Go Play a Toriyama Game Today

 

In some absolutely soul crushing news today, it turns out that Akiratoriyama, an absolute legend in video games and anime, has died at the age of 68.  I remember when I first came across his work around the time I was in middle school when Dragon Ball Z started being aired on TV and his work has been hovering around my life in various capacities ever since.  Hell, even right now there's a Dragon Quest Monsters towel with a bunch of monster and character designs of his adorning it pinned to the wall behind me as I write this post.  This guy was such a massive force in the field that even people like my wife, who are WAY outside of any of those interests knew who he was an the impact he had.

During his life he was quite the busy guy in the field of video games.  The most well known of it by a wide margin is Dragon Quest with Chrono Trigger following close behind but he worked on some other games that you may not have heard of or played.  The one that sticks right the fuck out in my mind is Blue Dragon, an RPG that sadly remains locked to the 360 and didn't review particularly review very well at the time but back then next gen JRPGs were a bit hard to come by so this scratched a particular itch and the effort was very much welcomed.  While the OG Blue Dragon is locked to the 360 there were a 2 sequels made for it on the DS so maybe those are easier to obtain and certainly easier to emulate if you chose to go that route.

If RPGs aren't your speed though he also worked on some fighting games.  You may think I'm about to list off all the Budokai and Tenkaichi Dragonball games but I'm not and of course I'm talking about the legendary Tobal No1.  It might not look much nowadays and it plays stiff as dick but it hails from a time when fighting games actually had content to experience so comes with a full on adventure mode that involves running around mazes and fighting dudes for experience alongside the regular 1v1 fighting.

The one thing I discovered while taking a quick glance at his wiki page for this short appriciation post is that he worked on a game called Fantasian.  Fantasian looks like a pretty standard JRPG but it's got a fairly unique visual style as all the environments are made out of hand-crafted dioramas instead of 3D graphics and that alone is enough to get me interested enough to give it a go.  Unfortunately it's been locked to the apple arcade for YEARS but maybe, in light of the news, I'll bite the bullet and give it a spin because I'm not sure when or even if a PC port is happening.  I'm not going to look it up in advance, I'm going to see if I can guess which diorama is his as I play then look it up at the end.

Japan and the world lost a legend today, 68 is far too young for anyone to be pushing up daisies.  Fire up some of his games, read some of his manga, watch some of his anime, put some respect on the mans name