Dragon Quest Sounds the Death Knell for the 3DS

With the release of Dragon Quest XI today on the PS4, you'd think a DQ fan couldn't be happier, but we're actually only getting half of the newest Dragon Quest game, as the 11th game in the franchise was released for not only the Playstation 4, but also for the Nintendo 3DS in Japan, and I think this is one of the signs that soon the Nintendo 3DS will flicker and fade away.

Dragon Quest XI began development on not only the Sony powerhouse that is the PS4, but it was also getting a port on the Nintendo handheld. If it seems impossible for the scrappy 3-D system to compete, you're not wrong, the 3DS port of the game had graphics made with a similar engine that was on Dragon Quest 9, which was a DS exclusive, and it also had the interesting feature of forgoing those graphics, and using a graphical style not seen in over twenty years: you could change it so the game looked like it was on the Super Nintendo. Needless to say, retro game aficionados were devastated that this version wasn't coming to America.

This begs the question though, if Nintendo and Square Enix published all the other Dragon Quest games in America, why not this one? While it's true, it would be competing with the PS4 version, and the DQ series isn't nearly as big in the US as it is in Japan, I think a more likely reason is that Nintendo is going to be abandoning the 3DS, and probably pretty soon.

With less and less games coming to the system, and all we have to look forward to is shovel-ware and ports, the Nintendo 3DS doesn't have a very bright future. While I wouldn't say that Dragon Quest XI is the most solid proof out there, it does beg the question as to why Nintendo wouldn't have tried to get it ported to America and even Europe, while Sony was stuck waiting on the game to be localized, and for voice acting to get added in. Perhaps as the sun sets on the Nintendo 3DS, with Pokemon moving on to the Nintendo Switch, America will realize just how sad it was for us not to receive the newest Dragon Quest game in handheld form.