Dragon Quest Series Producer Leaves Square Enix After 13 Years

Best of luck. That has to be an amazing bucket list get, to work on something you grew up on.

That's a big loss, all the best to him in his future work. I have a bad feeling he's gonna end up at Tencent or some similar place...

Yess everything can happen.

Impressive legacy.
But this leaves room for something new. The DQ series series needs a breath of fresh air.

Dragon Quest Swords was his first project huh? That was a fun wagglefest for the Wii, but it grew tiresome pretty quickly. Almost got to the end, but at some point a boss encounter was too hard and I really didn't exactly feel like grinding in a game where the entire gameplay was just waggling the Wii Remote lol. Still oozing with that DQ brand of charm in its English script though.

Love this series so much, I wish it was more popular here in the West.

Weird how we never got Dragon Quest Heroes 1 & 2 localised (on Switch)

Wish him the best of luck, working on Dragon Quest games, spinoffs not mainline, should look good on his resume at least.

May he go on to help make new legends! God speed.

@ActionPanther From what I've heard, it ran poorly on Switch, so my guess is they decided it wouldn't really be worth trying to sell a port with technical issues in a market where DQ is already really niche.

Good, I hope they use this opportunity to completely revamp Dragon Quest. It would be great to see what a new art direction and composer could add to this series. They pretty much perfected the formula with XI so it would make sense to see some kind of transition now.

@PinderSchloss They’re hardly going to go with a new art direction. Akira Toriyama’s art is intrinsic to Dragon Quest. If they changed it, it would just be a different fantasy RPG series.

As for a revamp and experimentation, that’s what the spin-offs are for. DQ has always done lots of different things. The mainline games are where they go back to the core.

I’d bite your hand off for a new composer, though!

Dragon Quest is one of the games nobody will ever understand. The game is mediocre, the writing is subpar, the music is horrible, yet this is supposedly one of the best series ever created

@ReaperMelia Ah, that's makes sense then

@Krull The old composer passed away, so it's pretty safe to assume we're getting a new one.

@ReaperMelia Yep, well aware that Sugiyama has gone - but my fear is that they just keep going back to the well and give us nothing but his old tunes. TBH, even if they do get someone new in, I suspect it will be like most composers following John Williams in the Star Wars universe - they’ll try to sound like the original. Dragon Quest needs the equivalent of a Ludwig Goransson, who’ll go their own way.

@Krull I remember hearing that the guy who was essentially Sugiyama's apprentice has different ideas regarding the use of orchestral music at the very least, so if they go with him, I'd imagine we'll see some differences.

@Princess_Lilly did you simply comment to be as negative as possible

if you don't get it, you don't get it

@ActionPanther it probably wouldn't have run well, which is why dqxis happened. maybe too much of an investment

@jun_ wow that's a pretty old post.

Well, it does seem like it's kinda negative, but I did not write it to spoil anyone's fun. If someone likes DQ, I think it's great!

The main reason I brought that up was that the series doesn't really seem to show much for itself when compared to masterpieces like FF, Chrono Trigger, Atelier series, etc. And it's one of the few RPGs where music isn't just not great, it's actually disturbing, who in their right mind puts midi trumpets to overworld theme. And yet people claim the series to be legendary.

Again, if you like it, I'm all for it, who am I to tell you how to have fun. I just wondered why it didn't click for me so hard when I tried DQ7 and 8

@Princess_Lilly Half of it is how basic the gameplay is, the other half is the story beats, really. The music is a common complaint even inside of the game's circles, so it's pretty normal to not entirely like it.