Editing Dragon Quest IX: Sentinels of the Starry Skies (section)

==Release==
===Japan===
''Dragon Quest IX'' shipped with over 2 million pre-order sales. While the official release date for ''Dragon Quest IX'' was July 11, 2009, some retailers had already shipped orders; one such dealer asked its customers to not play the game until the official release date. In spite the large number of pre-orders and additional release shipments by Square-Enix, lines still formed for the release.

Within a two period the title had sold 2,318,932 copies out of an estimated 3 million copies that had been shipped. Some analyst say that 3 million may be too conservative and expect 5 million copies sold in Japan alone with large overseas sales expectations that could break previous {{Main Series}} sales records. The sale is the largest post 2000 debut week sale which was previously held by the former title, {{Dragon Quest VIII}}.

===North America===
On July 10, 2010, one day before the official release, ''Dragon Quest'' creator [[Yuji Horii]] visited the Nintendo World Store to commemorate the release of ''Dragon Quest IX: Sentinels of the Starry Skies'' in North America at a special launch event.

The North American release of ''Dragon Quest IX'' was heavily promoted by Nintendo - the company ran commercials featuring Seth Green in theaters and on television, featured ''Dragon Quest IX'' for two weeks on Nintendo Week, and sponsored special ''Dragon Quest IX'' events at select GameStop, Best Buy, and Simon Mall locations from July 31, 2010 through August 2010 where players could obtain exclusive downloadable treasure maps. ''Dragon Quest IX: Sentinels of the Starry Skies'' was also the subject of two segments of ''Iwata Asks'', where Satoru Iwata interviewed [[Yuji Horii]] and Ryutaro Ichimura concerning the North American release of ''Dragon Quest IX''. Nintendo also ran a [[Dragon Quest IX: Sentinels of the Starry Skies Fan Trivia Contest|trivia contest]] to promote the game. The winner would receive the game early free. 

The August 2010 issue of Nintendo Power also featured ''Dragon Quest IX'' on the cover.

Excluding pre-orders, ''Dragon Quest IX: Sentinels of the Starry Skies'' has been the top selling {{DS}} game in the first two weeks since its release, according to Gamasutra and Amazon.com. It was the eighth best-selling game of July 2010 in the NPD charts, with 132,000 units.