The Japanese release of Dragon Quest Heroes is tomorrow and, in celebration of its launch, Square Enix has announced in a blog post that the game will be coming to North America and Europe sometime this year. The game is exclusively for PlayStation 4, and it will be available for purchase both as a physical release and a digital download over the PlayStation Network. Dragon Quest Heroes is the first installment of the series that is a full-fledged, full-scale RPG. It also is the first installment to abandon the turn-based combat system.
Dragon Quest Heroes has the player assume the role of a hero faced with defeating swarms of enemies and taking down colossal monsters in order to save his world, called Erusaze, from evil- not much different from the regular fare of the franchise which has been running since 1986. The characters and monsters were designed by Akira Toriyami and the music was composed by Koichi Sugiyama as usual. Sugiyama has been connected to the series since its first installment and has created many instantly recognizable themes in his work for Dragon Quest. General director and creator Yuji Horii also continued his work on the series with Dragon Quest Heroes. Omega Force is the development team behind Dragon Quest Heroes; the team is known for their Dynasty Warriors series (which has been continued with the recent release of Dynasty Warriors 8: Empires) and is a subsection of Koei Tecmo. Until 2005, Dragon Quest was published as Dragon Warriors in the West.
More details about the localization of Dragon Quest Heroes are promised to be forthcoming, hopefully including an official release date soon. The game is also being released for PlayStation 3 in Japan, but it appears that version will not be making its way over the ocean. If you want to check out some of the visuals, characters, and mechanics of the game, see the recently released Japanese opening movie below or the gameplay video for PS4 below that.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UK2nI4oDhtM