Dragon Quest och Google Gemini tar AI-evenemang till Tokyo

Square Enix and Google are taking their Dragon Quest partnership out of the game client and onto the streets of Tokyo. On July 30, the two companies will run an event called Gemini Quest across four locations in the city's Shibuya and Harajuku wards, according to Famitsu. Visitors can point the Gemini app at giant statues of series monsters, generate AR spells to free them, and work toward defeating a resurrected Dragon King who the event's premise says has appeared in the real world.

Automaton reports the event takes place at Shibuya 109, MAGNET by Shibuya 109, Tokyo Plaza Harajuku Harakado, and Takeshitaguchi Park. Staff dressed as villagers will hand out a physical reward to anyone who finishes the quests at a given site, and the event's site mentions an additional quest with details still unannounced.

"Players who successfully complete the quests will be eligible for a limited edition physical 'mini medal' reward featuring engravings of iconic Dragon Quest monsters such as slimes and killer machines."

— Dragon Quest Gemini Quest event website

Where March's announcement lived entirely inside a game client, Gemini Quest is the franchise's first offline event tied to the Gemini partnership, trading server logs for foam Slime statues and a scavenger hunt through two Tokyo neighborhoods. That March news introduced Chatty Slimey, an AI companion for Dragon Quest X: Awakening of the Five Walkers Online, the long-running MMORPG that has never left Japan. Square Enix said at the time that the companion listens to in-game chat, generates its own voice lines, and reacts to events on screen, like a player defeating a tough enemy or picking up a rare item. Series creator Yuji Horii pitched Chatty Slimey as a way to make the fifteen-year-old MMO feel less isolating for newcomers joining an established community, a framing some found odd for a game built around real players.

Reaction to that March news split the fanbase, and Gemini Quest has reopened the same argument. Some players are looking forward to the AR photo ops, per Automaton's report, while others point to concerns over the environmental cost of running generative models at this scale. I get why a marketing team would rather build a talking Slime than cut another trailer, but pointing a phone at a plastic monster to generate a fake battle photo doesn't do much for me. The timing hasn't helped either. Square Enix announced the Gemini partnership back in March in the same stretch that Nvidia was fielding backlash over DLSS 5 and Crimson Desert was apologizing for using generative AI in early development, so the announcement landed inside an industry already on edge about the technology.

Dragon Quest wouldn't be the first franchise to watch an AI companion feature go sideways, either. Where Winds Meet shipped last year with a world full of AI chatbot NPCs, and players wasted no time pushing them into deeply strange conversations. Epic Games had to quietly patch a foul-mouthed AI Darth Vader out of Fortnite last year after roughly an hour of live testing. Square Enix hasn't said whether the AR photos generated at Gemini Quest feed back into the game in any way, or whether they're purely promotional. I've watched enough of these chatbot rollouts to guess the lines in Shibuya will fill with people testing what the model will and won't say, the same way DQX's server chat did after Chatty Slimey launched.

The event lands during a busy stretch for the franchise outside the Gemini campaign. Dragon Quest VII released on PC in February, arriving on Steam with Denuvo protection and a diorama-style remake of the 2000 original, complete with a new job-mixing system called Moonlighting. Square Enix also unveiled Dragon Quest Smash/Grow for Android and iOS, a mobile spinoff that leans toward brawler-style combat instead of the series' usual turn-based fights. If Square Enix wants to spend part of its Gemini budget on the mainline series, I'd rather see it go toward systems like Moonlighting than another AR scavenger hunt.

Two more Dragon Quest releases sit on the calendar past Gemini Quest. Dragon Quest Monsters: The Withered World ships December 3, and mainline entry Dragon Quest XII remains in development. Square Enix hasn't tied generative AI to either project so far.

Read also: review of Dragon Quest I & II HD-2D Remake, which credits Square Enix for polishing the two oldest games in the series without disturbing their old-school simplicity, right down to the expanded role given to the Princess of Cannock in the second half of the duology.