Last Sunday at Japan Expo, Yuji Horii, the creator of the Dragon Quest series, expressed his interest in bringing the 3DS games Dragon Quest VII and VIII to the west.
At the very end of the event, he supposedly dropped a major bombshell, saying that they will be released “in French”. This would mean the rest of Europe, so an English release is also probable.
This info is backed up by the fan site Final Fantasy Ring, that posted an interview with Horii in which he stated that Square Enix is “thinking about” localizing Dragon Quest VII and Dragon Quest VIII.
Apparently, the Twitter user who attended the conference and shared this info, Jérémie Kermarrec, got in touch with someone from Square Enix once things ended, and was told that Horii sharing the big news wasn’t planned.
In a similar note, Dragon Quest series executive producer Yuu Miyake discussed the matter with Polygon, in an interview published yesterday.
In it, he noted that Square Enix wants to release the different games overseas, but since they’re “very text-heavy, the time and the cost it takes to localize these and do it well is quite something.”
As fans continue to share their enthusiam for the series, Square Enix will be more keen on pursuing localizations of past Dragon Quest entries, and in the meanwhile, the company seems to be using Dragon Quest Heroes as a way to gauge how much interest there is for the series in North America.
Yuu Miyake said:
“We want to get them out here. We really do! The Dragon Quest games are very text-heavy, so the time and the cost it takes to localize these and do it well is quite something. Business-wise, we have to think quite hard whether we’ll make that money back from localizing to North America. It’s always been a difficult decision. But the more you tell us, the louder the voices, the more likely we are to do it.”
“We’re really using this (Dragon Quest Heroes) as a kind of opening up of the market. We can gauge whether the American people might want to go back after Heroes and see some of the other Dragon Quest games. Hopefully we could use that as leverage to get those out over here.”
All in all, from all their recent comments, it seem like it’s highly likely we will at least get Dragon Quest VII and VIII in the West!
NOTE: What do you think of these news, are you excited about it? I never played the Dragon Quest games but I have been interest in trying them out sometime, so I’m glad we might get these around here!