TheKingsCrown said:
I'm a business booster more than a Nintendo booster. I guess we'll see who is right: If DQIX is, sometime in the future, announced for Wii and we don't see changes to the game that take advantage of the Wii (besides just menu stuff), I'll accept a permanent ban.
Hey, look, I'm not trying to get you banned or to engage in one of those silly bets this forum's so obsessed with.
I'm just saying you're wrong.
You're wrong when you say Dragon Quest is in need of any kind of serious change or overhaul, when the series thrives on sustaining a sense of traditionalism. Japanese consumers probably wouldn't even be able to accept many of the slightest, minor
cosmetic changes that were made to Dragon Quest VIII for American fans, such as the redone menu system.
You're wrong when you say that Square Enix likely thinks it needs any of the ludicrous things you suggest, such as real-time combat or wiimote-waving spellcasting. Square Enix has never shown anything other than full confidence in the ability of Yuji Horii to personally manage this series, and he's going to keep running it the same way he always has -- by letting Dragon Quest be Dragon Quest. Spinoffs are well and good, and Horii will continue to allow experimentation through those (seriously, I think the game you want and should be looking forward to is Dragon Quest Swords), but the actual series? Not going to change. No push for it to change. No desire for it to change.
And you're wrong when you suggest that shifts the market is undergoing will in some way necessitate any kind of overhaul in the Dragon Quest series. Certainly new consumers are being brought in, and some things that were once popular are declining in popularity. But anyone with a serious eye towards the Japanese market can also see that the value of traditionalism is as strong as ever -- look no further than the successes of Final Fantasy III, or Tales of Destiny R, or Pokemon Diamond/Pearl, or New Super Mario Bros.
Dragon Quest will always be Dragon Quest, until the three men who have maintained exclusive control over every aspect of the eight main series installments are all dead.
Now, Dragon Quest IX may well appear on the Wii -- it's likely to have a very significant Japanese userbase, and that's a key point; it allows Square Enix to better leverage its franchises between the different hardware manufactuers, to force some level of equalization between them and increase Square Enix's influence in the market; it's a fairly low development cost platform where there wouldn't be any expectation for huge graphical achievements, something the next DQ isn't going to attempt to deliver no matter what console it calls home. But if it does, it's still going to be the same old
Dragon Quest, just as Super Smash Bros. Brawl is going to use the classic controller. A DQIX Wii might use limited wiimote motions for menu navigation and the like, but I'd not be surprised if they eschewed every feature of the controller entirely.
The counterbalancing point to this is that if DQIX appears on the PS3, it's not going to be a graphical powerhouse. It's not going to be the PS3's answer to Blue Dragon. That's why I think the silly partisan wars over it are so pointless -- it'll be the same game no matter what system they put it on.
If it's announced this early, though, I'd go with PS2, under the expectation that they've likely been developing it for a while now and aren't prepared to declare DQ for either next-gen platform -- which is, I'd say, to Wii's favor, if they're that unsure of how the console war will shape out in the future.