I didn't report on it at the time, but earier this week Square-Enix announced a pretty significant delay for the Japanese release of Dragon Quest IX, pushing the game's launch back to July 11th. I figured, no big deal, basicaly every Dragon Quest game ends up suffering a few big delays. Today, though, the reason for the delay hit and it's a really surprising admission. Square-Enix in a statement fessed up that DQIX was delayed because it needed more QA and bug-fixing time.
"Although much effort has been made to fix this bug and test the usability in hopes that the game could still be released on the originally announced date, we have reached an unfortunate conclusion that it would take a longer time to fulfil these tasks in order to assure our customers of a product that they can enjoy safely."
The Japanese push-back is pretty likely to send a US DQIX back to Q4 2009, or even into 2010. It's worth it if the game streets bug-free and totally playable though. I wish Western devs would actually delay games over critical bugs like this and own up to it, instead of using the "polishing" euphemism or relying on the release-and-patch mentality.
