Enlarge / Assembling new islands from stone fragments is the way to move forward in Dragon Quest VII. (credit: Square Enix)
It’s hard to be a Dragon Quest fan in the English-speaking world. The series is phenomenally popular in Japan, but outside of its homeland its audience is definitely of the dedicated-but-small variety.
This means that getting DQ games localized is always a crapshoot. The series enjoyed a US revival in the mid-’00s when Dragon Quest VIII was released for the PlayStation 2, which was followed by a series of Nintendo DS remakes of IV, V, and VI (it was the first time either of the latter two had been released in English). That rush of games capped off in 2009 with the generally excellent Nintendo DS-exclusive Dragon Quest IX, but so far this decade English releases have been few and far between.
Case in point, Dragon Quest VII (officially subtitled Fragments of the Forgotten Past). It’s a 3DS remake of a 100-plus-hour PlayStation JRPG that was wildly popular in Japan but mostly overlooked in the US, due in part to the fact that it was a primitive-looking retro-style game that came out on the PlayStation just as the Dreamcast and PlayStation 2 generation was really heating up. The Japanese 3DS remake came out in 2013, but the game’s gargantuan script and its small Western fanbase meant that we didn’t hear anything official about a localization until earlier this year.
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Source: Ars Technica – Review: Dragon Quest VII is for people who already love Dragon Quest