Unless you're a JRPG nerd, you probably don't care about Dragon Quest if you live in America. While every man, woman, child, and robotic dog plays and loves the series in Japan, the localized versions tend to sell a grand total of about 13 copies here in the States -- even though other Japanese role-playing games like Final Fantasy perform quite well.

Why is that? What do American gamers have against Dragon Quest?

I'm one of those gamers...and I don't have an answer. My only excuse is that I just never got around to playing any of them. Which is why I decided to check out Dragon Quest 9: Sentinels of the Starry Skies, which has sold to the tune of more than 4 million copies in Japan since its release on the Nintendo DS last year. It comes out in America on July 11, and I wanted to know what all of the fuss was about.

What I found out exploded my mind: Dragon Quest 9 is actually a Western RPG in disguise!

Okay, maybe that's overstating it a bit. The game is still full of the standard JRPG tropes that define the genre -- turn-based combat, spiky-haired kids saving the world from a mysterious force. But anyone who's read of Dragon Quest's roots in the Western RPG heavyweights Wizardry and Ultima knows that the series has always had ties to the West. But the rest of us? Color us shocked.

And the new innovations in Dragon Quest 9 bring that relationship to the forefront. Here are three of them.

Character Customization

The first thing you do when you start up a game of Dragon Quest 9 is create a character. You can choose between 10 different styles in eight categories, ranging from gender to skin color to facial shape. Want to be a black woman with a blue ‘do? You can. Want to be a pasty-white bald guy with beady little eyes? You can do that, too. And whenever you add new outfits or equipment to your character, his or her appearance in the game changes accordingly.

Unlike most JRPGs, which have you playing out the life of a character with no real control over his appearance or destiny, Dragon Quest 9 wants you to get creative. “You” are the hero -- an idea more commonly found in RPGs by Bethesda or BioWare. Sure, the customization options are more limited than in Fallout 3 or Dragon Age: Origins, but this is a DS game. Cut it some slack.

There’s a good reason why Dragon Quest 9 offers such robust customization, and has to do with my next point...

Minimally Multiplayer Online

Dragon Quest 9 centers heavily around multiplayer, although you can only host three other players at a time, and you all have to be within wireless range of each other. Call it a "Minimally" Multiplayer Online game.

Once you’ve brought your customized character in a buddy’s game world, the game plays very much like typical massively multiplayer games. You’re not bound to stick by your friends and can wander off in any direction you please. You can dive into dungeons, grind to level up, and canvass hidden areas to grab loot. Of course, it’s more fun to team up, and you can most definitely do that as well. You can even help your pal advance his storyline (you can’t advance yours, as that would “disrupt the flow of time and space”).

When the multiplayer session is over, the items you earn, the money you find, and the experience you gain -- all of that carries over to your own game.

Speaking of earning items, Dragon Quest 9 has one more element that echoes the Western RPG style...

Quests

As you explore towns and villages in Dragon Quest 9, chatting up the locals, you’ll come across people with a blue icon over their head. Talk to them and you’ll “acquiesce to a quest,” in the game’s cutesy lingo. Quests range from the simple -- “Bring me a cobbleweb” -- to the baroque, which require you to acquire items scattered throughout the world. Completing a quest will net you a nifty little prize, and you can easily keep track of your ongoing and completed quests via menus.

Sound familiar to you? It does to me, and I wasn’t surprised when producer Ryutaro Ichimura told Game Informer that the quest system was directly inspired by Oblivion, and that the development team looked to Diablo to figure out how to get JRPG players to unleash their inner loot whore.

Will these Western-inspired innovations to the Dragon Quest series be enough to finally draw in gamers here in America? They’ve definitely hooked one new user. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have some more Dragon Quest 9 to play.