One Dragon Quest fan worked to preserve all of DQ7’s maps before the 3DS online shutdown

If you weren’t paying attention, Nintendo shut down the online services for 3DS and Wii U, because the future is forward, baby. Unfortunately, this means that gamers with principles had to step in to preserve what Nintendo was burying with its digital store closures, and one of those things was the Dragon Quest VII: Fragments of the Forgotten Past DLC maps.

Twitter user Sackchief had a plan to preserve those 56 DLC maps for anyone who wants to experience them after the shutdown in the best way possible, too. There seemed to be no takers on the endeavour until Gronya, stuck in bed and recovering from bowel ulcers, decided to take on the difficult task of grinding for the cleanest save file.

Gronya lays out the entire agonizing process in the embedded video. It involves keeping the two main protagonists dead while temporary party member Kiefer grinds his way to invulnerability to get to the point where the DLC Tablets could be obtained.

I’m going to be real with you: I don’t know enough about Dragon Quest VII and its DLC to know why this was necessary. I didn’t get into the series until about 2014 or 2015 when I was sad and lonely and my only escape was sprawling myself across the couch watching GameCenter CX and playing Japanese games.

It seems as though this was done not because it was the only way to preserve the content but the best way. Gronya even says that this could have been done in 10 hours without Super-Kiefer. Obviously, this was done for a reason, otherwise Gronya (and another user named DaniPhoFani) wouldn’t have gone to such lengths.

However, I admire the effort. It probably would have been better if Nintendo had just kept the infrastructure or designed it with more perpetuity in mind. Maybe Square Enix will one day port Dragon Quest VII again with the DLC either intact or just recreated. We can’t count on that. So, for now, we have the hard-fought save file available on the Internet Archive.