I bought it for the demo, and while VIII was good, XII, imho, was a vastly superior game and you certainly couldn't tell from the demo. I SO want to go off on a rant on how the haters of XII never really understood the battle system, lol, but I won't. I'll keep this to Dragon Quest.

DQVIII's weakness to me, was the fact that the characters never really truely developed. There are two things I would change about the game. One is the characterization. Give them some personality ffs. Let them interact with me so I care about them....

....second is the frusterating ass low number turn based battle system. Now, the game wasnt' as hard as the far superior Demon's Souls by a long shot, but because it is boring(simply due to the simplistic math that forms your "strategy") during the turn based segments. Most turns based games that I play aren't boring. There is some major payoff, but VIII felt a lot to me like Lost Odyssey in gameplay. You mostly just do attacks and heal at appropriate times. Normal attacks. Then you do that for 60 hours.

That said, again DQVIII is NOT a bad game, it's just a pretty good mildly boring and forgettable one...and yes I beat the WHOLE damn thing.

I don't remember the DQ remakes even being advertised here in Europe, I hope their sales justify releasing the DQ VI remake over here though

I never get the thing about omitting the numbers in the title out though, but not for DQ IX

Well that is part of the issue. The other part is that Dragon Quest was called Dragon Warrior for the first four chapters in North America. None of the Super Famicom/SNES versions of the games were released during 4th generation outside of Japan and Dragon Quest VII released in the West after the 6th generation had already begun. DQ just doesn't have Final Fantasy's name regonition.

It might have somthing to do with the fact that TWEWY actually met sales expectations.

To Square-Enix:

You can't sell what the costumers can' t find

MANUELF

TWEWY underperformed in Japan actually.  It did better than expected in America though, but bombed hard in Europe.

And funny enough, this situation with DQVIII vs the DS DQIV/V remakes is almost the opposite of what happened with Enix USA's previous DQ push... in the west, the GBC ports of DWI&II/III sold surprisingly well while the more high profile DWVII underperformed on PS1 pretty badly.

From what I understand, the game sold poorly in Japan but did pretty well in NA.  The game bombing in Europe is not a shocker considering how unpopular JRPGs are there.