If the embed won’t play, Square Enix’s trailer premiere is also here on YouTube.
Square Enix has announced a new Dragon Quest game, and its title sounds like a lost Enid Blyton novel that fell in with the Brothers Grimm: Dragon Quest RPG: The Cursed Tree and the Chosen Isle. It’s heading for iOS and Android, and so far those are the only platforms anyone has mentioned. The announcement trailer premieres on Square Enix’s YouTube channel on Tuesday 10 November at 11:00 GMT. It’s embedded above and will spring into life at the appointed hour, like a mimic that has been sitting very still in a dungeon waiting for someone to open it.
Until then, the cupboard is fairly bare. The official listing calls it “the next adventure in the Dragon Quest series”, and Japanese coverage via 4Gamer describes a command-based RPG. In Dragon Quest terms, that means menus, turn-based fights and the age-old dilemma of Fight, Spell or Flee. The Japanese title translates roughly as The Demon Tree and the Guided Isle. There’s no price, no release date and, oddly, no named developer. The credits do carry the series’ three load-bearing names: Armor Project, Yuji Horii’s company; Bird Studio, the studio of the late Akira Toriyama; and Suihyama Kobo, which looks after the music of the late Koichi Sugiyama. Whatever else happens, the slimes will look and sound right.
The words that will make a certain sort of player twitch are “iOS and Android”. Square Enix’s mobile Dragon Quest record runs from solid ports, such as the smartphone Dragon Quest VIII, to Dragon Quest Walk, a slime-flavoured cousin of Pokémon Go that has done very nicely in Japan. In between sit assorted gacha-shaped experiments whose real quest is to get you to open your wallet. Is The Cursed Tree a proper standalone adventure, or a live-service sapling with a premium currency growing on its branches? That is the question tomorrow’s trailer needs to answer, and Square Enix hasn’t said yet.
Trees, at least, are familiar ground. The series has been handing out World Tree leaves to raise fallen party members since the 1980s, so a cursed one feels like a natural promotion. Here at SFcrowsnest, we’d settle for an isle full of villagers who each say exactly one useful thing, a king who saves your game with a short lecture on your failings, and a slime or two to bounce off on the way out of town. Nobody has improved on that formula since 1986. We’ll know more at 11 o’clock on Tuesday, when the curse is lifted, or at least the trailer is.
Join the conversation (0)