This just got a release date for NA and EU - September 4th for PC and PS4!
In a confusing twist, the Switch version is coming “much later” and I guess the 3DS version isn’t coming to the west at all.
From Square Enix via IGN, “Our aim with Dragon Quest XI and the Dragon Quest brand is to grow the audience in the West. From a business point of view, it made strategic sense to release the 3DS version in Japan in 2017. For the West in 2018, it made the most sense to focus on the PlayStation 4 and PC (Steam) platforms.”
I didn’t see a thread for this, and other than enjoying DQ8 last summer on 3DS and playing the shit out of Dragon Warrior when I was a kid back on the NES I am not the biggest Dragon Quest fan, but I did like the 3DS game I played enough to complete it and it sounds like this is taking some pages from Breath of the Wild in terms of gameplay.
IGN also has a huge preview of the game so if you want to get a sense for what this is, link!
Dragon Quest is about the only JRPG I’ve ever really liked so I imagine I’ll pick it up - wish it was coming to 3DS so I could (more or less) complete the set though.
Heroes and Builders, while great games in their own right, aren’t really classic Dragon Quest games at all. They’re kind of like Final Fantasy Tactics to the Final Fantasy series: a lot of the same trappings, but fundamentally different gameplay. Heroes are more action oriented, and Builders is a story-driven Minecraft-alike.
Depends on what you have access to a little bit, but I’d say probably DQ8.
Dragon Quest is…very, almost aggressively Dragon Quest. It’s the archetypical JRPG, so there’s grinding, and there’s stupid fantasy tropes, etc. But it’s very good at being what it is.
For people without handhelds, I think there’s only been one other Dragon Quest mainline game, right? On the PS2, IIRC? And now there will be one on the PS4 and PC. Nice. My first real chance to check out the series.
Your best bet is to play VIII either on PS2 or 3DS. I think that one encapsulates what makes the series great. You can get V, VI, VII, VIII or IX to play the 3DS
Sorry, I meant a modern console. I wasn’t counting the NES and SNES. Those were before my time. I used to be PC gamer-only back then. N64 onward is when consoles started for me personally. Looks like Dragon’s Quest 7 was on the original PSX, but I was N64 that generation. So the only one that was released PS2 and after was Dragon Quest 8. 9 was handheld only, and 10 was an MMO, I believe.
I did briefly play one of the Dragon Quest games on a SNES emulator on the original Xbox once, but it didn’t grab my attention like Chronotrigger did, so I ended up playing through the latter game instead.
I remembered why DQ8 went by me now. It came out really late in the PS2 lifecycle. I was interested, but it came out around the same time as the Xbox 360, and I was distracted by the new and shiny console. I figured there would be a DQ game on the 360 or PS3 soon enough, but it never came.
Because the JRPG market had already moved to handhelds by then. We’re seeing things swing back to consoles now, but it took a lot of market consolidation and a lot of smaller developers going under, so it’s rather bittersweet.
I’m not optimistic about the game’s chances in the west, particularly with skipping the only platform family mainline Dragon Quest games have been on over here in thirteen years. Dragon Quest as a series has been doing the exact same thing for over three decades, with incredibly few changes outside of graphical improvements in that time, and no real hook for a western audience that isn’t going to see “ultra-traditional turn-based JRPG” as a selling point, no matter how much marketing it gets. The series isn’t like Monster Hunter, which turned out to have a good amount of mainstream appeal once they made a bunch of QoL changes, tweaked a bunch of mechanics (and the backlash from hardcore players has already started on that front), and put it on a console.
