Takeshi Uchikawa explains the lack of voice acting in Dragon Quest XI

Dengeki PlayStation magazine has an interview with the top staffs of Dragon Quest XI: In Search of Departed Time, as the anticipated game is going to be released very soon in Japan.

In this interview, the game's director Takeshi Uchikawa explained why the game does not have any voice acting, despite recent Dragon Quest spinoffs or re-releases such as the Dragon Quest Heroes series and the 3DS version of Dragon Quest VIII having them.

Dengeki : This game will not have voices, but did you decide on this since the beginning?

Uchikawa: In the dev team there was also much debate on whether to put in voices or not. Actually, there was 50-50 for both opinions. There were some who said it’d be okay with the ‘beep-beep-beep’ sounds just like the past, and there were some others who said it’d be better to have voices considering the current era. Ultimately, since this game has the subtitle ‘In Search of Departed Time’, we want to protect the existing style of Dragon Quest.

Also, if we were to have voices, the recording would take quite the time so we would have to quickly finish the script, thus making it even more difficult to change it later. This time Horii-san had a fixation to properly see through the scenario until the end, and we also wanted to take in all of Horii-san’s requests.

Dengeki : So Horii-san would tune [the script] and revise even the detailed parts of the quotes until the very end, correct?

Uchikawa: Yes. That’s why there is a meaning when we decided not to include voices in DQXI.

Dragon Quest XI: In Search of Departed Time is getting released in Japan for PlayStation 4 and Nintendo 3DS on July 29. An English localization has still yet to be announced.

In the same interview, Uchikawa, along with Yuji Horii and Yosuke Saito, also explained that they had created a prototype of Dragon Quest III on Unreal Engine 4 to help visualize the PlayStation 4 version of Dragon Quest XI. You can read more on that subject here.