Dragon Quest VII: Fragments of the Forgotten Past

Fragments of the Forgotten Past is an excellent entry in the Dragon Quest franchise (maybe even the best), offering a multitude of complex, touching, and tragic short stories. It certainly can be accused of overstaying its welcome, and its gameplay is too easy for its own good, but Dragon Quest VII still manages to shine by the force of its narrative alone.

The protagonist – who we can name as always – is a sixteen-year-old boy who lives in a small peaceful village on a small peaceful island. His best friend is Prince Kiefer, a hot-headed and impulsive boy who wants to discover what else lies across the ocean, beyond their kingdom. Although they are taught that it’s the only body of inhabited land in the whole wide world, they refuse to believe that their small peaceful island is all there is. The local priest, for example, talks about the time he also questioned their isolated existence and tried to venture into the ocean: he rowed, rowed, and rowed his boat but found nothing but water stretching as far as his eye could see. Their hope, then, lies in an unexplored shrine on the outskirts of the island: Kiefer hopes that, if they can crack its puzzles and discover its secrets, the truth about their world will finally come to light.

Fragments of the Forgotten Past has a very marked episodic structure. We collect fragments of stone tablets and position them on a pillar inside the aforementioned mystical shrine, which creates a portal to the past: there, we’ll find a new island and, after saving it, return to the present to find that it has suddenly appeared on the map. After exploring it again to find new stone fragments, the party will return to the shrine, open another portal to another point in time, visit another island, and repeat the process.

The game is massive, clocking in about 80 hours and offering almost twenty islands to explore, all of them with unique characters and storylines. The meat of the game, then, is the islands we encounter when we go through the portal: their stories are the heart of Fragments of the Forgotten Past, varying in tone and complexity.

The first island we visit, for example, holds a harrowing tale: all the women and children have been kidnapped by monsters, which are demanding that the men tear down every building in the village if they want their families back. It’s just the first story in Dragon Quest VII, but the strength of the game’s writing can already be seen: what would be a simple quest of going to the monsters’ lair and defeating them becomes much more complex as the village’s past is uncovered and we discover that the village was built over a lie and named after a cowardly, unjust act. The monsters are not random enemies but the village’s past coming back to haunt them with a vengeance. They didn’t kidnap the women and children simply because they’re evil, but because they’re after retribution. In a stellar moment, the last boss we fight on the island says a lot with just the action they keep performing during the battle, which helps cement them as a tragic character.

The places and locales we visit are usually haunted by their past – be it in the form of unresolved business or old traditions that now bear ill fruit. We meet a village built under an active volcano whose people worship “Father Flame” and make fire offerings to their god… which are actually just hastening their demise. We meet a people that live in a cursed village that knows no rain, and so they worship it, praying for it to come every day – but when their wish is fulfilled it only brings ruin to everyone. If there’s one unifying theme in Fragments of the Forgotten Past it is the problem of collective stupidity: most towns and villages we visit will have people uniting in the name of intolerance, tradition, and prejudice. They’ll pick up arms against peaceful monsters that only want to be alone or even help them; they will cheer for the bad guys to win, being easily deceived by appearances; they will try to harm or blame the “other” for their woes, and, if not for the hero’s help, certainly perish due to their inane actions.

The narrative’s tone is rightly varied: the funny tale of a village where everyone has turned into animals – the innkeeper is a cow, for example – is, in turn, followed by an extremely dark one in which a town is being stormed by robots. There, instead of a hapless cow, we meet a little girl frustrated because she’s unable to lift up weapons to avenge the death of her little brother, and a happy soldier celebrating the fact that he has just finished building a wall made from the corpses of his enemies.

Again, the writing makes things more complex, as the people of this island seem unable to forgive and move on, holding grudges and prejudices that will only confirm the nihilism of one of the key characters in that story, a bitter man who likes to name robots after his Ellie, believing that the robots, unlike his lover, will be more reliable than her: they’ll never die and leave him alone in the world. What he fails to notice, however, is that he’s going to become just like Ellie for his creations: unlike them, he’s mortal and will inevitably pass away and leave them without guidance or purpose, much like he was in life after Ellie died. When we visit the island again in the present and encounter one of the robots, the line “Must administer hot soup… soup will ensure revival…” manages to be silly and truly heartbreaking at the same time.

The game has us return to every island in the present so that we can see what has changed over the course of time with our actions. The game’s brilliance is choosing to work with the idea that time is rarely kind to people who had to be forced to do the right thing. So, we revisit them to discover that the noble acts of some characters were erased from history, entirely forgotten when not vehemently denied. Some people seem determined to repeat the same mistakes over and over again, denying what has happened in the past: there’s a character who even smashes a tablet to pieces because it tells the history of his town in a way that contradicts his ideology.

In other words, we revisit some islands just to find out that the lesson from the past was never learned. Sometimes, we even discover that some practices have become twisted, such as seeing that a certain problematic religion has now been turned into an excuse to attract tourists and make a profit. But, luckily, sometimes we visit them to find that the people are well, safe, and living honest lives.

We can spot the effect of time also in the characters, as we encounter some of them in other islands in different periods of time, sometimes when they’re older and looking for redemption, or younger, and so blind to the tragedy we know will befall them later. One of the best stories takes place in a town called Evergreen Gardens and it breaks the adventure formula by being a tragic love story, in which the characters are plagued not by monsters but by their own choices and attitudes. We witness characters that care for each other growing distant with time, becoming bitter and sad, living lonely lives, and there’s nothing we can do to help them get together again: fighting, after all, is the only main mechanic in the game, and their problem is definitely not one that can be solved with violence.

With almost twenty islands to explore, Dragon Quest VII can certainly get repetitive, especially later on when the stories start to share common themes without adding much that is new to them, such as the one that focuses on some people who can fly and bully a kid who is different. The game drags on at the end, too, with an unnecessary epilogue that makes us visit old places yet again to awaken some random spirits.

Our party is also far from memorable. The nameless hero has no personality or arc, just functioning as an avatar for the player. The other characters are just one-note: Kiefer is impulsive, Maribel is snarky, Mervyn is loyal, and so on. The focus, however, is not on them, but on the characters that they meet, and this is the secret of the game’s success.

The writing, after all, is full of charm, with NPCs often playing with words and sounds. A fisherman in the protagonist’s hometown, for instance, tells us how sad he is that he “caught a cold instead of fish” and is now saying “Ahchoo instead of Ahoy.” A farmer, in turn, says to us, “These cows are just like my children. We never run out of things to talk about. They’re so amoosing.” The names are also suggestive: the scientist who works with automatons is called Autonymus, while a king who grows too ambitious is called Hybris. The village under the volcano is called Emberdale and the volcano itself is called Burnmount. There’s a monster shaped like a pot called “Urnexpected”.  There are even some little alliterations thrown around for good measure, giving the dialogues some flavor: “We only ask that you do not bracer, badger, or otherwise bother our beloved king,” a random guard says to the hero.

The towns are also full of life because their inhabitants are not static: NPCs often change their dialogues and move around the town to match recent events, displaying unique traits and personality. Some of them even have their own character arc: in a certain village, for example, we meet a boy who, just like Kiefer, wants to travel around the world and discover new things. He is, however, unable to leave, because his mother is sick and he has to take care of her. If we talk to the mother, however, we find out that she’s actually pretending to be sick just to keep her son from leaving, as she was told by the local fortune teller that he may never come back. As the party solves the village’s problems, the mother starts to come to terms with letting her son go, while he – and that’s where the tragedy of their story lies – finds another reason to stay, settle, and form a family.

Gameplay-wise, Fragments of the Forgotten Past is a classic turn-based JRPG in the most boring sense of the term. We have a party of up to four characters and each one can either attack or use a skill, magic, or item. Twenty hours into the game, however, the characters barely have any spells or skills to speak of, and the basic attack command will still do the trick even when dealing with bosses. The game is ridiculously easy: twenty hours in, the characters will have around 120HP while the enemies will be dealing 1-3 damage with their attacks. Around the thirty-hour mark, we get access to a job system, but even then the game is still a cakewalk, rarely pushing the player to actually think about what they’re doing and develop any sort of complex strategy: just spamming our best skill usually works, as does the old “attack-attack-heal” strategy.

Dragon Quest is a series known for its tendency to stick to its roots, which can lead to a warm feeling of familiarity – making it the comfort food of JRPGs – but also to an annoying sense of stagnation. The game’s soundtrack, for example, composed as always by Koichi Sugiyama, has the same old problem: it’s great, but also incredibly repetitive. In Fragments of the Forgotten Past, we have dozens of towns each with their own distinct storyline, but they all share the same soundscape. Instead of each town having its own theme to build a distinct atmosphere, they all share the same three tracks: the sad, happy, and jolly town themes. It’s a huge waste of potential and it makes the game’s music incredibly tiresome after a while. The soundtrack in Dragon Quest games usually have players go through the same three stages: first, they like it, as the tracks are familiar and catchy, then they grow tired of the music, as there are just too few tracks for a game of this length, and finally – usually after the 60-hour mark – they start to suffer from Stockholm Syndrome and begin to hear the music in their dreams, think about it when they shower, and hum it to their partners in bed. Or maybe that’s just me.

Dragon Quest VII: Fragments of the Forgotten Past is not a game you come for the gameplay or the presentation. Its strength lies solely in the sheer quality of its short stories, which, in the end, prove to be enough to make the game a memorable experience.

February 22, 2025.