If you're a Dragon Quest fan, and you still haven't heard of "Chatty Slimey," don't worry. There's a perfectly good explanation for that: Dragon Quest 10, the franchise's one and only MMORPG, has never been localized and remains a Japan-only title 14 years after launch. It is, at this point, safe to say it's never coming.
Chatty Slimey is an AI chatbot companion coming soon to the long-running MMO. It's cute, it's friendly, and Dragon Quest creator Yuji Horii seems seriously bullish on its importance within the gaming industry. Setting aside whether fans are even OK with its inclusion as a "personal pal" in DQ10, the rising fear here is that Dragon Quest 12—announced five years ago with radio silence ever since—will see an aggressive AI NPC push as well. Suffice it to say, most of us aren't keen.
Chatty Slimey exists "thanks" to a partnership between Square Enix and Google. (There's something a touch ironic about a United States mega-company teaming up for a big game that will never see the light of day here, but I suppose it happens all the time.) Horii-san popped up at Google Cloud Next 2026 late last month, where...
