Not long ago, Square Enix revealed Dragon Quest 7 in their planned line-up for the Tokyo Game Show. The last of the announced mainline ports of the popular role-playing series, it was revealed without any release date or pricing information. At the very least, it was confirmed that the game is based on the Nintendo 3DS remake as opposed to the original PlayStation version, but other details were scarce. I assumed we would have to wait until the show started this Thursday for more information, but it turns out that’s how long Japan has to wait for the game itself.
An update on the official Dragon Quest homepage today announced that Dragon Quest 7 will be releasing this Thursday, September 17th in the Japanese App Store, at a price of 1800 yen. That’s around $14 in American dollars, and likely would fit in at the $14.99 price of many other Dragon Quest games. But unlike the other games, this one’s worldwide release is an if, not a when. The game was released in English on PlayStation 1, but Square Enix has indicated the game would need a new localization whenever it was questioned about the status of the 3DS version that this one was based on. I’d assume that goes just the same for this situation. You might be wondering what the big deal is, since they’ve had to re-translate other games during this project. The issue is that Dragon Quest 7 is easily the largest, most text-filled entry in the series. It would be an incredibly resource-intensive project, and the only reason I think it’s even possible is because one localization would be able to be used across mobiles and 3DS.
So we’ll have to wait and see what Square Enix has to say about Dragon Quest 7‘s status worldwide. It would be pretty odd to leave one game out after they’ve done all the others, but the special circumstances here mean that we have to at least consider the possibility that we may never see an English version on our mobile devices. We’ll let you know as soon as we hear anything, and I’ll of course be around with some impressions of the Japanese version when it releases later this week.
