The original Dragon Quest 7 is a bonafide classic JRPG, but even its most ardent fans - myself included - will admit its fragmented story has some pretty serious pacing issues. Apparently, Square Enix agrees, as the recently revealed Dragon Quest 7 Reimagined cuts some unnecessary subplots and adds new scenes intended to make the plot feel more streamlined, according to the developers.

In a newly published Square Enix interview with Dragon Quest 7 Reimagined producer Takeshi Ichikawa, this issue of pacing is addressed.

"The 'reimagined' elements of the narrative allude to improvements in the game's overall framework, which offers a much deeper and more compelling experience," said Ichikawa. "In our effort to streamline the overall story progression and provide a more engaging narrative, we decided to cut subplots that have little or no direct relevance to the main scenario."

Much of Dragon Quest 7's main quest is essentially made up of interconnected mini quests sending the player to various islands to solve their inhabitants' respective problems. It all comes together in a beautifully melancholic way, but I definitely remember some subplots that felt particularly unnecessary. It sounds like Square Enix is taking out the ones it deems irrelevant to the main plot and replacing them, although not necessarily at a 1:1 scale, with more meaningful ones.

"While some content has been removed, entirely new scenarios have also been introduced," added Ichikawa. "Our goal was to build upon the strengths of the original game while striving to deliver a deeper, more immersive story experience for modern players."

All of this helps to drive home Square Enix's point about Dragon Quest 7 Reimagined being a full-fledged ground-up overhaul of the 25-year-old original, similar to the HD-2D remakes of Dragon Quest 1-3 but with an art style I'm personally more drawn to as someone who didn't grow up with the NES games.

Dragon Quest 7 Reimagined launches on Switch, Switch 2, PS5, Xbox Series X, and PC on February 5, 2026.

Here are the best JRPGs you can play in the meantime.

The PS1 library is a treasure trove of wildly ambitious and unique games, and doubly so if you count the platform's Japanese library. One particularly big highlight is PopoloCrois, a series of adorable JRPGs published by Sony itself. Now, after five years of work from fan translators, the entire PS1 PopoloCrois trilogy is finally playable in English.

Popolocrois has an odd history, originating as a manga series in the '70s, the rights to which were eventually sold to Sony. It then became a PS1 game, telling the story of a 10-year-old boy trying to get his comatose mother's soul out of the underworld in the format of a traditional JRPG. Its biggest claim to fame is its absolutely gorgeous art and animation, which is still some of the most adorable stuff you'll see in a video game.

PopoloCrois got one global release on PSP, which combined the two main PS1 games – PopoloCrois Story 1 and 2 – into a single RPG with a continuous story. That wasn't quite the full experience, however, so fan translators have spent the past few years patching the original games into English, and that job ultimately wrapped up in 2024.

One piece was missing, however: PopoRogue, a roguelike spin-off released between the two main games. Yes, roguelikes were pretty popular among Japanese RPG enthusiasts in the '90s – the likes of Mystery Dungeon and Shiren the Wanderer are testament to that – and even PopoloCrois was getting in on the action decades before the indie roguelike boom.

Today is the day, Poporogue PS1 full english patch v1.0 is released now! translated from JP>EN! www.romhacking.net/translations...Poporogue is a turn-based mix roguelike elements, assecond game that set in dream world with mercenaries system where you can hire and recruit party members.

— @porosneustein094.bsky.social (@porosneustein094.bsky.social.bsky.social) 2025-09-16T22:25:56.054Z

That gets us to today's news, which is that PopoRogue finally has an English translation patch of its own, completing the whole trilogy. "The first translation patch for PopoloCrois was released 3 years ago, but there has been over 5 years of work from multiple teams to finally bring the whole series into English," as explained in a post on Romhacking.net.

This isn't purely a translation, either. The devs also went the extra mile here, hacking the game to let you get a handful of exclusive items you otherwise would've needed a demo disc and the Japan-exclusive PocketStation accessory for. "Something impossible is possible now," as team member keke_094 puts it on Bluesky, and I think that goes as much for the opportunity to play these games in English as it does for any other extras.

The best PS1 games never go out of style.

This afternoon my Destiny 2 clanmate texted me to say: "If you die in Solo Ops or Patrol you can no longer respawn 😂". That can't be right, I thought. That would be such a fundamental bug that it would effectively break the game. Anyway, I loaded in, did some testing, and you can probably guess where this is going.

From my own experience, once you die the respawn button will appear after the usual countdown, but cannot be interacted with. In order to start playing again you either need to go to orbit (ie, leave the activity) or switch characters. Which is as big a problem as it sounds. The bug even seems to extend to Patrol zones, although I was occasionally able to self-revive.

Quite how long it will take to fix is anyone's guess, but as you can tell by the tone of Bungie's tweet, this is a four alarm fire. You cannot have players trying to complete every solo activity in the game on a single life. I would love to tell you I'm surprised that a bug of this size has made it into the live game, but as we've been writing about recently, Destiny 2 is currently in a parlous state, both in terms of its biblical-sized swarm of bugs and player sentiment towards the systemic changes introduced with the Edge of Fate expansion.

Only this morning, I woke up to find a message from a different clanmate about a bug, this time involving a legendary sword that is one-shotting some of the hardest enemies in the game. The only criteria is you need to have no ammo and jump as you light attack with the sword.

See below:

Meanwhile, the exotic hand cannon Sturm is still giving players a +380% damage buff to all outgoing ability damage. Needless to say that is very much not intended. So far, Bungie has disabled the hand cannon in the Trials of Osiris PvP mode, but let the bug slide in PvE. That's probably because, with the community in near-constant tumult, the studio would rather not be accused of being the fun police.

Perhaps painting itself into a corner, on a recent Bungie livestream the developers said they were pausing any non-critical balance fixes, although Sturm surely qualifies as the kind of critical bug that will have to be fixed sooner rather than later.

Anyway, here's how you can take advantage of it for now:

And whilst those bugs might sound fun, they are merely the wacky cherries on top of an otherwise fetid cake. Pay a visit to Bungie's 'Known Issues' page for the Edge of Fate and you will find the Magna Carta of bug lists. Here are some random highlights:

• Players can sometimes be killed immediately upon respawning in the Nightmare of Gahlran Pinnacle Op.
• A number of Strikes are not completing properly after the final boss has been defeated.
• Focusing engrams at a Vendor can cause the reward to drop at a lower Power level than what was displayed.

On and on it goes, so much so that I can only feel sorry for Destiny 2's embattled community team, which forms the frontline when it comes to dealing with players' understandable fury. No wonder they sound downbeat today:

Still, at least Bungie has seen sense about the recent armor controversy and effectively given players the chance to earn what would have been a paid set of armor as an in-game reward instead. Although honestly the fact I'm giving credit for that is probably a form of Stockholm Syndrome at this point.