It’s conquered Japan – now Dragon Quest XI is setting ng its sights on the west
How one of Japan’s most revered videogames is setting its sights on western success
On February 10, 1988, Yuji Horii jumped on his bike. He was heading to his local game store, because a title he’d made, Dragon Quest III, was launching that day. “That was the moment, when I saw the queue. That was when I first felt we had something big on our hands.”
He wasn’t wrong: that day is now the stuff of videogame legend. A million copies sold in a single day. Almost 400 Japanese schoolchildren arrested for truancy in what the National Police Agency would later call a “national disgrace”. Publisher Square Enix had to promise the government that it would only release future series instalments on public holidays or weekends.
That promise has held firm, largely, for the last 30 years – Dragon Quest XI launched in Japan on July 29, 2017, a Saturday. For three decades this series has been a national treasure, every release comfortably passing a million sales in its home country. When, in 2006, Famitsu readers voted on their favourite games of all time, there were three Dragon Quest games in the top 10, and six in the top 20. The series’ appeal has grown and endured across the generations, both of gaming hardware and Japan itself – parents passing on their love of the game to their children, and them to theirs. DQXI sold over two million units in Japan in its first two days on sale.
It is one of Japan’s most famous, most revered and best-selling series. The Slime, a recurring enemy in the games since the first instalment, is every bit as iconic in Japan as Mario or Link. Yet despite all that, the Dragon
Quest series has never found much of a foothold in the west. Horii believes that, after 30 years and over 70 million copies sold, that might be about to change – and that Dragon Quest XI is the game to make it happen.
To do that, Dragon Quest XI itself has had to change, with Square Enix using the fifteen-or-so months between the Japanese and western release dates to better tailor the game to a western audience. “The last Dragon Quest game that was a big success in the west was Dragon Quest VIII,” executive producer Yu Miyake tells us (the game, an
Edge 8, launched in the US for PS2 in 2005 and sold half-a-million copies, a series record for the region). “The way it was localised, the translation and the voices, were very well received. We’re thinking that’s the baseline now, and everything we do for XI is going to be at least of that quality.”
Parents have passed on their love of the game to their children. DQXI sold over two million units in Japan in its first two days
“It’s very rare to see a game where the story is told with such depth, and breadth, without a speaking protagonist”
So it proves in our demo at Square Enix’s Tokyo HQ. Within seconds, in fact, as an NPC moves their lips and actual words come out. Part of the reason for Dragon Quest’s enduring, generation-spanning appeal in Japan is that it doesn’t change that much; that anyone who played a Dragon Quest game 30 years ago can settle down in front of the latest release and feel immediately at home. To that end, the Japanese games are silent, even in cutscenes, telling their beloved stories entirely through text.
That wouldn’t do in the west, of course, and as such many of the characters in the western version of Dragon Quest XI are fully voiced. Out in the sticks, where our hero begins his journey, they’re west country yokels. The palace guards in the nearby city are slightly more refined; inside, royals and noblemen speak as you’d expect. The only exception to this rule is the hero himself – who, Horii believes, simply has to remain silent. “One real core thing about Dragon Quest is how the player is the main character; they play that role. That’s why the main heroes in Dragon Quest games never speak. It’s very rare to see a game where the story is told with such depth, and breadth, without a speaking protagonist. That’s something I think people are going to react to very positively.”
That’s part of the reason for the delay. A year and a bit may not seem like much in the scheme of things – especially considering this series’ history, spanning back as it does to a time when 12 months felt like a quick
“I felt that, rather than spread our efforts across a breadth of things, we’d rather concentrate everything on the story”
turnaround for a Japanese game’s localisation – but in an era where players have grown accustomed to simultaneous worldwide releases, it feels like quite a wait. The team puts much of that down to the fact that it was polishing the story until the 11th hour, and couldn’t begin translation of the game’s 2.3 million-word script until development was pretty much complete. But Square Enix has been thinking about how it might better shape a Dragon Quest game for the west – including, early on, considering making the series’ first ever open world.
Horii’s strict control over the pace and meter of storytelling was the driving factor behind that idea being abandoned, though another major consideration was the stress it would put on the team. “If you’re going for a completely open world, there’s obviously a development cost attached to that, affecting where you spend your time and effort,” Horii says. “If you want to be able to, for example, go fishing somewhere, you’ve got to put a lot of effort into developing a fishing system. I felt that, rather than spread our efforts across a breadth of things, we’d rather concentrate everything on the story. I felt that was a much better use of our time.”
That’s not to say, however, that Dragon Quest XI is a small game. Nor is it entirely linear. Rather, it’s a series of towns, cities and small settlements linked together by open, explorable areas dotted with campsites and quest-givers, and strewn liberally with enemies. This is classic JRPG design – the town and the field – and it’s certainly no match for the vast, lavish open-world expanses produced in the west. But there is charm to it, and beauty, its rolling, cartoonish hills the set dressing for what is comfortably the best-looking game the
Dragon Quest team has yet produced. Yet despite the contemporary sheen, at its core Dragon
Quest XI is traditional to a fault. That’s made immediately clear when the protagonist gets into his first fight, after straying into the aggro range of a Slime in the field. This is menu-driven, turn-based combat in the most classic of styles, and while a glimpse at some encounters later in the game shows that the spectacle ramps up somewhat as you grow more powerful, DQXI’s battles are fundamentally driven by the same system – attack, cast, defend, flee – that powered JRPGs decades ago. This reveals the key question about Dragon Quest XI and, in a wider context, suggests why a series of such constant success in its home nation has traditionally struggled overseas. How do you
“The idea is that you’ll be able to understand the game and pick up everything really quickly without reading a manual or tutorial”
– how can you – bring about meaningful innovation in a series whose success and longevity is driven, in such large part, by its familiarity? More bluntly: how do you take something that people love for being old, and make it feel new?
“I always say it like this, but we don’t change the basic grammar; we change the content,” Horii says. “The idea is that you’ll be able to understand the game and pick up everything really quickly without reading a manual or tutorial. That’s a constant feature of the game. Every one is made like that.”
The Dragon Quest lineage serves as proof of that concept. The game might be essentially the same from one instalment to the next, but its method of delivery changes.
DQVIII was a PS2 game, IX a DS release, and X a PC MMO. In Japan, the pan-generational appeal of the series led to the creation of, effectively, two DQXIs instead of one. Both the PS4 and 3DS versions told the same story, but their method of delivery was different, each laser targeted at different demographics. “As a series that’s been running for over 30 years,
Dragon Quest has a lot of different fans,” Miyake says. “They’ve all got their own preferences and things they want to see. You’ve got people who’ll say, ‘I really like the old, traditional 2D Dragon Quest’. Then you’ve got people who want to play in 3D with really beautiful, good-quality graphics. By having the game on these different kinds of hardware we can satisfy all these people and their different needs.”
That was a decision that made good business sense in Japan, where both Sony’s console and Nintendo’s handheld have been tremendous successes. But the story in the west is very different; PS4 may be the runaway market leader, but the ageing 3DS is on the wane and, even at its peak, was hardly a smash hit. As such the west will get the PS4 game this July and, day and date, a PC version.
That’s sensible thinking in an era where Japanese companies are reaping considerable dividends from bringing their previously console-exclusive games to the likes of Steam, and a territory that lacks an audience with a penchant for the traditional to which Square Enix must cater in Japan. Long-standing western fans of the series may be comparatively few in number, but there’s still plenty here for them in a game Horii describes as “a culmination” of the series to date. There’s a certain
“In Japan, pretty much everyone of primary school age, if they haven’t played Dragon Quest themselves, they’ll know someone who has”
contradiction here, albeit one that will be invisible to the audience Square Enix hopes to attract, in a game packed with nostalgic callbacks to earlier games in the series.
Yet that is, to an extent, unavoidable for the latest game in so beloved a series, that has such a cultural footprint. Horii estimates that some 90 per cent of Japanese men in their 30s have played a Dragon Quest game; now at parenting age, they are passing on that love to their offspring. “If you’re talking about recognition, it’s similar to the way you think about football in England,” Miyake adds. “In Japan, pretty much everyone of primary school age, if they haven’t played Dragon Quest themselves, they’ll know someone who has – their siblings, or their parents. They know the name, certainly, and have contact with it.
“I think that shows how deeply it’s permeated into Japanese awareness. That’s the treasure of Dragon Quest as a series. It’s not just stopped at a single point in time; it’s continued to release, grow and evolve alongside new hardware. With every new generation, you get new people coming into it, and they continue to play it – you never really move away from Dragon Quest, even after many years. If you ask people what their favourite game in the series is, or their favourite moment, you’ll get different answers from different generations.”
That’s certainly borne out in the development team, a blend of old hands and new staff that played the veterans’ early work in their youth; producer Hokuto Okamoto, for instance, remembers being compelled to buy Dragon
Quest VII by a TV ad showing people begging for the longdelayed PS1 game to finally come out. Team sizes have certainly grown, and development times extended, since Horii and a small crew knocked out the first Dragon Quest in a matter of months. Square Enix won’t get specific, but we’re told the DQXI team was roughly equivalent in number to that which made Final Fantasy XV – albeit needing significantly less time than the decade Hajime Tabata’s sprawling game required.
The two series, once great rivals until Squaresoft and Enix merged, are seen as equals in Japan. FFXV has sold seven million copies worldwide, however, a target that even the most optimistic observer would think out of
DQXI’s reach, despite the publisher’s attempts to refine it for overseas tastes. It’s strange, as a westerner, seeing just how popular Dragon Quest is in Japan: a merch store round the corner from Square Enix’s Tokyo HQ has more than its fair share of Final Fantasy gear, naturally, but it’s stuffed to the gills with Dragon Quest goods. The Slime is simply everywhere, fashioned into plushies, pencil cases, coffee tables and latte-art stencils. The Square Enix Cafe, nestled in prime real estate a few yards east of Akihabara station, is ostensibly celebrating the first anniversary of Nier:
Automata’s release when we visit, yet again the Slime’s nonthreatening gurn is inescapable. It is as guaranteed a presence in an Akihabara game or otaku-culture store as Mario, Link or Pikachu. The series even has its own permanent theme bar in Roppongi (see ‘Cafe culture’).
Dragon Quest has left an indelible cultural footprint across 30 years of Japanese history, and while structural and stylistic familiarity are key to that, the secret of its consistency is not the Slime, but the men behind it. It’s Horii, the chief storyteller for 11 games spanning three decades. It’s Akira Toriyama, the creator of Dragon Ball whose vibrant, cutesy character designs have become the
Dragon Quest series’ visual calling card. And it’s Koichi Sugiyama, the elder statesman of Japanese game music, whose compositions are another hallmark.
Yet all are, to put it politely, knocking on a bit. Sugiyama, the eldest, is 86; we wonder how long Horii, by comparison a spritely 64, intends to carry on with his life’s work. He won’t be drawn on that – such is his importance to Square Enix that any hint at his retirement would send the publisher’s share price plummeting. But Miyake finds the notion of a Dragon Quest game without Horii and his fellow stalwarts unthinkable. “As far as we’re concerned, Dragon Quest is something made by Yuji Horii, Akira Toriyama and Koichi Sugiyama. If those three weren’t involved in the project, there’d be no point in making it. We’d make something else.”
Horii, now 64, couldn’t ride his bike to a Sofmap or BIC Camera on a new Dragon Quest game’s launch day. He’d be mobbed. We meet him and the team in his office, whose location, Square Enix staff inform us on the approach, we are forbidden to even hint at. Tucked away in a plush apartment building with views across Tokyo and decked out in mock-medieval regalia, with axes and swords hanging on the walls, it’d be a culture shock even without the heavy jetlag haze, the old butting up jarringly against the new.
But this is Japan in microcosm – a country deeply rooted in tradition, forever racing into the future – and it is Dragon Quest in a nutshell, too. A game that moves steadily forward without ever really changing its ways, growing in fame and reach all the time, its sales figures stretching upwards into the skies. Will it finally take off in the west? Perhaps, though the odds are certainly stacked against it. It remains, as it ever was, a curio, a brand-new game with an umistakable fusty air. To the Japanese – whether they’ve been playing it all their lives, or only recently found out about it on the playground – it doesn’t matter. For as long as Horii and co stick around, it will be something to be treasured.