Dragon Quest XI Producers Talk About Why Voice Acting Was Added

Dragon Quest XI director Takeshi Uchikawa, and producers Hikari Kubota and Hokuto Okamoto recently sat down for an interview, where they talked about the PC port of the game, why voice acting was added, as well as why Camus’ name was changed. [Thanks, RPG Site!]

Here are the highlights:

RPG Site: The Japanese release of Dragon Quest XI did not contain any voice acting, but this new western release does. What lead to the decision to add English voice acting?

Hikari Kubota, assistant producer: There’s a couple of aspects that lead to this decision. One is the main Dragon Quest games that released in Japan did not have voice acting, and that’s what the Japanese audience is used to. Additionally, Yuji Horii (Dragon Quest XI’s lead writer) often changes the scenario and story up until the very last minute and tries to do all these things to make it better and develop it further. That means that there isn’t a lot of time to do recording and we want to get the game out to Japanese players as quickly as possible. Keeping the voice acting out helps to get the game finished more quickly. However by the time it came to the US, everything with the script was already finalized and there weren’t going to be anymore last-minute story changes. So that was why we decided to go ahead and put the voice acting in the English version.

Final Fantasy XV had mod tools created specifically for the PC version of that game. Can we expect any sort of official PC specific additions for Dragon Quest XI?

Hokuto Okamoto, producer: “We hadn’t really considered doing that.”

Kubota: “Originally with XV, the PC version was released later than the console version but with Dragon Quest XI, both the console and PC version will be released at the same time so generally they will have the same content.”

What is the status of the Switch version of Dragon Quest XI?

Okamoto: “We’re making it! We keep getting asked, but we’re still making it. It’s going well.”

Why were some characters names changed in the western release? For example, Camus was changed to Erik in the western version.

Kubota: “Dragon Quest is a game in which even in translation we try to give a different feel to each of the worlds. Kind of a different regional feel, so that’s where changing the names started because obviously in different places and different languages, it’s going to feel differently. In order to keep that, we decided to change some of the names.

Because there’s so many different areas and regions within the game, each one has been given a very strong regional feel to it. Specifically, in the case of Camus to Erik, it’s because we wanted him to seem Scandinavian. To Japanese people, the name Camus comes across as Scandinavian but that’s obviously not going to work for English speakers so we decided on Erik. It wasn’t just off the cuff. We wanted it to seem like his name matched the region he was from.”

You can read the full interview here.

Dragon Quest Heroes XI: Echoes of an Elusive Age will come to the PlayStation 4 and PC in North America and Europe on September 4, 2018.