Dragon Quest producer Ryutaro Ichimura left Square Enix because it was prioritizing “safe” or “copycat” games

Dragon Quest producer Ryutaro Ichimura said he left publisher Square Enix because the company was prioritizing “safe” projects.

Ichimura joined Enix in 2000 and spent most of his career working on the Dragon Quest series, progressing to producer on Dragon Quest 8: Journey of the Cursed King and Dragon Quest 9: Sentinels of the Starry Skies.

But as the developer told ReHacQ, he ended up leaving because “to put it bluntly, [Square Enix] was copying others.”

“In DQ 2, you had a three-person party, in DQ 3 you could change jobs, in DQ 4, party members could fight using AI. Each entry pushed the series forward, both through the evolution of game mechanics and by leveraging the latest hardware of the time,” Ichimura said (as transcribed and translated by Automaton).

According to Automaton’s reporting, Ichimura felt Dragon Quest was a “leader” in the RPG space, and he was keen to “build something from zero.” But with spiralling costs, the producer felt Square Enix was less willing to innovative and instead focused on its tentpole franchises or “pakuri kikaku” — copycat projects — like the Minecraft-like Dragon Quest Builders, or Pokémon Go-inspired Dragon Quest Walk.

When Square Enix wouldn’t greenlight an idea for “game in which players could learn about wordbuilding and story structure through gameplay, and then build their own Sragon Quest-style games,” Ichimura left.

Ryutaro Ichimura formed PinCool, a new NetEase Games-funded development studio, in May 2023.