On March 1, 2024, Akira Toriyama died at the age of sixty-eight. The cause was an acute subdural hematoma. The announcement came a week later, on March 8, from his studio. The statement said he had several works still in progress. He had been drawing until the end.
In 1986, a Shonen Jump editor introduced Toriyama to a writer named Yuji Horii. Horii was creating a role-playing game for the Famicom. Toriyama had never heard of an RPG. He did not know what the genre was or what it required. Horii asked him to design the characters and monsters. Toriyama, by his own later account, was easily persuaded.
Horii's team had imagined a slime as a threatening puddle — something dark, formless, menacing. Toriyama drew a teardrop. Round, simple, with two dots for eyes. The team loved it. That teardrop became the slime. The slime became the mascot of Dragon Quest. The slime appeared on merchandise, in spin-off games, in every numbered entry of the series. It became one of the most recognizable shapes in Japanese gaming.
Toriyama later said that character design for Dragon Quest was fun but difficult. The fantasy setting was fixed. The options were limited. He preferred fanciful designs over wholesome ones, but the genre did not always allow that. Many of his designs were rejected and piled up over the years. He said he enjoyed painting the small monsters most.
He also said something else, years later, in a message for the series' thirtieth anniversary in 2016. He said that if he had known the series would last thirty years, he would have declined the job. He did not say this bitterly. He said it as a fact. He had not expected to stay.
But he did stay. From 1986 to 2024, he drew for every mainline Dragon Quest game. He also drew for Dragon Ball, which sold over two hundred sixty million copies worldwide. He drew for Dr. Slump and Chrono Trigger and Sand Land. He worked across decades, across platforms, across media. His line was simple and warm. His monsters were strange but never cruel. His heroes looked like children who had picked up swords by accident.
When he died, the studio said he had works in progress. Dragon Ball Daima, an anime. A Sand Land game. Other projects that were not named. He had been drawing, as always, until he could not.
The slime remains. It appears in games released after his death. It will appear in games not yet made. Toriyama drew it once, in 1986, without knowing what it would become. He stayed for thirty-eight years after that, drawing more, but the slime was already enough. A teardrop with two dots. A shape so simple that a child could draw it, and so quiet that it became the face of a world.