Enix Comments on DQ VII North American Release

Enix America has denied published reports that its Japanese counterpart announced Dragon Quest VII for the North American market. Company representative John Lawrence told GameSpot that the reports, which ultimately appeared on Famitsu and several online sites, originated from a Japanese newspaper called Sankei. Lawrence said that those erroneous reports were not based on any announcements by Enix's headquarters in Japan or from Enix America. He also commented on the reports regarding the censorship of the game's religious content for the American release by saying that the company plans to stay true to the Japanese version in any possible North American release.

"Anything regarding Dragon Warrior VII [Dragon Quest in Japan] is not official until we announce it here, and naturally we announce it in the form of a press release, which we have not done yet for this game," said Lawrence. "Anything that has to deal with the North American market will be coming out of our office. So, I have no idea where these guys picked this up. The other thing that was really weird was that whole thing about the censorship. That just doesn't hold any water at all. We make those decisions, and our philosophy and our policy is to keep the games as similar to the Japanese content as possible. We've demonstrated that in Dragon Warrior and Dragon Warrior II by keeping in a lot of things that Nintendo had originally taken out of the NES version. For example, the puff puff scene didn't make it into the NES version, but we did keep them in the Game Boy Color version that we put out. So, anything like that about taking stuff out for religious content and stuff like that is total bull."

An announcement on the North American release of Dragon Quest VII is not out of the question. However, Enix has not made any official announcement on the subject at this time.