Dragon Quest IX looks amazing
 

It pains me to know I won't be able to play this game until next year at the earliest, with the way Square does localisation these days.

I'm kinda worried about the whole "fruits come out from the happiness of humans" thing, though. I would hate it if I had to kill 9 slimes and 15 sabercats as one of the missions.

Is it still sub-titled Hand of the Heavenly Bride?

...See, I'm not sure if I'm looking forward about this because I generally don't like the battle system in dragon quest. So unless it's changed somehow ( Like actually showing the characters all the time ) I'd probably not get it.

That's DQV. This is Protectors of the Starry Sky.

Uhh yea, I knew that.

Damn, I'm off today.

See, a lot of that was always the limitations of the systems, like early Game Boy and GBC stuff. The amount of effort it would have taken to show the party members just was not worth it in comparison to designing the rest of the game. That's why Pokemon was so different from other Game Boy RPGs. The limitations forced them to choose where to put the focus. Now that we have better technology, it would be possible to do something much flashier, but they might not just to keep the line consistent.

I don't understand!
 

But Dragon Quest was originally for the NES/Famicom. Then the Super Famicom. In fact, the first portable system they showed up on was the Gameboy Color in 1999. Final Fantasy has shown that it is perfectly possible to show the characters during a fight on the NES. I think it has more to do with being similar to western RPG's of the time.

In DQVIII the party would show during many attacks but generally not during the attack selection process. If I recall. I expect it to be about the same.

It sounds like Dragon Quest is not the series for you.

At least try DQV, though.

Again, it's about where the focus went. Can you honestly say the NES had anywhere near the capability of modern technology? Hell, it pretty much IS a Game Boy Color. XD Both rely heavily on 4-color palettes, both have chip music, etc. And I'm probably being generous.

Really, looking at the NES FF games, and I have, a lot, the content gets a lot more limited as graphics storage increases. They used a lot of nifty tricks to get past a lot of the engine limitations, but it still boils down to the fact that sprites take storage space.

I'm not saying by any means that I'm a Dragon Quest expert, but what I've seen of the series involves a lot of different classes to choose from and become, monster breeding, and a host of other things that take up space, varying by the title. Really, no, there's no reason DQ can't become more like FF. On the other hand, DQ, in Japan, is a MUCH more popular series, and guess who the Japanese are primarily selling the product to? It's not the greatest idea to mess with a popular product, especially when that product has a completely different feel compared to its competitors.