Dragon Quest 11 Coming West Next Year

Dragon Quest 11 is out in Japan and to celebrate, creator Yuji Horii announced plans to bring it to English as Dragon Quest 11: Echoes Of An Elusive Age. There’s no word on which platforms it will hit, but publisher Square Enix says it will be out in 2018.

Yuji Horii, famed game designer of the Dragon Quest series, makes an appearance with a swarm of Slimes in tow to share some exciting news! pic.twitter.com/ytHpJyozkd

— Dragon Quest (@DragonQuest) July 28, 2017

“The game is currently being localised into five languages, including English,” Horii said. “There’s quite a lot of text, so it’s an exorbitant amount of work. But we’re doing our best and working hard to get this game to all of you as soon as possible.”

This is the eleventh mainline entry in Square’s seminal role-playing game series, which is one of Japan’s most popular franchises but has never quite caught fire in the west. The last game in the series, Dragon Quest 10, never made it to North America or Europe, in large part because it was a massively multiplayer online game. In recent years, Square Enix has found success in the U.S. with spinoffs like Dragon Quest Heroes and Dragon Quest Builders (one of last year’s surprise best games).

Dragon Quest 11 is on both PS4 and 3DS in Japan, with a Switch release to follow. Previous Dragon Quest 3DS games have been published by Nintendo in the United States and Europe.

“More details about the Western version will be revealed in [spring] 2017,” Square Enix says.