If anyone remembers, Square Enix announced Dragon Quest X for the Wii way back in 2008, before the DS exclusive Dragon Quest IX had even released, in fact. Since then, the title had pretty much been MIA, and many people had in fact abandoned it as vaporware.
Well, any fears that one might have had regarding the title’s existence can now be safely quelled. At their Dragon Quest event in Japan today, Square Enix re-unveiled Dragon Quest X as Dragon Quest X: The Wake of the Five Tribes: Online (yes, the title of this game has two colons).
The game is now an MMORPG, and is going to have, you guessed it, five tribes, which I guess will be the five playable classes. According to Andriasang, the game will feature a job class system. Players will allegedly be able to create their own characters as well as weapons and accessories, if they have the proper job skills. In addition, the game reportedly has a huge story, spread across five continents.
The real kicker, however, was that the game, originally announced as a Wii exclusive, will be hitting the Wii U as well. Though Square Enix was reluctant to provide much details, they did confirm that the Wii and Wii U versions will interconnect, and that the Wii U version will ‘look prettier.’
Another important piece of information that we all got was that Dragon Quest X will be supported with post release content, making it the first game on a Nintendo system to be confirmed to have DLC support, after Iwata talked about bringing DLC functionality to Nintendo systems earlier this year. Also, apparently, the game can still be played offline, with NPCs filling in party slots in offline play, similar to how Dragon Quest IX handled offline play, apparently.
Apart from Wii and Wii U support, Square Enix also announced support for the 3DS with this title, with the use of the SpotPass function to trade characters with friends being one of the touted uses of the 3DS’s functionality.
Finally, Square Enix will be developing this game internally, a first for the long running, twenty five year old series.
We’ll have more information for you, including a release date, as and when it becomes available, but for now, it appears that Nintendo may have secured some killer software for its entire ecosystem, a game that will thrive across all current Nintendo systems.