Japanese artist and writer Akira Toriyama has passed away.
As shared by the official Dragon Ball Twitter account, he actually passed on last week, March 1, 2024, due to acute subdural hematoma. He was 68. The family held private funeral services, and in keeping with the family’s wishes, no plans for official farewell events have been made.
Toriyama is most famous as the creator of Dragon Ball, one of the most successful and popular manga and anime series of all time. Americans were exposed to Dragon Ball in the 2000s, as part of Adult Swim’s Toonami lineup. However, most of the world was already onto the franchise in the 1990s, and some even the 1980s, as it became a global phenomenon.
Loosely inspired by the Chinese legend of the Journey to the West, the manga and anime tells the story of a martial arts fighter named Son Goku, who turns out to be a Superman-like orphan from another planet. He moves from fighting other martial artists and evil organizations on Earth to facing extraterrestrial and supernatural threats from across the galaxy, and recently, the multiverse.
Dragon Ball has a rich history in video games, dating back to the 1980s, running the gamut of genres and of varying quality, and going on even today. One upcoming title, Dragon Ball: Sparking! Zero, was just announced to the public last year.
Toriyama’s impact in video games would already be huge if we only talked about the Dragon Ball video games, but he directly worked in the video game industry itself. His most famous and successful franchise is the Dragon Quest series, produced by Square Enix. Veteran developer Yuji Horii knew Toriyama from when he wrote for Shonen Jump, and hired him to make art for the first Famicom title.
Toriyama’s art for Dragon Quest, which included all the concepts, character and setting designs, were a huge part of the franchise’s appeal and success. All Dragon Quest games up until now were made with Toriyama’s art, a 38 year legacy encompassing nearly 50 titles.
But that’s not all. Toriyama and Horii worked with other Square Enix staffers on Chrono Trigger, which rivals Final Fantasy, and Dragon Quest itself, in being considered the greatest RPG of all time. Chrono Trigger’s time travel premise and technical achievements on the SNES made it especially memorable upon its release. Today, its complex narrative is what sticks to memory, and Toriyama’s characters and art design where a huge part in making that happen.
And Toriyama worked on even more video games. Blue Dragon, an Xbox exclusive RPG franchise co-created with the other big Square Enix veteran, Hironobu Sakaguchi, and Tobal, a 3D fighting game series dating to the peak of the fighting game boom, are well regarded still today, even if they weren’t as successful as other titles.
We would also be remiss not to mention Sand Land, based on a one-shot comic Toriyama made after he first retired on Dragon Ball. A Sand Land action RPG is set to be published by Bandai Namco worldwide next month, on PlayStation 4, PlayStation 5, Xbox Series X|S and PC via Steam.
Indeed, the press release revealed that Toriyama still had many plans for works in the future before his sudden passing. Still, the world will remember fondly an artist whose characters had an indelible impact on not just the video game industry, but the childhoods of many from the Gen X generation and after.
