Dragon Quest creator on differences between Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy

Yuji Horii, the creator of Dragon Quest, has spoken about the differences between his series and Final Fantasy.

Both IPs are juggernauts when it comes to the JRPG space. They’re now owned by Square Enix, but way back in the day, they were with separate companies. Square had Final Fantasy why Dragon Quest was with Enix.

Horii personally didn’t view Final Fantasy as “competition” for Dragon Quest. However, he did tell Game Informer that he “was definitely paying attention to it.”

Horii said the following about differences between Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy:

“Way back then, when Final Fantasy originally came out, I was definitely paying attention to it because it was something we needed to look out for. But there’s one key difference that I really saw back then: the protagonists in the Final Fantasy titles, they speak a lot. Whereas for Dragon Quest, the key objective for [the games], or the experience it offers for the player, is that the player becomes the protagonist themselves. In Final Fantasy, you kind of observe the protagonist, but you’re not necessarily becoming the protagonist in the games. So I thought that was a really interesting and stark difference between Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy, but I didn’t necessarily see them as a rival back then.”

Horii also brought up one Final Fantasy game that he’s particularly fond of. That’s Final Fantasy 10, and when we saw it for the first time, he had a “feeling this was the ultimate perfection of Final Fantasy.”