While I was off trying to survive family vacation season, it looks like a controversial bit of new information surfaced about the soon-to-be-released-in-Japan Dragon Quest IX: the game is going to give players exactly one save slot. Think back to Dragon Quest VIII and what a total pain in the butt that game would've been to play with one save.
The word from Square-Enix is that the one save slot is the result of technological limitations of the Nintendo DS. Basically, there's so much to do in the game that save data's size is huge relative to the overall size of the game cart. Series creator Yuji Hori also insisted that the game include an emergency back-up save, so a player whose DS battery dies during play doesn't lose all of their progress. According to Square-Enix, the emergency back-up save is basically what we're getting instead of a second save slot.
As another wrinkle to the debate going over the one save slot: it's actually becoming very common for new DS RPGs to only support one save slot, usually without any sort of courteous explanation from the developers. Pretty much all of the DS Pokemon games only support one save. So does Atlus's quite excellent Devil Survivor. So maybe the real question is: why is it okay when other games do it, and not okay with Dragon Quest IX ships with one save slot? Is it just because DQIX invites comparison to earlier console games?
