They'd have to bother porting the games to the west. DQX getting a bespoke offline version with no announced plans for a translation is wild.
They also haven't bothered porting the majority of the mainline games to platforms that are popular in the west (1-3 and 11 are on Switch, only 11 is on Xbox/PS4/Steam)
Yes, I'm aware of this problem. I think at this point it's a chicken-or-egg situation in the sense that the series got off to something of an awkward start in the west and then has never truly recovered.
Regardless of the cause, I don't really know what people who don't speak Japanese are supposed to do if they find themselves interested in the series. If you want to play Dragon Quest V, for example, your options are a) piracy, b) importing the Japanese PS2 version to play a fan translation (or the SFC version, but I don't see why you would do this unless you were really committed to playing the original), or c) paying an actually frightening amount of money to play a controversial official translation on a now-deprecated console. DQV is the best and most acclaimed game in the series, yet accessing it in English continues to rest on piracy, jumping through a lot of hoops, or dropping low triple digits on a remake of a game now thirty years old.
It's sort of ironic because the Erdrick trilogy being very easy to access in the US is going to lead people to believe that the whole series (sans XI and maybe IX) is very antiquated, which is very far from the truth.
Don't even get me started on DQX!
