Dragon Quest XII: Beyond Dreams is going to take longer than expected to come out. How long exactly? Square Enix didn’t say on a 40th anniversary livestream for the franchise, but producer Yosuke Saito did confirm that the development team decided to reboot the RPG project and “start from scratch.”
He said that the development team has been reshuffled and that while things are now progressing more smoothly, it’s going to take longer than expected to deliver Dragon Quest XII, a game fans have been waiting on since the last entry in the series arrived back in 2017. Standing alongside Dragon Quest creator Yuji Horii, Saito even confirmed that the previously revealed logo and subtitle, The Flames of Fate, would be getting completely overhauled.
“We’re hard at work on XII,” he said. “But due to a reshuffle of the team and a restart of development, it’s going to be a bit longer till it’s in your hands. Work on the original version, Dragon Quest XII: The Flames of Fate, hit a lot of hurdles along the way. But as we kept talking with Mr. Horii and pinned down what a mainline Dragon Quest game should look like, we decided to move things around and start over from scratch. It was a major decision but I believe it was the right one to ensure that the next Dragon Quest game will be one that all you fans of the series will really love.”
Dragon Quest XII 夢の彼方へ (Beyond the Dream) trailer finally debuted omg!!!!!! The graphics and everything looks BEAUTIFUL!!!!!!! 🥹 #DQXII pic.twitter.com/AO1uAEg9om
— ☆オードリーAudrey☆ (@aitaikimochi) May 27, 2026
Dragon Quest XII was announced all the way back in 2021 and promised to marry a darker tone to the normally upbeat RPG series’ traditional turn-based combat. New footage shown of the rebooted version of the game looks more like what you’d expect from the franchise, with bright colors, whimsical monsters, and characters still very much designed in the style of the late Akira Toriyama. It’ll still rely on controversial composer Koichi Sugiyama’s music as well.
Back in 2024, Square Enix essentially demoted then-top Dragon Quest producer Takashi Kiryu amid the sequel’s ongoing delays and sent him to work in the publisher’s mobile gaming division instead. The company has been attempting a larger structural pivot over the last couple of years, away from tons of middling releases to a more focused portfolio of new games, though it has yet to demonstrate if that strategic shift has been successful.
What we have gotten is a bunch of remakes and remasters of earlier Dragon Quest games. While they’re no substitute for a new entry, most of them have been pretty great.