Dragon Quest Monsters: The Withered World

Dragon Quest Monsters has always been the branch of the Dragon Quest series built around a mechanic rather than a story: you do not play a hero, you play as the person who goes out and finds monsters and persuades them to come with you. Everything about the series, including its difficulty curve, follows from that inversion.

The series split from the mainline Dragon Quest at Dragon Quest Monsters 2 and ran its own line, with later entries returning to the more traditional monster-catching structure. This entry continues that line and is tracked on PlayStation and Nintendo, which is where the whole series lives. There is no PC version in the platform data for this title.

That platform limitation is worth stating plainly for tracking purposes. A date here is a console date, and console games in this genre are almost never the PC release, because there is no PC release. If you are hoping for a PC version, its absence from this page is information rather than an oversight.

What to expect from a date on this page is the standard release sequence for a Japanese role-playing game: an announcement well ahead of release, a demo or pre-order period before launch, and then the game itself. Japanese role-playing games in particular tend to be announced far earlier than Western titles, so a date here may have been public for a long time before anything shipped.

The other thing that matters for a release-date tracker is localisation. A Japanese role-playing game release is usually global or near-global on day one, but if the announcement specifies a Japanese-only launch there is frequently a second wave for other territories. That second wave has its own date, and it is the date that matters if you are outside the first region.