Download DRAGON QUEST VII Reimagined Demo

Love the series and have played through every game, including the DS version of DQ 7. That being said, this version sucks. The pacing of the gameplay is too quick and leaves no room for appreciating its environments, stories, or characters either from an artistic or writing point of view. The character writing skips to the tropes of each of them and leaves no space for proper emotional connection, individuality, or growth. Each character is simply their caricature. The writing of the individual plots suffers from practically the same issues in reference to story beats this time, it skips to the payoff or emotional pull as quick as it can without any sense of payoff or intrigue. It's almost insulting, like it’s asking the player to clap whenever something happens. The game introduces a “chat” button that checks in on party members that turns out to be used as a glorified objective tracker/“yellow paint” for the most part rather than a bit of fun character writing for specific moments or areas during your travels. The gameplay itself has undergone a huge change for this specific game that, for some reason, no one is bringing up and it's one of the reasons the game is so much easier: Party members choose their action as their turn comes up in the list. Typically with Dragon Quest you have to choose all of your party’s actions at the start of a round before any actions happen at all, this means that part of the difficulty comes from a risk/reward relationship with predicting the damage you will take during that round of actions. But, in this game every action you take is reactive since action choices come up as it becomes another character’s turn in the round. All of that combined with enemy stats being lesser: HP being lower, defence being worse, and their damage being lower makes for a game that can literally play itself. Seriously, simply set the Tactics of the whole party to “Fight Wisely” and the game will actually fully beat itself. If you turn up the difficulty it will still beat itself, it will just take longer, it’s sad. The areas, both overworld and dungeons/towns, are tiny and simplistic. This means that any piece of “explorable” land can be understood and practically fully explored in less time that it takes to say the word linear. It’s a shame, the game is beautiful and the music fantastic, but you spend so little time in these places that it is simply never given the time to shine.
tl;dr the game is extremely simple in practically every conceivable way from game design to writing to combat and it pushes you through its story like it wants you to finish it before you can start thinking.
It's sad, because this series is beautiful and is typically some of the most fun I’ve had playing any RPG, but this is easily one of the worst in the series.
Go play DQ 5 or DQ 8 or DQ 11 they are all substantially better in every way.