Legendary mangaka Akira Toriyama was not only the creator of series like Dr. Slump and Dragon Ball, but he had also ventured into the world of video games. Toriyama had worked on multiple games, like Chrono Tiger and Blue Dragon. But his biggest achievement in the gaming world was his character designs for the popular role-playing game Dragon Quest.
While Toriyama earned a lot of recognition with Dragon Quest, he was not particularly a fan of his works in the series. In 2017, when Dragon Quest celebrated its 30th anniversary, Toriyama shared a special letter where he claimed that he would have never agreed to work on the video game if he had known that it would have gone for so long.
The manga creator also gave a reason why he was not interested in working on Dragon Quest anymore and would rather have someone else take his job and design the characters.
Akira Toriyama Would Have Never Signed Up for Dragon Quest
Toriyama’s letter was shared on the And Now Towards a New Legend ~ TV special to mark the 30th anniversary of the game. This letter was later translated by Crunchyroll. In the letter, Toriyama admitted to the fact that he had no knowledge about Dragon Quest when he was signing up as the character designer of the game.
Toriyama stated:
“It was very easy to convince me to take on the job of character designer for Dragon Quest. “What the heck is a role-playing game?”, I thought. That was the sort of time it was. Really, if I had known that it would still be going on after 30 years, I don’t think I would have taken the job! Honestly, if I had known how long it would last, I would have politely declined.”
The manga creator claimed that he had been working on the series for thirty years and that he would never have agreed to work on the game if he had known it would run for as long as it does. Akira Toriyama’s Bird Studio has been the game’s designer, and they co-own the copyrights with a few other companies.
Akira Toriyama’s Reason for Losing Interest in Dragon Quest
In the letter, Toriyama also listed his reasons for not wanting to work on Dragon Quest. He claimed that he was running out of characters to draw for the game and that there were other capable designers who were doing a better job than him, which ultimately made his work easier than it was when he started.
Toriyama claimed:
“I’m not good at doing the same thing over and over again. Designing characters for Dragon Quest is fun but difficult work. Nowadays, there are a lot of people working on the series, and all of the ones responsible for designing characters are good and serious people, so I don’t have to do as many designs. I’m personally not terribly interested in designing wholesome characters, so I don’t have many variations to offer.”
According to Toriyama, Dragon Quest was based on a fixed time period, which limited his imagination to drawing the characters. However, he still contributed to the character designs of Dragon Quest XI, which was the last game he worked on before his demise in March 2024.
