- Dragon Quest series producer Noriyoshi Fujimoto has personally always wanted to remake Dragon Quest VII for a portable system
- the amount of documents used to develop Dragon Quest VII was insane
- Dragon Quest VII has so much that Square-Enix has its own section for it
- the team had to go through every single document for the remake
- there are about 40 books of documents, consisting of the scenario texts alone
- took about a year to copy everything from paper to stored data on PC
- they used this time to think of new ideas for the remake
- focus was on how to best utilize the 3DS graphics and its features
- Fujimoto sat down and played through the PlayStation version of Dragon Quest VII with Yuji Hori
- Hori realized how difficult the game was with all the problem solving and puzzles.
- the original idea for the game was to make a "riddle solving adventure"
- Fujimoto said, "Solving some of the puzzles felt very exhilarating at times. Whenever you got stuck in the game, the frustration would build up."
- added features like stone shard radars and worked on making the overall tempo better for a smoother game play
- in the original, it took a good hour or longer until the first fight
- the remake introduces fighting much earlier
- increasing the leveling pace so it can be up to par with the other DQ titles
- this is why visual encounters were added
- idea is to make the game easier to play, not making it easier overall
- useful spells, such as Evac (used to escape from dungeons,) are available at earlier levels in the game.
- class exclusive costumes that visually correspond to each class.
- put a lot of thought into the camera works
- players have two different angles to play from, which can be adjusted at any time