Nintendo and Square Enix held a little press conference last night to talk about the biggest JRPG franchise in Japan: Dragon Quest.While the series remains relatively niche abroad, Dragon Quest is more or less the definitive RPG for Japan. Probably 90% of the entire country has bought and played at least one Dragon Quest game, and I'd be very surprised to meet anyone under the age of 80 who hasn't heard of it. Scratch that. Make it 90.
So, Dragon Quest IX. It's been a while coming (understatement alert!), but Square Enix finally got around to throwing down a solid release date: March 28, 2009. As an interesting aside, you'll note if you look on a calendar that March 28, 2009 is a Saturday. Most - nay, nearly all - games come out on Thursdays in Japan. Dragon Quest is special. Why? Because if it was on a weekday, most of the country's workforce would skip the office that day to pick up their copy. I'm not even slightly joking.
However, the Dragon Quest fun doesn't stop there. During the event, series creator Yuuji Horii slipped up to proclaim the following:
"...Well, it might be time to start polishing up the concept for the next new thing. Since this one (referring to DQIX) was on a portable, the next one on something like the Wii would be nice... Wait, am I allowed to say that?"
Horii continued that the now enigmatic Dragon Quest X is indeed in development, but said that any further details are "a secret."
While not a 100% 'DQX on Wii' confirmation, its about as close as you can get.
(Quotes taken from the Famitsu report and translated from the original Japanese by yours truly.)
So that's a bit of megaton - for Japan at least. What are your thoughts on the matter?
UPDATE: Here, have a trailer for Dragon Quest IX. You may think you've seen this one before, but it's totally different because it has the new release date written at the end. Like I said: Totally different.
3 comments:
I think this is great news. As a Wii owner I'm glad to see that it won't become the JRPG ghost town that the GameCube was. And the Wii seems like a great fit for the series, especially if they stick with the cel shading style from VIII. I wonder if we won't see the actual game for another three years, or if the fact that this annoucement came three months before IX is even released indicates a faster development cycle than usual.
Yeah, the JRPG ghost town belongs to the PS3 this gen. :P
I would imagine DQX will stick with cell-shading. Hell, if it's Level 5 on it again, I would expect to see nothing more than a Wii port of DQVIII's engine.
As for the development cycle, I know Level 5 was dragging their asses on DQIX, plus they had to change at least half of the game completely when Japan got mad that it was going to be an action-RPG.
I would assume DQX will take less time, but the DQ projects typically move only as fast as Horii and the dev team want them to.
I'd be surprised if DQX comes out before Wii2 is announced. It might get released before the next Wii console, but I'm sure were looking at at least 3 years or more before another console DQ graces us with its presence. Just like DQVII did with the original PS.
I'm just glad DQX will be for a console though. I don't care that it won't be HD, I'm just happy that it'll be playable on my tv, because I was really scared that it'd be announced for the DS (or the DS2, which will probably be less powerful than the Wii).
As for DQIX, I think it looks awesome for a DS game. Though I seriously doubt Level 5 will be back. If Square-Enix had to help finish the game, then Level 5 is probably out of the picture now. It isn't like S-E is small though, I've always been confused as to why they didn't develop the games in-house after the merger (since DQ is such a major series for them).
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