Today at a conference commemorating the 20th anniversary of the Dragon Quest series, it was announced that the next installment would be for the Nintendo DS. Until now, the last few titles of the series have been developed for Sony consoles.

Dragon Quest IX: Defender of the Stars, its full title, is being developed by Level 5 and will see the return of the team behind Dragon Quest VIII. Kouichi Sugiyama will also be coming back to compose the music for the game and Akira Toriyama is heading character designs.

The game will feature a single-player story, as well as 4-player online co-op play. There will be no random battles; monsters will move around the field and you can fight them in real-time. Further details should surface in the near future as the game gets closer to its summer 2007 release.