Yuji Horii confirmed yesterday on the KosoKoso broadcast that there will be a Dragon Quest livestream on May 27, the franchise's fortieth anniversary, and that the next game will be part of it. The next game is, almost certainly, Dragon Quest XII: The Flames of Fate, which was first announced at the thirty-fifth anniversary and has been mostly silent for five years since. May 27 is also the date the original Dragon Quest shipped on the Famicom in 1986, which means the franchise will be exactly forty real years old when the livestream goes live.
Whatever ships on the day, the more interesting thing for me is the franchise itself, and what JRPGs at large quietly taught a generation of us about keeping a log of our own playing. I want to make a small case in this post that Dragon Quest, and the broader genre it spawned, was the first time the medium of video games made the player into a record-keeper. Not a critic. Not a leaderboard chaser. A journaler.
The save file was always a journal
Before there were tracking apps, before there were achievement systems, before there was even reliable battery memory in a cartridge, you kept a log on graph paper. The original Dragon Quest in Japan came with a small player's guide that was really just a world map and an XP table. Everything else was for you to write down. Where the slimes were softest. Where the chest in that early cave was. What the village priest had said about the stair that wasn't quite a stair. The act of playing the game was inseparable from the act of writing it.
Save files are journals too, although we mostly stopped seeing them that way. A Dragon Quest save, once they started shipping, was a snapshot of who you were when you turned the console off. The party composition you'd built over thirty hours. The town you'd most recently stopped in. The monsters you'd seen but not yet beaten. You were, every time you slid the cartridge out, leaving a small autobiography behind. The next time you booted it up, that was the version of yourself you came back to.
I think this is part of why old JRPG saves remain so affecting in a way that, say, an old multiplayer-shooter level is not. The save file is yours. Other people's games are on the other side of the disc. Your save is the only place a particular thirty-hour run of a particular game ever existed, and once you delete it, that run is genuinely gone.
What the JRPG taught us about long games
The JRPG, as a form, is one of the few genres in any medium that openly assumes you are going to be with it for a long time. Dragon Quest assumed forty hours when forty hours of anything was a lot to ask. Final Fantasy assumed sixty by the mid-90s. Persona casually books a hundred. The genre has, for most of its life, been a public holiday from the rest of entertainment's relentless need to be over with quickly.
That has consequences for how you experience the games. You play a JRPG across weeks and months, which means it ends up entangled with the actual life you lived while you played it. The way you remember Final Fantasy IX is partly the game and partly the apartment in the third year of college you played it in. The way you remember Dragon Quest XI is partly the boat you spend a lot of time on in the second act, and partly the year your kid was born and you weren't sleeping much. The game and the calendar bond. The two memories aren't actually separable any more.
Most other genres don't do this work. A first-person shooter is a weekend. An indie platformer is an evening. A roguelike is a particular Tuesday in March. Those are fine, but they don't seep into the year the way a JRPG does, because they don't ask you to keep records, and a JRPG can't help asking.
Forty years of carrying a log around
What is striking about Dragon Quest, specifically, hitting forty is that it is old enough now that the people who played the original Famicom release on graph paper in 1986 have, in many cases, been playing every entry since: the eleven mainlines, the spinoffs, the remakes, the rereleases, the Builders games, the Heroes games, Walk on their phones. There is a small but real population of human beings who have, in some sense, been keeping a forty-year journal of one franchise. Their save files are scattered across cartridges and memory cards and PSN accounts and Switch profiles and probably a paper notebook in the back of a drawer somewhere.
If you ask one of those people what the games meant, they will not, generally, give you a top-five list. They will give you something that sounds more like an autobiography. The one they played in middle school. The one they replayed in their first apartment. The one they finally finished on a long flight. The one they shared with their kid. What you are listening to, when this happens, is a person reading from a journal they did not quite mean to keep, organized by save files instead of dates.
The thing the medium has been quietly doing this whole time, since 1986, is producing those journals. The genre's contribution to gaming culture is not really the turn-based combat or the spell list. It is that it made the player's experience long enough and varied enough to be worth remembering across decades, and gave you save files as the inadequate but real artifact of that.
What got lost when the platforms got smart
Modern platforms know more about what you have played than ever, and somehow the result is that you remember less. Steam can tell you to the minute how long you played, and almost nothing else. PSN logs trophies but not feeling. Xbox tracks achievements without ever asking why you came back to the game two years later. The platforms turned the save file from a journal into a database row, and the journal part fell to the floor.
This is part of why a small but loud population of players is currently looking for, in a phrase that has become its own search term, a "Letterboxd for games." The phrase is a stand-in for the journal that the platforms used to imply and then quietly stopped delivering. People want a place where the save-file feeling, the thirty hours into a Dragon Quest is also a description of my October, can be written down somewhere that won't disappear when the platform changes hands.
This is the small space Perthro is trying to live in. We are an iPhone-first journal that tries to be patient about the way games actually arrive in your life, in big sixty-hour blocks and sometimes years apart. Reviews can be a sentence or three pages. Lists are first-class. Library import covers Steam, PlayStation, and Xbox so you do not have to retype the last fifteen years of your life into the app. The TestFlight is open, free, iOS 16 and up, with the invite at testflight.apple.com/join/XVxCdRcK. We are in beta, and the small team in Alberta reads every piece of feedback that comes back through the in-app channel.
What May 27 will probably do
On May 27, Yuji Horii will sit down on a livestream and show everyone whatever they are ready to show of Dragon Quest XII: The Flames of Fate, plus, in his words, "various other things." Some of those various other things will end up being more important than the headline reveal. That is how Dragon Quest has tended to work. The reveals nobody talks about become, ten years later, the games that the forty-year journal-keepers cite when they tell you what the franchise meant.
What is also true is that the franchise has been shaping how a lot of us learned to remember games at all. The save slot. The party portrait. The slow accumulation of a bestiary. The town theme that keeps playing while you decide whether to head north or back south. The pause on the world map at the end of a long evening when you realize, with a little surprise, that you have been playing this thing since before the leaves turned.
What I am going to do on May 27 is pour something to drink, watch the livestream, and then write a small note in my own log about whatever the new game looks like, because in 2036, when this anniversary has its own anniversary, I would like to be able to tell my future self what May 27, 2026 was like to sit through. I would like the journal of forty Dragon Quest games to keep going, even if only into a phone. The save file did its share of the work for forty years. It is our turn now.