Installments of the series have appeared on various computers, consoles, handheld devices, and mobile phones.

The series introduced a number of features to the genre and has had a significant impact on the development of other role-playing games. In addition, there have been numerous manga, anime and novels published under the franchise, with nearly every game in the main series having a related adaptation.

With its first game published in 1986, there are eleven main-series games, along with numerous spin-off games. The games are published by Square Enix (formerly Enix) since its inception, with localized remakes and ports of later installments for the Nintendo DS, Nintendo 3DS, and Nintendo Switch being published by Nintendo outside of Japan. Dragon Quest, previously published as Dragon Warrior in North America until 2005, is a series of role-playing games created by Japanese game designers Armor Project ( Yuji Horii), Bird Studio ( Akira Toriyama) and Sugiyama Kobo ( Koichi Sugiyama) to its publisher Enix, with all of the involved parties co-owning the copyright of the series since then.

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