Dragon Quest Surpasses 100 Million Units Sold in 40th Anniversary Year

Dragon Quest has passed 100 million units sold worldwide, Square Enix announced on 16 September 2026, landing the milestone in the same year the role-playing series turns 40. Creator Yuji Horii marked it with a short celebration video, thanking fans for their support and pointing them toward the next spin-off, Dragon Quest Monsters: The Withered World.

The total spans 11 mainline games and a long run of spin-offs, going back to the original Dragon Quest’s Japanese release in 1986. Square Enix links the recent push to its remakes of the series’ best-known entries, while the next numbered game, Dragon Quest XII: Beyond Dreams, is still in development.

What Counts Toward Dragon Quest’s 100 Million Units

Square Enix’s figure combines two things: physical copies shipped and digital sales. Shipments measure copies sent out to retail, not copies bought at the till. Digital sales only enter the count from April 2015 onward, covering full-game downloads of boxed titles as well as download-only releases on console and PC. Any Dragon Quest bought digitally before April 2015 sits outside the 100 million.

For scale, TweakTown puts the franchise at 76 million units in mid-2018. On that figure, Dragon Quest has added about 24 million units in a little over eight years, or roughly 3 million a year. Inside Square Enix, the benchmark is still Final Fantasy, which the publisher lists at more than 215 million units, a little over twice Dragon Quest’s total.

The series reached the US in 1989 under the name Dragon Warrior, and it holds several Guinness World Records, including Longest-Running Japanese RPG Series.

The Remakes Behind the Milestone

Two HD-2D remakes now cover the whole Erdrick Trilogy. Dragon Quest III HD-2D Remake and Dragon Quest I & II HD-2D Remake rebuild the three games in Square Enix’s HD-2D style and add story content and gameplay changes the originals never had.

Dragon Quest VII Reimagined followed in early 2026 as a remake of the 2000 release Dragon Quest VII: Fragments of the Forgotten Past. It turns Akira Toriyama’s character designs into a handcrafted 3D style, sets the story in diorama-like environments and dungeons, trims exploration, and expands the narrative. Square Enix has also just re-released an older spin-off, Dragon Quest Heroes: Torneko’s Mystery Dungeon -Classic HD-.

No new numbered Dragon Quest has launched since Dragon Quest XI in 2017, so the remakes have been doing the job a fresh mainline entry would normally do. That’s a lot to ask of them until Dragon Quest XII has a date.

Dragon Quest Games Still to Come

Two releases already have dates. Dragon Quest XI S: Echoes of an Elusive Age arrives on Nintendo Switch 2 first, followed by The Withered World, the latest entry in the Dragon Quest Monsters series.

Dragon Quest XII is the one without a date. Originally announced as Dragon Quest XII: The Flames of Fate, the game was rebooted and renamed Beyond Dreams, and Square Enix has not given it a release date.