When I was a young journalist, I had the opportunity to interview Yuji Horii at Square Enix HQ in Tokyo. This would've been around 15 years ago, and my abiding memories are the great man chain-smoking throughout the session, and getting visibly irritated when the Square Enix translator was turning his long answers into short English snippets: He prodded them to go again several times, magisterial in his smoker's cloud.
Horii seemed like a man who had all the time in the world, and was going to enjoy it. Dragon Quest fans may well agree, because they've now been waiting eight years for the next instalment in the much-beloved series, the longest gap by far between releases, with no indication of when Dragon Quest 12: The Flames of Fate may be coming, or even if it still is. The series has lost two of its key creatives since Dragon Quest 11: Akira Toriyama, Dragon Quest's main artist, died in March last year, while series composer Koichi Sugiyama died in 2021.
