Gaming What happened to?

[Drizzt Do'urden]

I really have one big question to ask about, but I'd also like to use this forum for Q&A about where games/series went.

For example I have a question about the Dragon Warrior series. It was a good series for its time. The first three titles made it to the U.S.A. for the NES (though the second one was almost impossible to find) I got addicted to it back in the eighties/early nineties and then it just dropped off the face of the earth. Until a couple years ago I found Dragon Warrior 7 for the PS 1. Did the others not make it to the states, or were the creators just trying to #$%% me off?

[Jonexe]

None of the other Dragon Warrior games made it to the states.

However, you can find 4, 5, and a I believe 6, on the Super Nintendo; and I know for a fact that 5 has a translation floating around.

If you can't find them under Dragon Warrior, try looking under Dragon Quest.

[Morpheus]

Look for emulators. While I personally don't use them, you can bypass the law by using a system that makes absolutely no money anymore.

Also, Dragon Warrior 8 comes out this year. It took a long time, but it's looking good. All Hail Enix!!! All Hail Enix!!!

[Semjaza]

Actually, the first [i]four[/i] Dragon Warrior/Quest titles were released here for the NES. I own all of them. Dragon Warrior 4, however, did not sell very well... likely because it was near the end of the NES's life and was barely advertised. As such, it wasn't really considered that heavily for release once the sequels came out on the SNES.

5 an 6 on the Super Famicom were totally ignored by Enix here. There weren't even rumors of their release. It's a shame since 5 is largely considered the best in the series by Japanese fans and 6 was pretty damn good too. As mentioned, the only way you can play either of these here as of right now are ROMs with fan translations. Some time after, Enix actually completely closed its US offices. Any Enix game afterwards that was released was published by other companies (like Star Ocean: Second Story by Sony).

After that, Eidos released the Game Boy game Dragon Warrior Monsters here, which is kind of more related to Pokemon than anything. Enix started up their US distribution company again around this time and released Dragon Warrior I&II for the Game Boy. It's the same as the original games, but with better graphics and cutscenes.

They then released the next wave of Dragon Warrior Monsters titles and Dragon Warrior III for the GBC. I've not played the former, but the latter is probably my favorite game on the Game Boy Color.

I didn't expect Dragon Quest 7 to be brought here, but it was. Good game. Definitely not the best in the series, but I did enjoy it. It's ugly as hell outside of the awesome enemy animations, but yeah.

After that, Enix had plans to release the Playstation remake of Dragon Quest 4 here. However, Heartbeat, the Japanese company responsible for the remake, wound up disbanding. Apparently they coded the game in such a way that it was just too much work to translate it and insert the English text without them. The project was cancelled.

Since then, Enix and Square have obviously teamed up. Dragon Quest 8 hit Japan not too long ago. It has a graphics engine done by the same team who did Dark Cloud 2 (Enix always outsources different parts of DQ for whatever reason). Square-Enix has made numerous comments about how they want to bring this series to the states and popularize it again... but I don't know of any specific release date as of yet.

That's about all there is to say.