 We have reported on this game once before, and we will no doubt report on it over and over again! This is Dragon Quest Shonen Yangus to Fushigi no Dungeon, a title I have translated as "Dragon Quest: Young Yangus and the Mysterious Dungeon." That's a good enough title for it to be released in English under. You may know that Torneko, the fat merchant from Dragon Quest IV, also had his own game. That game was developed by Chun Soft, who then went on to make a living out of making games about swarthy, bulky people getting lost in mysterious dungeons.
Torneko's popularity was a surprise. Yangus, the fat bandit from Dragon Quest VIII, was popular for reasons the writers (and the character designer, Akira Toriyama), no doubt understood from the start. Well, now he has his own Mysterious Dungeon to explore, and the game is shaping up well, with neat graphics and cut scenes. However, many corners of the internet are quietly disappointed. To wit, my big brother (and something of a mysterious dungeon hero candidate himself), games journalist extraordinaire Christian Nutt, says, in a blog entry, "NO THANKS." Perhaps the most important part of that blog entry is a comment by me, wherein I say,
Yangus is a simple guy, and I'm guessing his youth is a simple story. His introduction to world-saving stardom comes when he's old enough to have chest hair while attempting to rob travelers crossing a bridge; he probably comes from a background that more closely resembles "attack the dungeon, kill the monster, get the money, and run out screaming" than, say, the opera house in Final Fantasy VI. Furthermore, you know, the FND style of play could be done well. It would end up feeling like a perfect blend of RPG and hot sports franchise. Maybe!
Well, the point in this is that it was revealed today that the developer who handled this game is none other than the bold, righteous cavia. Why this went below the radar, I don't know. It's big news now that cavia has joined AQ Interactive, a new publisher built (arguably by Square's former king Hironobu Sakaguchi) around the idea of giving small game development houses the opportunities to work with bigger budgets. Thanks to AQ, cavia will release two games for the Xbox 360 in the next two years -- an action-RPG called "Cry On" and a melee action game called "Bullet Witch." Both of them sound exciting.
It's perhaps because of cavia's recent defection to AQ that Square-Enix, a former, red-headed-stepchild-beating surrogate parent of cavia (and publisher of their excellent Drag-On Dragoon 2) isn't mentioning the name of the developers of this Yangus title. How rude. Or maybe it's because Square-Enix did little more than throw cavia scraps and take all the credit that cavia sought shelter with AQ in the first place? It's all kind of amusing.
The one laughing most loudly at the moment is probably Dragon Ball / Dragon Quest / Blue Dragon artist Akira Toriyama. Yangus will mark cavia's first and last chance to develop a game in the Dragon Quest universe, though it will be their second time developing a game based on an Akira Toriyama property. The first was a Dragon Ball Z fighter released on Nintendo DS back on December 1st, 2005. It was a pretty good game, even. However, now cavia is with AQ, together with Artoon; Artoon is developing the new Toriyama RPG potential franchise Blue Dragon. So yeah -- it's kind of . . . confusing. If cavia hadn't gone with AQ, and if Yangus ends up selling well, cavia probably would have been a candidate for developing the Dragon Quest VI remake. Oh, well.
In other news about Dragon Quest and small game developers, I will take this moment to inform you that Innocent Life, the newest chapter in the Harvest Moon series (and the first all-new game in said series in quite a while), is being developed by Arte Piazza, who handled the excellent Dragon Quest V remake for PS2 back in 2004. Innocent Life's release date was announced just today: April 27th, 2006.
Darling cavia's perhaps-masterpiece Dragon Quest: Young Yangus and the Mysterious Dungeon will be released on April 20th, 2006, for 6,800 yen.
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