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While shaken as a nation, quite well battered as individuals, Japan and specifically Square Enix are not about to give up and walk away. Even in the midst of disaster, the company is sending news out worldwide for gamers, with more to come in the following weeks. Here's what is up right now for the gaming megalith.

The best-selling Dragon Quest game of all time, DQIX, managed to move 5.3 million units worldwide as of the end of December of last year; that's nearly ten percent of the sum of all Dragon Quest sales, which I suppose makes sense, given that there have been almost ten of them (some with a few re-releases, of course). It's the first game in the series to cross the 5 million mark, though, and one has to compare that with the massive 9.8 million number of Final Fantasy VII for a benchmark.

In other news from the Enix side of the house, it appears that the sequel to the game released as Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime in the west will be coming for the Nintendo 3DS. There's no annoucement for the US or Europe as yet, but it looks like it will be coming to Japan before the end of this year. It's going to have a lot of action at sea, a change of pace from the tank battles of the second game (the one we got here).

The demo for Duodecim is out in North America this week; hilariously, the demo for Europe was also announced - two days before the launch of the full game. Enjoy!

If you've been interested in Final Fantasy Type-0 since the last time we talked about it, we hope to have more news next week. According to andriasang, Famitsu will have a new preview in their issue next Thursday. If the translators get to work, we could have some new info in time for tidbits next week. Wouldn't that be lovely? I missed this somewhere along the way, but it looks like there might be a playing card theme to the names of many of the twelve main characters: Rem, Machina, Cinque, Seven, Trey, Eight, Nine, Jack, and Queen.

Finally for this week, if you're a Canadian looking for work, Squenix might have something for you next year. Eidos Montreal, home of the new Deus Ex, is still in play, but apparently the company is in talks with several provinces for a new studio in the Great White North. Way too early to know what games the company might be thinking for this new location.

Source: andriasang, Joystiq

100% of the reason why DQ IX is the biggest-selling DQ game - it's on the DS. This is not a knock on DQ IX or the DS or the development team or anything else, but it's the truth.

I'm intrigued by a Rocket Slime sequel. This new one is supposed to involve slime pirates with pirate ship battles instead of tank battles (which R51 alluded to). Rocket Slime is goofy, colorful, and fun, but a little on the easy side. Nothing wrong with giant slime tanks chucking swords, shields, bombs, and arrows at each other, though. Qualifies as dumb, cheap fun.

I had heard that Type-0 was always going to be a card game, even back when it was called Agito XIII. I own a PSP but usually avoid video game / card games. I'll keep an eye on this one.

This post has been edited by laszlow on 18th March 2011 15:28

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I wonder, does FFVII's 9.8 million sales account for the Playstation Network sales? If not, how much has it sold there?

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Praise Be To Helix!

I would suggest Googling the answer to that, as I don't plan to. Let us know what you find.

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"To create something great, you need the means to make a lot of really bad crap." - Kevin Kelly

Why aren't you shopping AmaCoN?

Quote (Rangers51 @ 18th March 2011 16:16)

I would suggest Googling the answer to that, as I don't plan to. Let us know what you find.

I don't know, I'll check. PSN may be like iTunes, which doesn't give out sales information, which drives me crazy. But I'll look it up.

Edit:

Apparently, it's now sold over 10 million, including PSN sales, as of May 2010. So the benchmark is getting higher.

This post has been edited by BlitzSage on 18th March 2011 21:42

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Praise Be To Helix!