Dragon Quest Treasures dev on game’s origins, Dragon Quest Monsters not dead

Dragon Quest Treasures producer Taichi Inuzuka spoke to Japanese magazine Famitsu in this week’s issue about the origins of the game as well as the future of the Dragon Quest Monsters series.

Inuzuka described the new title as a “reboot” of sorts after feeling that Square Enix “put in everything we could think of” for Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker 3 Professional. The team became interested in the concept of using an open-world and went from there. Some fans will be happy to hear assurance from Inuzuka that Dragon Quest Treasures doesn’t mean the Dragon Quest Monsters series is over.

Here’s our translation of the interview excerpt:

This game’s title is Dragon Quest Treasures, becoming its own separate thing instead of receiving the “Dragon Quest Monsters” mantle. Why did this game become a completely new work?

While we called this the latest entry in the DQ Monsters series when we first announced this game, when Dragon Quest Monsters: Joker 3 Professional was released in February 2017, we felt satisfied that we had put in everything we could think of. Therefore, we decided to try and reboot the series here, and began work on this game.

And then began the process of trial and error.

We were very interested in open-world games at the time, and we first tried thinking about what we could do by combining DQ and an open world setting. At this point, we asked Akira Toriyama for designs of Erik and Mia. While we didn’t have a complete concept yet, we decided to make them the main characters.

From there, did you advance towards a “treasure hunting” direction?

You could say that. The definition of open-world was still unrefined in my head, but “treasure hunting” fits Erik and Mia, so we decided to make the game revolve around that. At that point, since “gathering monsters” became a secondary gameplay element, the title was changed from “Monsters” to “Treasures (temporary)”.

So this game isn’t an evolution of DQ Monsters, but a spin-off?

It’s not really a spin-off either. It might be closer to DQ Heroes or DQ Builders as a completely new game. But, the release of this game doesn’t mean the end of the DQ Monsters series, so please don’t worry.

Dragon Quest Monsters has had a strong presence on Nintendo platforms going back to the original title for Game Boy Color. However, the more recent entries have not been localized and remained only in Japan.

Dragon Quest Treasures is now available on Switch.

Translation provided by SatsumaFS and Simon Griffin on behalf of Nintendo Everything.