# Dragon Quest at forty, and the journal we didn't know we were keeping

**May 10, 2026 · Perthro**

Yuji Horii [confirmed on the ](https://www.gematsu.com/2026/05/yuji-horii-dragon-quest-live-stream-planned-for-may-27-to-announce-next-game)[*KosoKoso*](https://www.gematsu.com/2026/05/yuji-horii-dragon-quest-live-stream-planned-for-may-27-to-announce-next-game)[ broadcast](https://www.gematsu.com/2026/05/yuji-horii-dragon-quest-live-stream-planned-for-may-27-to-announce-next-game) that there will be a *Dragon Quest* livestream on May 27, and that the next game will be part of it. The date is the Dragon Quest 40th anniversary: the original game shipped on the Famicom on May 27, 1986. The next game is almost certainly *Dragon Quest XII: The Flames of Fate*, which was announced at the [35th anniversary](https://www.gamesradar.com/games/dragon-quest/dragon-quest-12-the-flames-of-fate-isnt-canceled-despite-the-lack-of-updates-confirms-series-creator-yuji-horii-who-says-the-team-is-working-hard-on-the-jrpg/) and has barely surfaced in the five years since.

We'll be watching. What we've been thinking about this week, though, is the series rather than the reveal, and how much of the habit of keeping track of games goes back to long JRPGs like this one.

## What to expect from the Dragon Quest 40th anniversary stream

Horii said the stream will cover the next game and "various other things." That's all we have, and we're not going to guess at a trailer. With a series this old, the smaller announcements on a day like this sometimes turn out to matter more than the headline, but that's a pattern you only see in hindsight.

## The save file was the first game journal

Early JRPG players kept notes by hand. Where the chest in that first cave was. Which area had enemies you could handle at your level. What a villager said about a staircase that didn't look like one. Playing and writing things down happened together.

Save files carried on that job once they arrived. A *Dragon Quest* save holds the party you built over thirty hours, the last town you rested in and the monsters you'd met but hadn't beaten yet. Every time you switched the console off, you left a snapshot of where you were. The next time you booted it up, that's the version of yourself you picked back up.

That's part of why old JRPG saves feel personal in a way a multiplayer match history doesn't. A particular thirty-hour run of a particular game only ever existed in that one save slot. Delete it and the run is gone.

## Why long JRPGs stick to the year you played them

JRPGs openly expect you to stay a long time. *Dragon Quest* asked for around forty hours back when forty hours of anything was a lot. *Final Fantasy* was asking for sixty by the mid-90s. *Persona* casually books a hundred.

Games that long get played over weeks or months, so they end up tangled with whatever else was going on. Ask someone about *Final Fantasy IX* and they may tell you about the apartment they played it in. Ask about *Dragon Quest XI* and you might hear about the boat in the second half of the game and the job they had that year, in the same breath.

A shooter campaign fills a weekend. An indie platformer fills an evening. A JRPG fills a season, and you remember the season along with it.

## Forty years of one series

The Dragon Quest 40th anniversary also means some players have been with the series for its whole run. Someone who started on the Famicom in 1986 could have played all eleven mainline games since, plus the remakes, the re-releases, the *Builders* and *Heroes* spin-offs, and *Walk* on their phone. Their saves are spread across cartridges, memory cards, PSN accounts and Switch profiles, with maybe a paper notebook in a drawer somewhere.

Ask one of those players what the series meant and you probably won't get a top-five list. You'll get something closer to a life story: the one from middle school, the one replayed in a first apartment, the one finished on a long flight, the one shared with a kid. They're reading from a record they never meant to keep, sorted by save file instead of by date.

## Where that record lives now

Modern platforms know more about your play than ever and hold less of it. Steam logs your hours to the minute. PlayStation logs trophies. Xbox logs achievements. None of them asks why you came back to a game two years later, or what else was happening the month you finished it.

That gap is why people go looking for a [Letterboxd for games](/blog/2026-05-05-letterboxd-for-games-on-iphone). It's also why we built [Perthro](https://apps.apple.com/app/perthro/id6764673686), a free iPhone app for keeping that record. You can connect Steam, PlayStation Network or Xbox Live to bring in the library you already have, write a review as short or long as you like, and make a list called something like "every Dragon Quest I've finished" if that's how your memory is organised.

## What we'll do on May 27

We'll watch the stream, see what Horii is ready to show of *Dragon Quest XII*, and write a few lines about it the same night. The series has been handing us save files for forty years. Writing down what the fortieth birthday looked like seems like the least we can do.