Dragon Quest Team Celebrate 40th Anniversary

Today marks the 40th anniversary of the Dragon Quest series, with the first game releasing for Famicom on this day in 1986 (in Japan, of course - it didn't come to the west until three years later). Squenix had teased an announcement video for several days beforehand, and it was assumed that like in most similar videos, there would be some mention of special events and progress on the newest mainline game, first announced five years ago.

We got something slightly different. That newest mainline game, "The Flames of Fate," is no longer a thing, and the twelfth game has apparently been restarted from scratch and is now subtitled "Beyond Dreams." It's unclear when this restart happened, or how much longer it will take for the revamped game to be released, though from the brief clips shown, it will still certainly look like one would expect a current-gen Dragon Quest game to be. One thing that is made very clear is that Yuji Horii is no longer interested in the "darker" storyline for this game, as the official translation specifically reflects him saying that the world of the new version reflects a "bright and exciting future."

One more announcement came at the end of the video - a new game in the Dragon Quest Monsters series. This one is subtitled "The Withered World," but beyond that and the platforms for which it will release (all of the usual ones), there's no detail to be had yet, including a potential release window. The entire announcement video is nine minutes long, with the first few dedicated to a quick recap of prior games, and you can watch it just below.

Source: Dragon Quest Official YouTube