Sequels to the franchise are always released locally on Saturdays, which according to the company is to prevent the predictably huge turnout of fans from skipping school or work during launch days to pick them up. It's worth noting that the franchise was always punny in Japanese, it's just that puns don't translate well and prior to VIII the English versions mostly just discarded them entirely rather than trying to come up with equivalent English puns. The localizers also love to use puns, something that's a bit of a bother to some fans, and another selling point to others. Similarly, the US releases of Dragon Quest IV, V, VI and IX on the DS and VII on the 3DS are using regional dialects - there's a Russian town, a Scottish town, etc etc. The English localization of Dragon Quest VIII was notable for its solution to the regional accent issue: many of the characters speak in British dialects rather than American ones. Mostly due to the historical prevalence of console gaming over PC gaming in Japan, most parodies of RPGs that show up in Anime that aren't MMORPGs, will reference Dragon Quest in some way. The actual developer of the series is Yuji Horii (the proper creator of the series, who has been in either a directorial or upper production role of every entry in the series to this day) and his studio Armor Project, which had long since established an exclusive publishing contract with Enix from back during the NES days - a deal which naturally carried over into the merger with Squaresoft.ĭragon Quest is said to be inspired by earlier RPGs such as Ultima and Wizardry, as well as Yuji Horii's earlier Visual Novel Adventure Game The Portopia Serial Murder Case.

Interestingly, unlike its rival series, Dragon Quest, though carrying the Enix name up until the merger, is not an in-house project, as Enix is purely a publishing house. Most of its tropes, especially the battle screen, have been kept intact over the years. While never as popular in the US as the Final Fantasy series (but even more popular than Final Fantasy in Japan since the companies merged, needless to say, Square Enix owns the Japanese RPG scene), it's notable for its character art by Akira Toriyama (the same man behind Dragon Ball), and maintains a sizable cult following. Before their merger, Dragon Quest was to Enix what Final Fantasy was to Square. Absurdly popular in Japan, fairly obscure outside (at least compared to its more popular counterpart).

Often credited as the first turn-based battle console JRPG in history. A long-running fantasy JRPG franchise with eleven main installments, and dozens of side and spin-off games.

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