On Sept. 20 there were two interview sessions at the Square Enix booth, both on the subject of Dragon Quest X. During the first, the game's producer, Yosuke Saito, and the director, Jin Fujisawa, were present. The second session had Saito by himself answering questions from the woman conducting the interview, as well as a few from the audience.

There was some information to please fans who already own the game (about half the audience). Things like allowing players to purchase land and build their own domiciles, or a planned rise in the level cap (up to level 55 from the current cap of 50) are just a couple of new features being added. The paladin and ranger classes are to be implemented soon, and they'll be made available via quests, similar to Dragon Quest IX.

For those who haven't had a chance to mess with it yet (i.e. the rest of the world), here are some points I took away from watching the demo. Battles are a weird mix of online action combat and the DQ norm, in that there's a cutaway to a battle screen, but the battle screen is in fact the spot where you met the monster, just a different angle. The player and allied characters are able to move around freely within battle, and some weapons (namely the boomerang) can hit multiple enemies regardless of their respective positions.

Mr. Saito demoed this for the Wii U, playing with that console's controller pad. He showed how to switch the game display from the TV to the controller's own screen and back in mid-game, effectively turning this into a semi-portable game at the player's discretion. He also answered several questions about the two console releases. The two versions will have the same content, the same effective limits, and the same payment packages for the online aspects. They will even connect to the same servers. The Wii U version will have slightly better graphics than the Wii version (the interviewer was impressed by the verisimilitude of the shadows cast by everything on screen), but that's about it. Theoretically it's possible to transfer characters from one version to the other, but that part of the conversation got a bit technical and I'm not sure I caught everything except that it was possible.

I'll be keeping my ears open as the show continues and the game continues to developer, as there might be more revealed later on.