Today, Square Enix announced that Dragon Quest XI: Echoes of an Elusive Age is coming to NA and EU in 2018. The game which released today in Japan on the PS4 and 3DS is being localized into 5 languages. The localization was announced in a brief vid which you can watch below:
Dragon Quest XI: Echoes of an Elusive Age Coming West
The highly anticipated latest entry to the beloved Dragon Quest video game franchise follows the adventure of a hero who must solve the mystery of his fate with the aid of a charming cast of supporting characters. Dragon Quest XI: Echoes of an Elusive Age will offer a world of adventure, exploration and instances of heroism— all brought to life by the character art of famed manga artist Akira Toriyama and the memorable music of composer Koichi Sugiyama.
No platforms have been announced for release but Square Enix did say they would more info about the western release in the fall. Regardless this comes as great news to longtime fans of the series who have been anticipating the next entry in the west.
Thoughts on the game coming to the west? Make your voices heard in the comments!
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4 responses to “Dragon Quest XI: Echoes of an Elusive Age Coming To The West in 2018”
This series has never been very deep, especially on a storytelling level. I’d be surprised if any literate person had a hard time grasping the context of a DQ game from the dialogue alone. Besides, bad VA can be far more detrimental to a story driven game than no VA at all.
I’m not much concerned with the quality of the voice acting. Yes, better would of course be…better. My issue is that most JRPGs are so exposition heavy that reading all the text ceases to be fun, yet the plots are dense enough that if I skip the text I get lost (indeed I often get lost anyway, I mean, what was Tidus supposed to be in FFX for instance, and how did doing whatever I did to help him in FFX-2 actually make him human/real after all? That’s a typical conundrum, but skipping text makes it worse).
Failure of the storyline to change, on the other hand, might bother me if I was getting the games every couple years. However, the last home console release of a Dragon Quest game in North America was DQ VIII in 2005! 13 years is a long enough time that I probably wouldn’t even be too upset if the plot were actually identical. At this point I only remember DQ VIII in the most general terms.
I could count the number of JRPGs with decent voice acting on one hand, so a lack of VA entirely doesn’t strike me as a big loss. I’m more concerned this newer entry will be identical to the rest in its bland and overused formula. The whole underdeveloped and one dimensional cast of characters on a quest to defeat a demonlord for no other reason than because they’ve got nothing better to do, has overstayed its welcome. The DQ series hasn’t really moved forward in anything but graphics since it’s conception, so I don’t expect XI will be particularly mind-blowing.
The reason that the Japanese version does not contain any voice acting is, they claim, so they could edit and change the story/dialogue up until it was released.
Now it has been released, and they have 4-16 months to add voice acting before the U.S. and EU release. Whether or not they do will show whether their claim was valid or pretextual for saving development cash.
I’m not holding my breath.
I’m also not going to buy the game without it, as this is a PS4 game, not a game for the PS1. Yes, I have been waiting over a decade for a new Dragon Quest game to hit a real console, but it’s not like there aren’t lots of other good games.
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