When Dragon Quest 12 was first announced, fans were both excited and nervous. Excited, because the series is always known for quality games, with 11 setting the bar really high for RPGs in general. Nervous, since Square Enix is supposedly taking this series in a “mature” direction, and fans always enjoyed the fairy tale-like nature of the franchise’s stories.
Fans are now wondering if Square Enix jumped the gun with Dragon Quest 12’s announcement back in 2021. Don’t get us wrong, game development is difficult, and we want this entry to be good, but there’s still no new information outside of that logo announcement.
If it were up to us, Square Enix would have announced the game after plenty of development, like Capcom does.
Creator Yuji Horii confirmed to Gamereactor that this upcoming installment is in active development, so fans just have to be patient. There’s nothing wrong with that, we just wish some of that had already been done before the game was announced. Of course, we don’t know the whole story, and there were probably plenty of development hurdles not known to the public.
That’s why we would have held off on the game’s announcement until a direction was properly picked. We know the devs wanted to reveal something major for the series’ 35th anniversary in 2021, but the HD-2D remake of Dragon Quest 3 would have been enough. Still, remakes aren’t always enough to sell people on a franchise, so it makes sense to jump the gun a bit.
In fairness to the lack of news surrounding Dragon Quest 12, Square has released more games from the series to keep fans busy. Dragon Quest Treasures and DQM: The Dark Prince were side games that people were pretty happy with, even if the latter had performance issues on Switch. There’s also the remakes of DQ 1 and 2 coming soon, so fans waiting for that game will at least have those numbers in separate games before they’re put together.
We also would have liked it if Dragon Quest X: Offline had a Western release, but that still hasn’t happened. As expected, many of us are still bitter that we don’t have it, especially since an offline version would be perfect, and only Japan got the online version of this game.
Square Enix has been more announcement-heavy lately, revealing new Kingdom Hearts 4 screenshots and canceling the Missing-Link mobile title. Many of us are hoping that some sort of Dragon Quest 12 announcement is next, but that’s just us reaching for something that’s not there.
It’s a shame that Square Enix announced this game so early, because everyone’s looking forward to Dragon Quest 12. After 11 raised the bar, we hope 12 doesn’t learn the wrong lessons from other “mature” RPGs like Final Fantasy 16.