Euro Dragon Quest IX in summer

One date that slipped under the radar earlier was a summer launch for Dragon Quest IX: Sentinels of the Starry Skies.

Nintendo's picked the same time-frame for the US.

Japan, however, has been playing since last summer. There, the DS RPG has been lauded by critics - Famitsu awarded the game 40/40 - and snapped up by a hungry public, which has bought 4.15m copies to date.

Nintendo's eyebrow-raising decision to plop a fully-fledged Dragon Quest instalment exclusively on DS appears to have paid off.

Videos, screenshots and words await on our Dragon Quest IX gamepage below.