Dragon Quest (Series) Archive

While doing research yesterday, I found the localization development logs for Dragon Quest VIII: Journey of the Cursed King on The Cutting Room Floor. The logs are fascinating because you can see the back-and-forth between the people working on the project. Here’s an example of the devs trying to come up with a good description for a weapon while keeping it within the 18 character limit:

//敵を眠らせる武器
// ALTJ, jul12: I don’t like this wording, but “A weapon that puts enemies to sleep” is way over the limit.
// ALTJ, jul20: This appears to refer to the dream blade.
// WILL, jul22: How about the more ambiguous, “a sleepy weapon”? Or is that too obscure? Or even “a boring weapon”!!!??? It might make people think!
// MORGAN, jul25: I really don’t like “sleeper”. I would prefer “a sedative sword”, “a tiring weapon”.
// ALTJ, jul27: Changed.
a tiring weapon

You can find the whole log over here! It’s pretty long, so I recommend reading it during some lunch breaks or something~

Work on our Funky Fantasy IV book is starting to wrap up and hopefully it’ll be sent off to the printers early next week. I spent some time recently getting some last-minute images, one of which was an example of tiny kanji in a Japanese video game. My hunt led me to Dragon Quest X for the 3DS, which had some text size issues from day 1.

Luckily I have a Japanese 3DS and a capture card installed, so I just had to find where to get this tiny text to appear… and hope that updates since the last few years didn’t fix the problem. After many surprises and frustrations, I managed to get exactly what I wanted: a screen full of teeny tiny kanji!

On an actual, normal 3DS it’s quite a bit harder to read than these photos make it seem. I’m not sure why that is, maybe it’s because these pics are so hi-resolution. In any case, as soon as I got my screenshots I stopped playing the game even though I was like 10 hours in and spent a chunk of money buying the time to play that far. It was a neat little game but I would never ever recommend playing it on 3DS! The streaming graphics look horrible a lot of the time, and it sounds like they’re gonna drop 3DS support in a few months anyway.