Dragon Quest

When Dragon Quest arrived on the Famicom in May 1986, it distilled the dungeon-crawling of Wizardry and Ultima into something a console player could pick up and finish. Yuji Horii wrote and designed it, Akira Toriyama drew the characters and monsters, and Koichi Sugiyama composed the score. That trio stayed with the series for decades. Enix published the early games; Square Enix handles them now. The premise rarely changes: a silent hero, named by the player, gathers a party and sets out to lift a curse or topple a demon lord. Combat is turn-based, menus are text-driven, and encounters come at random. The Slime, a grinning blue blob, became the mascot. North America knew the series as Dragon Warrior until 2005 because of a trademark clash with the tabletop game DragonQuest. The games have appeared on the NES, SNES, MSX, Game Boy Color, Game Boy Advance, Nintendo DS, 3DS, Wii U, Switch, PlayStation 2, 4, Vita, iOS, and Android. Main-series entries number eleven, with spin-offs beyond counting and manga, anime, and novels alongside. Horii's stated aim is intuitive play: a new player should understand the first screen without a manual. The series has sold more than 100 million copies. Dragon Quest VIII is often named among the best role-playing games ever made.[edit]