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The story
A thread on 5ch’s hardware/industry board (Geha) asking whether “Dragon Quest’s golden age only ran through the Famicom quartet (I-IV) and Super Famicom’s DQ5” sparked a debate over just how far the series’ run of masterpieces really extended. One theory for why development cycles stretched out from DQ6 onward was a surge in script length — pointing out that the text ballooned from roughly 2,800 pages in DQ5 to about 16,000 pages by DQ7. On the other hand, DQ7 actually set a new all-time sales record for the series, and DQ9 pushed the number even higher, putting the popular narrative that “old fans drifted away” at odds with the actual sales figures. The discussion also branched into specifics — battle balance, the quality of various remakes, and how the Builders spin-offs stack up.
What people said
Feels like they used to crank these out pretty fast before that.
And it's not like they're pouring money into cutscenes the way Final Fantasy does.
Script length:
DQ5 — 2,800 pages
DQ6 — 4,000 pages
DQ7 — 16,000 pages
No way development wraps up in the same timeframe with that much text.
What's crazy is they've cranked out this many spin-offs and only landed a hit with that one.
DQ6's soundtrack really is one of a kind.
Koichi Sugiyama's music was only great through DQ5.
My impression is a lot of old-school fans went "huh?" at 6 and 7 and drifted away.
Even though DQ7 outsold DQ3 and DQ6 outsold DQ5?
Dragon Quest Heroes is a Koei Tecmo game, though.
DQ8 → best-selling PS2 game in Japan
DQ9 → set a new all-time sales record for the series
If you go by the Famicom generation's gut feeling, the peak was around Super Famicom's DQ3, but
the numbers show the series never actually declined at all.
I'd buy it if it were a worldwide record, but this is Japan-only Galapagos syndrome. And even then it still can't beat Pokémon.
Around the time of DQ7, the Famicom generation was in their 20s to 50s,
and younger generations got pulled along with them — that's what created the golden age.
After that it's probably been a gradual decline.
Also, DQ9 only allowed one save file per copy, so I suspect its numbers are inflated by something like 1.5x from people buying extra copies.
It's not really about the numbers though.
DQ7 got absolutely panned critically.
Numbers are the best way to disprove your fantasy that old fans drifted away.
I tried to push through to the ending, but my save got wiped right before the final boss and that broke me.
No wonder DQ7 sold so well —
it was the Dragon Quest where your save didn't get erased.
When they do the HD-2D remake, they have full permission to go wild and overhaul it.
Though to be fair, the later ports did cut things like the vocational training requirements roughly in half…
Honestly I just want them to remake 2 and 3.
Nah, there are definitely parts of it that are worse than DQ3.
Then again, there's plenty it does better than DQ3 too.
DQ1 and 2 aren't even in the same league for comparison.
DQ5's spells are a bit weak too, but Echo (a recruitable monster that doubles spell effects) and Pierre somehow manage to carry it.
Spells are genuinely useful in DQ6, though.
At the very least it's a far more sane balance than DQ5, which is basically a pure physical-attack game.
Good proof of that: they milk I-III to death while barely even porting IV onward, let alone remaking them.
That's not the opinion of someone who knows DQ4 has already been remade twice — once on PS1 and once on DS.
DQ6 got its first-ever remake.
DQ4 was basically just the PS1 version as-is, wasn't it?
Was there something added post-game?
The immigrant-town mechanics changed, and a bunch of the internal formulas got tweaked here and there.
DQ7 — would've been fun if not for getting stuck collecting stone tablets.
DQ8 — genuinely fun, and the graphical leap was huge.
DQ11 — arguably the most fun in the whole series, and for a DQ game the graphical leap was impressive too.
Sales aside, I think DQ9 is really the biggest problem,
and following it up with the online-only DQ10 as a one-two punch is what really did the damage.
DQ9's StreetPass (Surechigai) treasure-sharing feature was amazing fun, though.
Both the graphics and the systems felt dated.
Gamers at the time were all obsessed with Final Fantasy V, Shin Megami Tensei, and Tengai Makyou II (Far East of Eden II).
Thinking back on it now, Shin Megami Tensei II was actually a pretty mediocre game.
Background and Key Points of This Debate
Dragon Quest’s script length has grown enormously since the Famicom era, and the figures cited in the thread — “2,800 pages for DQ5, 4,000 for DQ6, 16,000 for DQ7” — were offered as one illustration of how much the series’ development scope expanded. Indeed, release intervals widened from DQ6 onward, and the idea that growing scenario volume is one reason development dragged on is a theory fans often bring up. At the same time, DQ7 set a new all-time sales record for the series at the time, and DQ9 pushed the number even higher on the back of changes like its save-data specifications — leaving a gap between the popular narrative of “old fans drifting away” and the actual sales data. What split opinion in the thread was whether to weight nostalgia- and memory-tinted judgments of where the “masterpiece line” falls, or the hard sales and review data. One point readers can easily miss: raw sales figures alone don’t automatically indicate a “golden age” — the broadening of the fan base and shifts in the market environment are also tangled up in the picture.
※This article is excerpted and summarized from the 5ch (Hardware/Industry [Geha]) thread “Dragon Quest’s Golden Age Really Only Ran Through Famicom I-IV and Super Famicom V.”
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