Square Enix Reveals Dragon Quest RPG: The Cursed Tree and the Chosen Isle for iOS and Android

By CriticalPixel · 2026-11-10

Square Enix picked a Tuesday morning to drop the least expected Dragon Quest of the year. No Direct, no Tokyo Game Show stage, no countdown stream: just a trailer at 11:00 AM and a website with a beta application form. Dragon Quest RPG: The Cursed Tree and the Chosen Isle is a full mobile RPG for iOS and Android, it is not out until 2027, and Square Enix is already taking signups for a closed test that caps at 25,000 people. For a series that usually treats announcements like national holidays, the rollout is almost casual. The game itself does not look casual at all.

Official Dragon Quest RPG screenshot showing field exploration on the floating island

What Square Enix Is Actually Selling

The pitch is a proper Dragon Quest game that happens to live on your phone, which is a different claim from the spin-offs the series has leaned on for the last decade. It runs turn-based battles, an isometric field to walk, dungeons, and a home base you expand as you recruit and upgrade allies. Noisy Pixel reports the project is developed with WFS and that the release window is 2027 on iOS and Android. The trailer backs that up with the usual production credits: Yuji Horii as general director, Akira Toriyama's character designs, and Koichi Sugiyama's music, all under the Armor Project, Bird Studio and Square Enix copyright line.

The story is classic Yggdrasil business. You start on Monbelusha, a floating island where everyone gathers for the annual Ringing Feast, and a fiend named Zaahl ruins the party by corrupting the world tree into something called Grimvein. The island starts to fall, a boy drops toward the surface, and the goddess Belusha hands him a branch and the job title Warden of the World Tree. From there you travel on the isle of the chosen, cleaning up corruption and hunting a way to repair the tree. That is a very Dragon Quest premise, and the official site is already live with screenshots, a promotion movie and the beta form.

Combat keeps the familiar shape: turn-based rounds with Fast Strike skills and pep powers, which the series has used to let a party spike damage at the right moment. The twist is that you also gather materials and rewards to build out a base, which strengthens your roster and feeds further exploration. That loop is the part mobile RPGs usually get wrong, and it is the part Square Enix has put front and center in the marketing. Exploration, dungeons, monsters, a town that grows: nothing here is new to the franchise, and that is clearly the point.

Official Dragon Quest RPG screenshot from the announcement showing the party in a dungeon

The Beta Is the Real Test

Square Enix is not handing out access quietly. The closed beta page lists applications running from November 10 to November 23 at 2:59 PM UTC, the test itself scheduled for December 8 through December 15, and 25,000 spots available. If signups overshoot, selection is a lottery, results land on December 4 by email, and you have to be 18 or older with a device that clears the listed minimums. The recommended bar is an iPhone 14 or a Snapdragon 8 Gen 2 handset with 6GB of RAM, so this is not aiming at the cheapest phones on the shelf.

The fine print is where it gets interesting. Beta progress does not carry into launch, paid currency is switched off during the test, and participants are expected to fill out surveys rather than just gawk at the trees. Square Enix also says it will invite media and influencers alongside the public pool. All of that reads like a company that wants balance and monetization feedback early, not a marketing stunt with a download button. It also means the beta is the only real look anyone gets before a 2027 launch that is still more than a year out.

Official Dragon Quest RPG screenshot showing a battle scene from the mobile RPG

Why It Is Called Dragon Quest RPG

The name is doing work. PocketGamer notes that a letter from Yuji Horii on the official site explains the plain Dragon Quest RPG label as a way to separate this from the pile of mobile spin-offs and signal that it plays like a regular entry. That is a pointed thing to say when the series already has Walk, Tact and a long line of older mobile experiments behind it. It also sets expectations the beta has to survive: if the combat feels thin or the hub turns into a storefront, the branding becomes the story.

Mobile is where a large slice of the Dragon Quest audience actually lives now, whether the console crowd likes it or not. Japan has been playing the series on phones for years, and Square Enix has watched free-to-play RPGs print money while its premium ports sell quietly. A mobile-first Dragon Quest with a real overworld is the obvious next step, and also the one most likely to annoy purists who want the next big console entry instead. The company is trying to serve both camps with one announcement, and that rarely lands cleanly.

Community Reaction Is Early and Thin

Two hours after the trailer went live, the official Square Enix upload sat at a bit over 6,000 views and roughly 870 likes at the time of writing. Deal accounts and news aggregators passed it around faster than fans did, which is normal for a mobile announcement on a Tuesday morning. There is no consensus to report yet, and anyone telling you the internet is divided over this is inventing a mood. The obvious question, and one Square Enix has not answered, is how the game makes money. No price, no shop details, no gacha language in the announcement.

The CriticalPixel Take

Here is the uncomfortable part. Dragon Quest is one of the few Japanese franchises where a mobile entry can be genuinely good and still get buried, because the audience that grew up on it expects a controller and a 60 hour campaign. The announcement trailer makes the strongest case in the game's favor: Horii, Toriyama's designs, Sugiyama's music, and a studio that ships mobile titles for a living. The strongest case against is everything the announcement leaves out. No monetization plan, no price, no indication that base building avoids the usual mobile treadmill. A beta with 25,000 people and a survey requirement suggests Square Enix is at least pretending to listen. Pretending is cheap. Shipping a Dragon Quest that does not feel like a chore is not.

For now the practical move is boring. Apply for the beta before November 23 if you are curious, and treat the 2027 window as a promise rather than a date. Dragon Quest RPG: The Cursed Tree and the Chosen Isle carries the branding of a mainline game and the burden of proof of a mobile one. Square Enix has roughly a year of beta feedback to close that gap, and the first real answer arrives in December, when 25,000 people find out whether the world tree is worth saving.