Dragon Quest hit the big 30 this year. While there wasn't a huge huge party or anything, they did release a bunch of Dragon Quest games this year. North America gets Dragon Quest VII for the DS for the first time along with Dragon Quest Builders. We also will get Dragon Quest Heroes II and Dragon Quest VIII in 2017. In Japan they released more games too, ones we'll have to wait awhile for in English. There is a Dragon Quest Museum moving around Japan too this year.
I remember playing Dragon Warrior on the original black and white Gameboy, but only got back into it playing Dragon Quest VIII on the PS2. I loved this game and it holds a special place in my heart along with Tales of Symphony on the Game Cube. When I was in Japan in November, I ran across this Dragon Quest 30th Anniversary branded Lawson store. It's got slimes everywhere and there was some Dragon Quest merchandise and branding inside too. I wasn't into the special merchandise they had, but I have some other Dragon Quest related pictures below. Enjoy!
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| Dragon Quest Lawson in Akihabara. No idea how long it'll stay. |
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| The inside of the store. Mostly a regular Lawson, but you can see some of the special goods on the right. Big King Slimes smiles upon you from the back wall. | |
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| Outside the store was a pretty cool looking vending machine with a Dragon Quest wrap. |
In some of the other stores I visited I saw some other Dragon Quest stuff. Almost all toy stores and such have a bit of Dragon Quest merchandise and the blue slime is pretty common.
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| The arcade card came for Dragon Quest. |
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| Slime plushies. |
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| More DQ merchandise. I picked up a slime t-shirt. |
There were big pushes for Final Fantasy XV when I was there too, but I found it pretty hard to say if any one game was more popular than the others for merchandise. There is just so much stuff. The only thing I'd say is that only the popular shows or very long running shows have more merchandise than the others.
