Thursday, February 4, 2021

Why did Nintendo bother publishing Dragon Quest 1 in late 1989 when they could have just skipped it and localized Dragon Quest 3?

Hear me out...

Dragon Quest 1 was first released in May of 1986.

Dragon Quest 3 was first released in February of 1988.

Dragon Warrior 1 got its North American localization in November of 1989.

Dragon Quest 3 is a vastly superior game to the first 2 and far more competitive with Phantasy Star (whose western release has been in December of 1988) and with CRPGs in terms of its mechanics, narrative, and aesthetics.

Moreover, 21 months is an abundant amount of time to localize a game (Phantasy Star took 13 months), so we can presume that going with Dragon Quest 3 would not have led to any delays.

At a time when games were improving very rapidly, what benefit did Nintendo get from publishing and putting a major marketing push behind a game that was older than Zelda and nearly as old as Super Mario Brothers when they had (from my vantage point) a far better alternative available?

submitted by /u/GritBusters
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* This article was originally published here

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