Hot off the heels of Microsoft’s Minecraft Earth announcement, Square Enix has revealed its own Dragon Quest Walk for iOS and Android.
DQ Walk is being developed by the mobile developer Colopl, and is due out in Japan sometime during 2019. It is a location services-based game where players can take quests from landmarks, talk to townsfolk, buy equipment, and fight monsters as they walk. You can also build your own room, decorating it with the furniture and items you obtain on your adventure.
This augmented reality game, like Minecraft before it, harkens back to the enormous global success of Pokemon Go. Go demonstrated the power of AR games by earning over $1.8 billion in revenue for developer Niantic, and is still receiving updates today. DQ Walk’s trailer takes cues from Go’s exciting first reveal trailer, sacrificing any details of normal play for a bunch of funny shots of iconic monsters in the real world. At the Dragon Quest Walk announcement event, Dragon Quest series executive producer Yuu Miyake also mentioned that they are not yet ready to talk about Dragon Quest XII, but preparations are being made.
Luckily, it sounds like we won’t have to wait long to see what Dragon Quest Walk is really like. A closed beta test for 10,000 iOS and 10,000 Android users will begin on June 11. Plans for North American localization have not been announced at this time.