Last year, Square Enix released a 3DS remake of Dragon Quest 7 in Japan, and if you’re expecting them to bring it to the West then you’re unfortunately mistaken. According to the company’s mobile producer, Noriyoshi Fujimoto, the issue with localizing Dragon Quest 7 is its text, meaning, it’s too wordy.
“In terms of [ Dragon Quest 7 ] , it has a lot of text to go through and translate, and we’ve received so many requests and so much positive feedback about the game, but unfortunately, we have to consider the cost and the manpower needed to handle the sheer load of text,” said Fujimoto.
It’s hard to imagine that a PS1 game would have so much more text compared to the latter entries like Dragon Quest 8 , which also featured voice acting. Even had to axe the voice-acting to fit onto mobile devices, so putting that into perspective, Dragon Quest 7 must have ate copious amounts of memory with its text.
Fortunately, Fujimoto claimed that Square Enix is still eager to localize the PS1 classic. “We really want to do it, but right now, we need to hammer out what kind of resources we’d need to do it. We say this a lot, but, we can’t seem to get to the point where it’s justifiable,” said Fujimoto.
You can find an English translation of Dragon Quest 7 for PS1, although it might not hold up to Square Enix’s new, costly standards.
[ Polygon ]