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Where Winds Meet’s AI NPCs are the talk of the town right now, with some players enjoying the sheer raunchy nonsense, while others – hi, it’s me – cannot stop cringing.
But I’m just a video games journalist, and Yuji Horii is the father of Dragon Quest and one of the Japanese role-playing game genre’s foremost cultural icons. He’s given me hundreds of hours of good times, and if he thinks adding ChatGPT-esque features to video games is a promising venture, I… well, I’m still going to disagree with him, but at least we can hear him out?
Horii recently took to the stage in South Korea, at G-CON2025, where he gave a customarily lengthy and largely delightful conversation about the development of the Dragon Quest series. He was similarly outspoken about his own view on RPGs, his life motto (“life is an RPG!”), and what he envisions for the future of the gaming medium.
It’s that last part that drew particular attention, with Automaton first catching his comments on AI. “You mentioned earlier that you’ll probably continue making games for a long time to come,” the panel’s Famitsu moderator inquired toward the tail end of the discussion. “But could you tell us what you’d like to do in the future?”
“Recently,” Horii replied, “I’ve been thinking that AI is amazing. For example, ChatGPT. The various consultations are very logical.” Recognizing that there are “a lot of people who use them as chat partners or conversation partners,” he envisions a reality in which “we could use that kind of AI to, for example, play quiz games or mystery games where you have to find the culprit.”
You could find the culprit while talking to your subordinates. The AI could do the interrogation and tell you what the answer was. It would be fun if we could actually solve a case while chatting and having a conversation.” -Yuji Horii
In case there’s any doubt as to whether this is something that Horii himself would like to work with, there’s this follow-up snippet, which goes into VR a bit as well (albeit to less glowing results):
Famitsu: “Nowadays, AI is useful for things like research, but you’re also thinking about incorporating that kind of thing into games.”
Horii: “Yes. There’s also VR. It’s quite uncomfortable to wear it, so I’m wondering how to use it.”
On the topic of mystery games, it’s worth noting that Yuji Horii wrote and directed 1983’s The Portopia Serial Murder Case. As Wikipedia notes, it even became the basis of his creation of the Dragon Quest series; what’s more, it inspired Hideo Kojima and The Legend of Zelda’s Eiji Aonuma. The Portopia Serial Murder Case briefly returned to the limelight two years ago, its nostalgic sentiments thoroughly mined for Square Enix’s NLP AI tech demo. If you’re curious about the results, I largely agree with Vice. And the “Very Negative” Steam user score. But that’s just me, and I’ll admit, AI has come a long way since then.
I suppose if anybody can make this stuff sound remotely compelling to me, it’s Yuji Horii. And there’s no guarantee here that he’ll use it for a mystery game; he just has big thoughts on how one might go about doing so, and given his background, it stands to reason that he could be contemplating pulling it all off firsthand. Otherwise, what are we looking at, here? Dragon Quest IV getting a remake with “Party Chat” replaced by “AI Chat”?
I love Alena as much as the next DQ diehard, but I don’t know if I can handle a world where players are telling her she’s pregnant with their child.
“I still think Nintendo should come out and tell us what we already know.”
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