Persona, Final Fantasy, Ni No kuni, Xenoblade, Kingdom Hearts etc. 

Many Jrpgs this gen have gathered attention from the mainstream and thus most of them became more popular than ever in terms of sales and general consensus. 

Except for Dragon Quest, if you take a look at the sales of DQ 11in USA and Europe here on VGC, it is quite underwhelming.

And I'm just wondering why?

Obviously releasing in the same week as Spiderman wasn't really smart lol.

This. 

/thread

Nope we are the west. We still don't care. Now give us Fire Emblem. We only allow one Japanese franchise to thrive every 5 years.

What was Square thinking 🤔 

Probably because many just don't enjoy it? I did not loved any mainline game till DQXI. Also DQVII came to late and DQVIII was basically the only one we could play on consoles in 'kind of' recent memory.

And on top of that, they did only modest promotion for the game, leaving Sony to do the rest.  Which was extremely foolish with Spiderman launching in the same week.

Xenoblade and Persona both chose clear launch windows and were pretty heavily promoted.  Xenoblade in particular was consistently pushed by Nintendo all the way through release.  Dragon Quest XI's promotion was spotty and marketing fairly limp in the sjadow of such a monstrous exclusive.  

And this has been the case for Dragon Quest almost throughout all its life.  Square promotes the ass off it in Japan and then just kinda shuffles it over to the west quietly to die.  It's like they are afraid it won't sell so they don't invest in marketing which hurts its sales in a self fulfilling prophecy fashion.

And we'll see it again with the Switch version.  Any significant push it gets in the West will be Nintendo's doing, not Square's. 

Releasing the same month of Spiderman did not help.

I feel like this game will get a second chance on Switch however. I fully expect it to outsell the PS4 version in the west by quite a bit.

The real question is: Why didn't it already take off with Dragon Quest VIII?

If that one couldn't convince westerners about the quality of the series, nothing will

I tried 8 when it came out on the ps2 and couldn't get into it, I tried 7 a few years ago on raspberry pi and again couldn't get into it. I've been tempted at buying 11 when I've seen it on sale a few times, but with so many good games out there I can't seem to get motivate to buy it.

I played DQ VIII on PS2 and really loved it. I would have bought DQ XI, but I was still busy with Ni No Kuni 2 and had Octopath Traveler in backlog. And I was expecting DQ XI would get some serious patches like Ni No Kuni 2 a few months after release. But I will get it soon.