There is a version of this piece that opens with a calm, measured overview of the situation. A sensible breakdown of the facts, a few quotes from the developers, maybe a gentle conclusion about patience and trust in the process. I am not writing that piece. I am writing the piece where I stare at my screen after watching the Dragon Quest 40th anniversary stream and ask, out loud, to nobody in particular: what the fuck is actually going on here?
Let me back up.
Dragon Quest XII: The Flames of Fate was announced in 2021. A darker, more mature Dragon Quest. A game that was going to ask harder questions, take the series somewhere new, challenge the conventions that had been baked into the franchise since 1986. Yuji Horii stood on a stage and told us this was going to be something different. Fans were cautious, as Dragon Quest fans tend to be, but there was genuine excitement underneath the caution. The series was going to grow up a little. We were going to get something with teeth.
That game no longer exists.
What Square Enix announced during the 40th anniversary celebrations is a completely new title. Different name, different protagonist, different direction. Dragon Quest XII: Beyond Dreams. A young hero. Strange visions. A fresh start. The Flames of Fate has been extinguished so thoroughly that they did not even keep the subtitle. It is not a rebrand. It is not a pivot. The game that was announced four years ago has been binned and they have started again from scratch.
I want to be clear that I am not angry about this in a destructive way. I am not sitting here wishing the series harm. Dragon Quest is one of the most beloved franchises in gaming history and I have no interest in watching it fail. But I am genuinely baffled, and I think the reaction from some corners of the internet that amounts to “well they know what they’re doing, trust the process” is doing a lot of heavy lifting over a pretty significant admission.
Because this is not a small thing. A full restart of a mainline entry in one of Japan’s most important gaming franchises, years into development, with a completely different creative direction, is not a routine adjustment. Something went wrong. Maybe the original vision was not working. Maybe there were internal disagreements about what the game should be. Maybe the darker tone tested badly, or the team found themselves building something that did not feel like Dragon Quest anymore. We do not know, because Square Enix have not told us, and they almost certainly never will.
What we do have is a new title, a new protagonist with character design that has already divided people fairly sharply online, and a release window that could generously be described as “sometime before we all die.” The developers have asked for patience. Which is fine. Patience is reasonable. But patience is easier to give when you feel like you understand what you are waiting for, and right now it is genuinely difficult to know what Beyond Dreams is, what it wants to be, or how it relates to anything that was previously said about the game that came before it.
The “Beyond” thing is not helping either. Metroid Prime 4: Beyond. Dragon Quest XII: Beyond Dreams. Every game that spends long enough in development purgatory apparently now gets a colon and a vague word about transcendence. It has become its own genre at this point.
Here is where I land on it. Dragon Quest has earned a significant amount of goodwill from me. The series has an extraordinary track record and Horii has been making these games longer than I have been alive. If he says the new direction is the right one, I am willing to sit with that. The Switch 2 exists now, there is presumably a hardware target that makes sense, and maybe Beyond Dreams turns out to be something genuinely special.
But I am allowed to find the whole situation strange. I am allowed to feel a little bit of grief for the game that was promised and then quietly disappeared. And I am absolutely allowed to ask, four years on from an announcement with no release date and a completely different game in its place, what the fuck is happening with Dragon Quest XII.
Apparently even they were not sure.