Dragon Quest XI set for western release in 2018

Square Enix has announced that Dragon Quest XI will finally be making its way westwards next year. The news came a day before the release of Dragon Quest XI: Echoes of an Elusive Age in Japan, which we suspect will rise straight to the top of the charts when our data from Famitsu comes through later this week.

More details about the game will be announced later this autumn, says Square Enix, and but we do know the game will be localised in English, French, Spanish, Italian and German when it eventually launches at some point next year.

The localisation is already underway, according to series creator Yuji Horii (which you can see in full in the video below), but he doesn’t mince his words about the task ahead, saying there’s "an exorbitant amount of work" ahead.

At the moment, there’s no word on which formats will receive a Western release, as the game is currently available on 3DS and PS4 in Japan, with a Switch port following later this year.

The 3DS version has a slightly different style to the PS4 version, with 3D graphics on the top screen and retro sprite-based artwork on the bottom screen, with players able to toggle between the 2D and 3D art styles.

With Square Enix jumping straight to the eleventh entry in the mainline series, it now seems that any hope of a western release for Dragon Quest X, the MMORPG title that came out in 2012, has now been firmly dashed. Clearly, the localisation effort in this case was too great.

Dragon Quest remains a relatively niche series in the west, but 2010’s Dragon Quest IX: Sentinels of the Starry Sky for the Nintendo DS did much to improve the franchise’s standing in the UK, selling over 1m units in Europe and the US by the end of Nintendo’s fiscal year 2010.