We have some interesting new rumors about the upcoming Dragon Quest HD-2D release.
All of this comes from Midori, and it follows Square Enix’s official announcement yesterday.
Midori says that the title will be shown at this year’s Nintendo Direct. And yes, that means that this will be one of those games that Nintendo has promised are still coming to the original Switch. This should really be expected, in any case; the two Octopath Traveler games were released on the Switch, and there aren’t any issues with releasing another game in that scale on the platform.
Midori also says that the game is releasing by the end of this fiscal year, so we can tag this one as possibly one of the big releases of the year. Midori may have been told by her sources that Square Enix is looking at the fiscal year, but obviously, Square Enix will want to get this out in time for the holidays. And the real ideal timing would not be the period between Christmas to New Year’s, but the period from Thanksgiving to Cyber Monday.
But, it’s Midori’s last rumor that’s the real big one.
Midori thinks that Dragon Quest HD-2D won’t just be Dragon Quest III, but will actually have the full Roto Trilogy. And the Roto Trilogy, invariably referred to as the Loto Trilogy or Erdrick Trilogy, counts the first three Dragon Quest games.
So, we already talked about the possibility that this title would bring together the whole trilogy, and not just the third game. While these games became incredibly big in the process of Enix learning how to program games for the Famicom/NES back in the day, they are obviously dwarfed by modern RPGs, even action RPGs like Final Fantasy XVI, today.
So it would have been a no-brainer for Square Enix to bundle the whole series together. But there is something we hadn’t brought up yesterday that could be a possibility.
As you may remember, the announcement did not actually show the titles for Dragon Quest 1 to 3. That may be because the Octopath Traveler team, which was comprised of Creative Studio 11, as well as external studio Acquire, designed this as an original new remake, making a single game out of the story of all three games.
So this might be Square Enix diverging from how they handled the Final Fantasy Pixel Remaster, but maybe that’s for the best. This remake may come with QOL improvements in the gameplay front, but it may also have a better unified narrative across three generations of heroes. And who knows if we’ll have some more story added in to tie it all together with the official canon?
Dragon Quest HD-2D will be coming to PlayStation, Xbox, Nintendo Switch, and PC via Steam.
