Dragon Warrior 7 on PS1 is my favorite game in the series with Dragon Quest 11 being my second favorite. Dragon Quest 11 as some of the best gameplay, but the pacing is awful.

For those who have played Dragon Warrior 7, the amount of dungeons, towns, etc, and their size and exploration, completely dwarfs any game in the series, especially, Dragon Quest 8, 9, and 11. These full 3D dungeons were just much smaller in comparison to Dragon Warrior 7's birds eye 3D view dungeons. Not only that, but the modern behind the back 3D adds pacing issues of its own, simply because in birds eye view, you immediately see the treasure chest, stairs, etc, that are behind the wall after you enter the house, dungeon, etc, so you immediately see what's in range without having to SPECIFICALLY look at it. So both games may be 80 hours long, but Dragon Warrior 7 is 80 hours long without modern day mechanics padding it out.

You know what other modern day "mechanics" pad out games? "Text." Not really a mechanic but publishers have obviously realized that padding out your game with absurd amounts of text, is extremely cheap in comparison to graphics and gameplay. Are they going to just add absurd amounts of dialogue to Dragon Quest 7 to in order to make the game longer? Are they going to cut down the size of the dungeons and cut down how explorable they were while adding text to keep the games long?

I think the only issue with the game, is some of the early game imbalancing issues on the PS1 version. When you get to the area with all the robots, every robot attacks twice, and the boss was two regular robots and one boss robot. This part did feel a little bit grindy because of just how hard this was, but afterwards, the remainder of the game didn't feel too difficult and was balanced very well. So despite some early game difficulty, Dragon Warrior 7 felt like it was the most balanced in the series until Dragon Quest 11 with super strong monsters(the only truly great game that has "draconian difficulty" as an option.)

The other thing about Dragon Warrior 7, is I used two memory cards to trade characters to get all the towns. When you get closer to the maximum amount of allies and there being less of each type out there, it gets really difficult to get those final ones, so you pretty much have to trade to make it easier. I started a brand new game, worked my way up to that point, and traded everything to get the casino. It was much faster than the time it was taking me to do it legitimate.

Now, while I state I'm worried about it, I also want to state that, I do think Square Enix has been doing really well bringing back their classic games. Now while I don't want these old ports and remakes, I can't argue that the changes were enough to make previous games, go from great to near perfect in at least one case, or amazing in another.

Crisis Core Reunion for instance. I'd score the original Crisis Core a 7/10, having to press L and R to change to different materia or to change to your attack, and the game did feel a lot like playing Parasite Eve on PS1 somewhat. It was completely action based, but the slower attacking and enemy AI is very Parasite Eve like. Reunion changes the combat I think making the AI attack a little bit more often, I could be mistaken, but I didn't think they would rebalance the game, so I did play it on hard difficulty, and because of the newer combat that is more similar to Final Fantasy 7 Remake with the changes of theirs, evading no longer uses a resource, attack skills and summons can be banked used when the player wants, and bosses special attack damage can be reduced by damaging them enough. The change made me like the game much more and is an 8/10 with Reunion, which is great, very few games are a 9 or 10 for me.

Tactics Ogre Reborn though is a 10/10. They took the original Tactics Ogre, they took the content of Tactics Ogre on PSP, they reworked a lot of the mechanics for the PSP version into a new streamlined class system and the game is a near perfect TRPG. There's no reason to ever play either the original or the PSP version of this game. It is a masterpiece, and while I still like Brigandine better, Forsena and Grand Edition, I would state the game is so good it's debatably better. The PS1 version was able to easily be broken, just equip everyone with bows or maybe turn everyone into ninjas and level them up as those, you'll never get hit. It's by far better than the PSP game which was just a absolute grind. Tactics Ogre on PSP is straight garbage, I couldn't even be bothered to finish the game despite finishing every route on the original game and every route on Reborn.

Tactics Ogre Reborn uses the actually great ideas in the PSP version of the game that just happen to be an absurd grind. Except for the fact that it changes these mechanics up. It's no longer a grind, you don't start with all level 1 classes every time you get something new They even change the way how the classes work so the game is designed for your parties to be a "build." The more knights you have for instance with guardian force to play extremely defensive, terror knights with broadswords or soldiers with allies that have broadswords, voulge, etc, these are the characters you'll use to cut enemies defense. Archers and other characters with baldur's bow or other status effect ranged weapons to shut out silence or add other status effects. Or instead of the archer, ninja to add silence, stun, or poison.

Now while Star Ocean the Second Story R looks beautiful, the gameplay is a mess imo. The open world is much larger, more padded out, but I didn't realize until late game that I could have actually fast traveled back everywhere I've been. So it makes the change in the open world a bit redundant and it was annoying until I realized that fast travel was added.

Anyways, I just wanted to say all of this to point out that in most cases, Square Enix has really been killing it on the remake/remaster front. Again, I don't care for remasters I'd rather have new games, but Square Enix has been doing it really well and it's a completely different game and the original game is still its own game at that point.