Dragon Quest: message from Akira Toriyama (chara-designer)

Last week, the NHK aired a special program dedicated to the Dragon Quest series, as part of the celebrations for the 30th Anniversary (make sure to check out this post for details). Akira Toriyama, the chara-designer for the series, did not make an appearance (it’s something he’s apparently been avoiding), but he did write a message for fans.

In that very message, he talks about his work on the Dragon Quest series. He first begins by talking of the day he took on the job: it was apparently easy to convince him to do so. At the time, he didn’t even know what a RPG was… and he never imagined the series would go on for 30 years. In fact, had he known the series would still be going on 30 years after the first entry, he would have politely declined the offer.

He finds that designing characters for Dragon Quest games is fun, but also rather difficult. There’s several reasons for that:

• he’s not really interested in designing wholesome characters, so he doesn’t have many variations to offer;
• the Dragon Quest are Fantasy games, taking place in more or less the same time period, so coming up with designs become increasingly difficult every time. He really has to use all the tricks he knows about to keep on creating Dragon Quest characters.

Back in the days, he came up with lots of designs that were rejected, because he likes to come up with fanciful designs every once in a while (and those did not fit with the highly specific guidelines for designing characters). That being said, he also got to design many monsters, which is something he really loves to do.

But nowadays, there’s many more people working on Dragon Quest compared to the past, and that includes chara-design, which means he hasn’t had to design as many characters as before in recent years.

Naturally, he plans to do his best for Dragon Quest XI: Sugisarishi Toki o Motomete, even though that one will not be released for a few more months.

Dragon Quest XI: Sugisarishi Toki o Motomete (3DS, Switch) comes out this year in Japan.

Source: NHK
Translation by: Crunchyroll