Japan's biggest role-playing game series is, finally, hedging its bets.
Square Enix has announced Dragon Quest XI, the latest in its long-running, very popular line of RPGs that's something of a Japanese cultural phenomenon. The games sell millions of copies to a wide audience. This installment will be released in late 2016 or early 2017 in two versions; one on Sony's PlayStation 4 and one on the Nintendo 3DS. And that's a pretty big deal.
The publisher is always very choosy as to which platform the next Dragon Quest game ends up on. Spinoffs aside, its stated goal is always to release the next Dragon Quest on the most popular, best-selling game platform in Japan. And the series is so monumentally huge that its announcement and release always has the effect of cementing that platform's victory, since consumers (and other developers) will flock to the platform afterwards. It was a huge deal when Dragon Quest VII left Nintendo and became a PlayStation exclusive. It was even huger when Dragon Quest IX switched allegiances back and appeared on the portable Nintendo DS instead of a home console.
PlayStation 4 and Nintendo 3DS are nowhere near each other in terms of power, of course, so there will effectively be two different versions of the game: A version with souped-up graphics (it's built on Unreal Engine, actually) for PS4, and a scaled-down version on 3DS with a crazy twist: The system's top screen will show 3-D graphics, but the bottom screen will show a 2-D sprite-based version of the game that looks like Dragon Quest circa 1995.
This isn't just a cosmetic quirk: If you use the 3DS' analog joystick, the game will display all its messages on the top screen and the battles with enemies will feature 3-D graphics. But if you use the old-school D-pad instead, the game's messages will appear on the bottom, pixelated screen, and the battles will feature classic 2-D sprite illustrations instead.
What the appearance of Dragon Quest XI on two different platforms at once suggests is that there isn't and will not be a clear "winner" in Japan's dedicated gaming business, at least not for the time being.
Were it not for the fact that Dragon Quest creator Yuji Horii had made it clear that the next game in the series would be for dedicated game devices, I'd have felt pretty sure that it would be a mobile game, considering that smartphones are gobbling up so much of the gaming market in Japan.
And in fact, Square Enix actually did announce Dragon Quest of the Stars, a free-to-play, microtransaction-based role-playing game for iOS and Android, just a few days ago. It's not out of the question that this could actually be more lucrative than the console games, if it catches on.
Creating two similar games using the same story, characters, etc. on two disparate platforms isn't unheard of. In fact, Level-5 did it for its collaboration with Studio Ghibli, Ni no Kuni, which had PlayStation 3 and a Nintendo DS versions. It's a great risk-mitigating concept in an uncertain market that seems to have worked well: As expected, Level-5 sold more of the DS version in Japan, but the PlayStation 3 version was more suited to the worldwide market, and outsold the DS version once European and American sales were factored in.
Square Enix had one more hedge to offer before closing its presentation: It's also going to bring Dragon Quest XI, as well as the MMO game Dragon Quest X, to Nintendo's upcoming NX console. But it didn't have anything else to say about that.
