 Welcome back folks. For today's video we're going to be taking a quick look at the newly released Dragon Quest illustrations book that Vizmedia put out. It's a nice hardcover art book illustrated by Akira Toriyama of Dragon Quest fame and it shows a lot of his drawings throughout the years. So we're gonna take a nice look at the book and I'll show you guys some of the pages. You can get a little bit of a feel for it before you buy it. So on the side here we have Dragon Quest illustrations Akira Toriyama and on the back there's a little collage of different images throughout the years. 30 years of genius on display in this comprehensive collection of over 500 Akira Toriyama stunning illustrations. And as you can see it it's a nice it's a nice book it's nice it has a nice cover and everything and if you look closely you can kind of tell that the character portraits on the cover are protrude a little bit they're kind of bumpy which is nice not sure if you can tell from the video but it's a very it's a very nice cover overall. So now taking a look on the inside there appears to be a little fold-out kind of poster with all of the main characters of the Dragon Quest series. Let's fold this out. There you go. It's not really a poster it's more of a fold-out. And behind it there is a timeline of all of the Dragon Quest releases over the years to the present which is pretty nice and tells you the year came out which game it is what console is for and I do like that they included this in the book as well. It's very nice and this appears to be the Japanese release dates they're talking about so the timeline includes Japanese releases that have not been localized yet. So moving on there is a excerpt from Akira Toriyama himself in the first page. So there's his self-portrait right there he's dressed like Dragon Quest 3 protagonist. It says here he was born April 5th. If you want to read this you can always pause it. So basically Toriyama met Yuji Hori when working at Shonen Jump and Toriyama of course was working on the manga Dragon Ball and Yuji Hori was a writer for Shonen Jump and basically they decided to work together on this new role-playing game and they promoted the game Dragon Quest through Shonen Jump which is how it became so successful. So if you want to read that you can just pause the video I suppose we'll keep moving on. Here is the first section which covers the original trilogy of Dragon Quest on the NES. That's some monster designs here from the original Dragon Quest. There's Dragon Lord different kinds of monsters as well on the other pages and these are very nice and glossy sort of high resolution images. This is probably the best art collection we've had of Dragon Quest for a long time. We've never had anything this big before. This in particular is a very interesting page. Toriyama once famously mentioned that he had trouble doing pixel art and we didn't really know what that meant but turns out he actually drew the way the pixelated sprites are supposed to look like next to the original portraits which I thought was cool. So there's more Dragon Quest 2 art here on this page. Very cool and this continues Dragon Quest 2. Now we move on to Dragon Quest 3 and these are the heroes of Dragon Quest 3 including the main character, the Usha also known as the brave hero of DQ3 and these are some nice images especially the one on the left. Toriyama actually drew that on my gray piece of paper for the cover art of Dragon Quest 3 and here are the rest of the character classes that you can play as. These are all the character classes from the original NES version and this is the Game Boy Color promotional art of Erdrick on the cliff with his sword and these are the new classes with the thieves of Dragon Quest 3. Now these are the bosses of Dragon Quest 3. There's Zoma, Baramos and the red the red character right there that's it an unused monster design unused boss that they did not use in the original Dragon Quest that was originally planned but it was scrapped. So that's some pretty cool trivia right there I've never seen that before ever this is the first time I've seen that picture so it's pretty neat. Moving on use some more Dragon Quest 3 images and the next section is the Zenithian trilogy 4, 5 and 6 with SNES well this is the NES version so there's Solo the main character there's Sophia there's Ragnar, Alina, Tornico you know the sisters this is all original artwork not the remake so this is still original art and this would be the remake artwork here's Sorrow and he has very sort of elf looking appearance and this is Sorrow's original look from the NES artwork so in the original Dragon Quest he had this yellow form which was later retconned into becoming the character Estark but in the original his name was Sorrow the manslayer and he would throughout the fight transform graduate into the green image you see on the right so the one on the left is now known as Estark but originally he was Sorrow the manslayer's first form and Sorrow the manslayer's final form so he had two different forms in the original NES version which they changed in the DS remake later on which I thought was pretty cool so moving on there's more Dragon Quest 4 monsters and these drawings are very very nice they're very high quality printings I probably recognize that from Dragon Quest 11 a lot of familiar familiar monsters around here and now we're moving on to Dragon Quest 5 and this is the SNES artwork so you have all the characters there lots of monsters this is mostly artwork you might have seen on the internet it's nothing exclusive yet but you know we have Dragon Quest 6 here some nice images from there and these are the DS remake portraits for the the remake of course which are a little bit nicer and here are some of the villains of Dragon Quest 6 and here is an unused character drawing this looks kind of like an early concept for Terry but this character has no name and he's unused from Dragon Quest 6 here if you want to get a little closer look at this character he definitely does look like an earlier version of Terry but yeah this character is not in Dragon Quest 6 and is just a concept drawing of an unused character as you can see 1995 unused so that's some pretty neat stuff I've never seen that drawing before it's very cool and now we're moving on to spinoffs and tv shows this is the Dragon Quest anime this is actually not by Toriyama himself this is made in the style of Akira Toriyama which is very faithful to the original style of Dragon Quest the Dragon Quest TV shows I don't believe he worked on any of the Dragon Quest TV shows they're all just based off of his work so as you can see this is the first Dragon Quest anime and it looks a lot like his art style and here are some spin-off games Tornico's Mystery Dungeon games very good games there's Terry's Dragon Quest monsters and these are original drawings for the promotional art with the Game Boy Color version of Dragon Quest monsters you can see Tara and Kobe there too so I'm moving on we have Dragon Warrior 7 which was that's what it was called here but that's the original artwork for the cover and it's a very big drawing it's very nice looking and there's a lot of art here I've never seen before additionally these are some pretty good pieces here are some more images from the original release of Dragon Quest 7 different characters and some enemies as well I also like the little notes by the characters it looks like it's written in pencil so here is the motion controller game for Dragon Quest Kenshin Dragon Quest that is the reboot version of Erdrick's descendant he has blonde hair in this version this is a a game with like a TV TV game with like a motion controller where you fight monsters so there's Zoma who appeared in the game and there's a dragon lord on the left so uh yeah that's some pretty clean art that right there that's very nice looking and there's Rocket Slime of course everyone's favorite spin-off so we have the original Rocket Slime for Game Boy the DS version of Rocket Slime which is a very nice game and that's the cover art right there on the right and moving on we have Dragon Quest 8 for the PS2 and there's a lot of art here I've never seen before like this drawing on the right I have not seen before promotional art for Dragon Quest 8 with the hero with his fist in the air it looks really nice but yeah I've never seen that before so that's a new picture I've seen the one on the left is of course is the box art for the game I've never seen the one on the left right here that's a new picture I've seen the one on the right right here before but uh yeah the one on the left I've never seen before so that's that's a nice drawing I've seen and continuing onwards there's the 3ds cover art here are some character sketches for the main character some for Yangus and Jessica showing off their expressions and the little black and white drawings and here's some more art I have not seen before here's Princess Medea I haven't seen these drawings before so that's pretty nice and there's dual magus on the left and some NPCs on the right and more NPC designs from the rest of Dragon Quest 8 and it looks very authentic it looks very close to the final product more NPCs we'll zoom in a little closer I bet you guys like this one the bunny girl and the dancer yet Toriyama knows how to he knows how to draw the ladies really well so anyway we'll be moving on from there and just more character designs from Dragon Quest 8 and there's Raphthorn very cool and next we have Dragon Quest 9 art and there's not much new here that I haven't I haven't seen because Dragon Quest 9 came out when the internet was still a big thing so most of this art is pretty much on the internet right now there's not a lot of new stuff but it's still pretty well it's nicely printed either way now there is some cut content from Dragon Quest 9 which is put on display here there are some costumes and character classes right here on these two pages that have been unused and are not in the final game for Dragon Quest 9 as you can see there these outfits are not in the final game this uh this outfit looks kind of like the main protagonist of Dragon Quest 7 a little bit like him and this one looks a little looks a little goofy he's got his animal ears and looks kind of like a shaman like like a wolf kind of it's kind of weird would have been cool though if it was in the game and here are the spin-off illustrations there is Erdrick's Ascendant from the motion game there's the Prince of Middenhall Erdrick the hero on the right the main character Dragon Quest 3 and these are some nice drawings as well they're all in the same pose there's Solo the hero and on the right that is the legendary monster tamer from Dragon Quest 5 that's what they're referring to him as in this in this book the main hero Dragon Quest 6 is referred to in this book as Wreck the Hero so that's his canonical name i'll show you a little bit closer yep Wreck the Hero so that says official name if you ever want to use the canon name when playing Dragon Quest 6 next time and here we have some artwork from Dragon Quest 10 the MMO and it's pretty nice here but not nothing we haven't really seen before it's a lot of familiar stuff because you know Dragon Quest 10 came out during a time when the internet was still pretty big so here's some more spin-off stuff Dragon Quest Heroes illustrations and got some nice designs here from Dragon Quest Heroes 2 i like the way these characters look yeah it's very nice looking those Caesar he's very berserk looking and we'll continue onwards here's Dragon Quest Builders that would be the front and back art of the game i actually own a poster of this exact artwork right here moving onwards that would end Dragon Quest Builders coverage and for Dragon Quest 11 there's only one picture in the entire book for Dragon Quest 11 it's just it's just a picture of luminary and that's it so i guess they just don't want to spoil the game or something but uh it's a little bit disappointing with the Dragon Quest 11 already anyway there's some analysis of Dragon Quest illustrations back here which is really cool and i would recommend checking this out it gives a lot of insight into the history like for example Akira Toriyama had his own newsletter called Birdland Press and right here as you can see he actually spoils Zoma from Dragon Quest 3 who's the secret boss of Dragon Quest 3 this magazine came out before DQ3 came out and he still has Zoma on the cover so he actually completely spoiled the game with his newsletter and here's a postcard from Toriyama first fan club anyway if you decide to pick up this book this is a very interesting section which talks a lot about the production of Dragon Quest and the art behind it and it's very insightful it's very it's very neat so moving onwards there is some more interviews here some more information and in the very back there is a message from Yuji Hori the game designer behind Dragon Quest the creator of Dragon Quest and it talks about how he met Toriyama i'll let you pause the thing and of course he drew that himself Yuji Hori drew this because that's his art style he's also a little bit of an artist himself and i would know because i own his autograph so that's that's his drawing thanks for everything over the years Toriyama san and right here talks about how they met at Shonen Jump you could pause that if you want to read it but it's a it's a neat story it's a pretty cool story and on the back page we can take a quick look at some of the details this is a first printing first edition of Dragon Quest illustrations as you can see December 2018 so this is this is the first first edition of the book and it will likely be worth millions of dollars in the future so that is Dragon Quest illustrations the newly released Dragon Quest art book by viz media and i'm just amazed that we even got this to be honest like it's it's really cool that viz actually put out a Dragon Quest illustrations book in english for you know the few fans who want to check something out like this and i'm very very happy with this book if you're like a big Dragon Quest fan and you want to see behind the scenes things and art and how the characters were created i would 100 recommend picking this one up see i hope you guys found this video helpful in case any of you are thinking of picking up this book and i'll see you guys next time