I really liked the voices for Kiefer and the residents of Ballymalloy. I felt like the voices for the residents of Pilchard Bay didn't sound natural, especially Pollock and Maribel. However, Maribel's voice grew on me by the end. Might try out the Japanese audio in the future.
Kiefer is one of my favorite characters in the franchise. I'm so excited for the new content featuring older Kiefer from the trailers!! I played Caravan Heart a few months ago, and I tried to keep an eye out for references, but I didn't notice anything specific. I saw a post where someone pointed out that his family's sunstone ring is now a more direct reference to DQII, but I suppose I'll learn more about that whenever I finally play DQII.
I was happy to see that party chat is still present in this version, but it felt lacking. The party members have about 2 lines of dialogue per location per quest phase. The DQ game I played most recently that had party chat was DQVI mobile version, and in that game each party member would react to almost every line spoken by EVERY NPC! Not sure if I cared to check the party chat when I played DQVII on 3DS, but someone else said it was in fact closer to the quantity of DQVI in that version. It's not like these are voiced lines! Bring them back! You don't need to rely on reminders about what to do next either, since we have that in the map now. Also, the little new party chat icon kept popping up even though they said the same line as before.
I love the defeated monsters list / monsterpedia in these games. In the most recent 3D entries I've played (DQM3: The Dark Prince and DQIII HD-2D), you can cycle through all the animations for each monster, which is the best part! It doesn't seem to be implemented in this game. I even tried mashing random buttons. This is what I most hope is added in the full version, not even joking lol.
