Pastel meadows and poplars? Emo-parted coifs and noseless faces? Exotic creatures with body-sized tongues and waggish smiles on their mugs as they smack you and your companions around? Must be a Dragon Quest!
Dragon Quest XI, in fact, subtitled "In Search of Departed Time" (yes, that's almost surely a Proust reference). It's due out next year in Japan, and while there's no word yet on a US release, I'm knocked out by this batch of new screens, noticed by GameSpot and shared by 4Gamer.
The super-high-def ones are of the PlayStation 4 version, and they showcase what the design team's been doing with Epic Games' next-gen Unreal Engine 4. It's not the environmental complexity that's notable here—we've seen what The Witcher 3 can do—but the "quirky Dragon Quest vibe goes high-def" thing that's worth a look.
It's been more than a decade since the last console-based Dragon Quest in the West. Maybe that's because the lion's share of Dragon Quest VIII's (2004, PlayStation 2) sales were in Japan? Just a guess, but Dragon Quest IX, which did show up here, was 3DS-only, and while Dragon Quest X was additionally released on Wii, Wii U and PC, none of those versions saw light of day outside Japan.
Square Enix says it is considering Dragon Quest XI for Nintendo's next platform, codenamed NX, but it's only a lock for the PlayStation 4 and Nintendo 3DS at this point. Those are the versions you can sample below.
