Over a year ago, Square Enix announced their plans to develop Dragon Quest XI. In a conference held in Japan last summer, it was announced that a number of Dragon Quest games were going to be released for PS4 – starting with their latest game, Dragon Quest X. Square Enix also officially revealed the development of their newest addition to the franchise, the 11th installment Dragon Quest XI. It was only announced that the game would be coming to PS4 and 3DS, but it looks like Square Enix will back-track from this and will also include launching the game on the NX.
According to IGN, in recent interview with Gematsu, the series creator Yuji Horii confirmed that Dragon Quest will also be coming to Nintendo’s newest platform, Nintendo NX. Gematsu notes that this year’s October issue of Nintendo Dream will feature a round-table discussion between Super Smash Bros. series director Masahiro Sakurai, Pokémon series producer Junichi Masuda, and Dragon Quest’s Yuji Horii. In the table-discussion Horii suggested they will be trying to release the game simultaneously for all platforms, stating that “spoilers will emerge is we release one version earlier.” He continued to state some of the difficulties in making several different version of the game simultaneously:
The movement in the 2D of the 3DS version, and the movement in the 3D of the 3DS version and the PlayStation 4 version definitely feels different when it’s in action. However, there are concerns when making several versions at the same time, and to that extent it’s difficult, so we’re making the game to the best of our ability.
PS4 and the 3DS are two vastly different platforms so one can imagine the technological difficulties that may arise when trying to release the game across both of them. We don’t know what the NX will officially look like yet, but we do know that the handheld 3DS will feature the typical two viewing mode screens: the top is where the 3D battles will be displayed and the bottom will be for the 2D sprites. Dragon Quest XI will become just the fifth officially confirmed game that will be released for the NX game. The publisher of Dragon Quest has told Eurogamer that they don’t have a concrete goal as to when they plan to officially release the game to a Western audience, but it will come sometime next year.
Its release in Japan, however, is set to release around the end of May 2017. Below is some gameplay released by Gematsu last summer: