More Dragon Quest games heading to mobile, including the original, very soon

The Dragon Quest series will continue to migrate to mobile with the release of the original game in September, executive producer Yuu Miyake and mobile producer Noriyoshi Fujimoto said during a translated interview at PAX Prime today.

"We are planning to release in the first part of September the first Dragon Quest," Fujimoto said. "We're hoping to release [Dragon Quest] 2 and 3 in order in a period of two or three months, in a short span. We're planning to release subsequent numbered [games] — whatever is left — we hope to release that in order as well."

The first Dragon Quest game, known as Dragon Warrior in the U.S., will be a "revamped version."

Dragon Quest 8: Journey of the Cursed King hit iOS in May, while Dragon Quest 4: Chapters of the Chosen was released earlier this month. According to Miyake, Square Enix began with Dragon Quest 8 because it was the most complicated to bring to mobile devices. The team did "a lot of testing" to figure out the best way to implement the interface and figure out how to tackle controls originally played on a console.

Dragon Quest 7: Warriors of Eden, however, will be difficult to port as well because of the sheer amount of text involved. Miyake said that the mobile games are aimed at people who have never played Dragon Quest and enjoy games on a more casual basis, as well as nostalgic players.

"We've always wanted to have [Dragon Quest] available on the most popular console or gaming machine available at the time," Miyake said. "If you look at the modern gaming scape, a lot of people play games on the mobile platform. That's why we felt Dragon Quest would be appropriate to bring to that very popular game device, [mobile]."