The Success of Dragon Quest

Date: 2006 April 26 03:22

Posted by Joe

Although it's a few weeks old we haven't found anyone else that's covered it yet, the Times On-line have published an interesting article about the popular RPG Series Dragon Quest, released in the US and Europe. The article mentions that the game series was so popular that in 1988 Japanese parliament passed a motion that requires the games makers to limit new releases to school holidays, as too many schools kids were skipping school to buy it!

The article goes on to mention Yuuji Horii the creator of Dragon Quest who was originally a freelance manga story writer, and was inspired to create the game after buying his first computer.

Part of the games success is down to the regular collaborators such as Dragon Ball creator Akira Toriyama, who provides the character designs for all the Dragon Quest Games. This helps keep the game consistent through out its 20 years of releases.

The article also explains why Horii has been reluctant to release it in the UK, apparently because the game is caption based lots of the games success depends on the language you use. In Japanese Horii can phrase things to match the character on screen, but things could be lost in translation, so to avoid this voices have been added to the character captions, so the accents can emphases key character traits (the Japanese version has no voices).

Refreshingly the voice talent used for this game are British rather than American, after a lot of consideration Horii thought it would be worth the risk and hired English actors to speak in regional accents.