Today in Japan, Square Enix held a Dragon Quest-themed press conference to mark the 30th anniversary of the series. It sucked.
Square Enix assembled the Japanese gaming press (Famitsu took the above photo) and streamed the whole thing online. People, obviously, had expectations. They were soon crushed.
At the start, Square Enix announced there wouldn’t be any new info about Dragon Quest XI made public today.
The reaction on NicoNico varied between “Wha?” and “Whaaaaaaaaaaaa?” with the occasional “hahahahahahahahaha.”
Instead, we got a bunch of info about stuff that could easily be slipped out in press releases—i.e., stuff that doesn’t need a huge press conference with the expectations that a huge press conference has.
So...Square Enix did announce the demo date for Dragon Quest Builders (January 22, heh), that DQ is getting a real-life locked-room style escape game, a kiddy card battle arcade game, and Dragon Quest Heroes II’s release date, which is May 27 of this year. May 27 is also when the first Dragon Quest game went on sale in Japan.
Universal Studios will be getting some sort of Dragon Quest collaboration. Further details will be announced at a later date.
Shrug.
Dragon Quest creator Yuji Horii thought this would be a good time to share photos of his visit to Universal Studios Japan. Probably because he didn’t have much else to share.
[Images via Jin]
Other announcements included a temporary Dragon Quest museum opening in Shibuya until this fall. More details on this later. (Of course!)
Horii said said it would be great to release Dragon Quest XI, a game we got no new info about, sometime during the game’s 30th anniversary year, which runs from May 27, 2016 to May 27, 2017. Hopes are nice, I think.
And that’s about it!
Sigh.
How did all this go down?
In the Nico Nico poll taken right after the event, 15.1 percent said the event was “not very good,” while 53.3 percent gave it the lowest rating possible, saying it “wasn’t good.” So, 68.4 percent of the viewers did not like the presentation (you typically do not see such negative numbers for these kind of events).
Fans and industry types took to Twitter:
Top image: Famitsu
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