Dragon Quest IX Fever About to Spread Across Asia
It's only a month until the RPG hits Japanese DS's.
Does this girl, a 21-year-old named Kanoko who hails from lovely Kanagawa prefecture, look like she knows a lot about video games...or about much of anything else, for that matter? You'd be surprised. When Famitsu caught her in the Harajuku district of Tokyo and reminded her that Dragon Quest IX is due out in a month in Japan, Kanoko gushed that she "was so addicted to DQ" that she "filled a notebook with strategy" with her mother and sister.
Kanoko is one of the
estimated four to five million people in Japan that will likely buy DQ9 when it hits stores July 11. Like most Dragon Quests, it's had a rocky development road. Originally announced December 2006, its debut and choice of hardware (the Nintendo DS) were a source of major consternation for Japanese gamers, with 46% of them saying the portable platform was not "the right choice" for the series in an early-2007 Famitsu.com poll.
Of course, since then, the Nintendo DS has become by far the most popular console platform in Japan, and gamers seem largely over the shock.
In a poll of 1000 soon-to-be DQIX buyers (the results of which are in this week's print version of Famitsu), 71.7% of respondents said they already owned at DS, and 21.8% said they were planning to buy a DS alongside the game when it hits stores, the remaining 6.5% presumably mooching off their friends or whatever.
Famitsu asked these thousand gamers all kinds of odd questions, the answers to which are equally interesting. 30.7% of pollees plan to play DQ9 for one or two hours a day after purchasing it. When asked what they'll name their character, 56.4% said they'd use their nickname or Internet handle; 17.3% would use a name from some movie or novel they like, and 17.2% plan to just type in their own name. 26.7% said they'd be playing the co-op multiplayer with their friends. 23.9% said they wouldn't use multiplayer, and 29.6% didn't realize the feature existed at all.
DQ is nothing without its extensive job system, of course.
22.1% wanted "Fighter" to be their job, followed by the two advanced classes Magic Fighter (16.5%) and Paladin (10.5%). When asked what part of DQIX they were looking forward to the most, 63.7% were excited by the story, 45.5% by the fact it's on a portable machine, 33.1% the music, 30.1% the battles, and 29.8% the characters.