Adventure Doesn’t Wait

Fragments Of The Past

There’s a light I see behind the eyes of Dragon Quest creator Yuji Horii when I mention Akira Toriyama. It’s not overwhelmingly bright, like a brand-new LED; it shines more like a candle, flickering with flashes of light through the dark. As we sit inside an unassuming room in Square Enix’s fancy new office in the heart of Shibuya, the legendary developer waits for my questions to him to be interpreted and translated into Japanese, but a smile escapes him when he hears me mention “Akira Toriyama” within my prompt. As he speaks about Toriyama, who passed away tragically and suddenly in March of last year at age 68, just three years younger than Horii, there is a mix of joyful reminiscing and somberness in his answers.

“No, I wasn’t actually really nervous,” Horii tells me when I ask if he ever worried Toriyama might stop working on Dragon Quest as the series’ lead character and monster designer after his manga (and subsequent anime) work in Dragon Ball exploded in popularity. Sure, Horii explains that professionally, his Dragon Quest team never overloaded Toriyama with too many artwork requests, but the two were also friends, and I have to imagine that’s part of it, too. Of all the memories I think Horii could have shared with me during this interview, the one that stood out to him the most was when he visited Toriyama's house and discovered aquarium tanks all throughout it. 

“When he gets into a hobby, he gets really into it,” Horii says through a translator, laughing as he remembers that day.

He later agrees with me that the new visual style of Dragon Quest VII Reimagined, which Square Enix announced in September, with its protagonists reworked as handcrafted dolls and its environments made in diorama style, is something that captures Toriyama’s work well. By coincidence or serendipity, the, dare I say, reimagined visuals in this Dragon Quest VII remake were one of the “very first elements” that the team and Horii thought about.