Akira Toriyama and the Dragon Quest series

This is spawning from two friends I have online. One loves the Dragon Quest series, and a great part of that love is Toriyama's style and character designs. Another friend I have hates playing them because she can't stand his designs. Personally, I think it's silly to avoid an entire game series because you don't like the character look, but whatever.

So now I'm curious how the general public feels about them :O. I think he does a fine enough job, and anybody who makes me Angelo (*cough and Lucca from CT cough*) is great in my book. I am, however, admittedly astonished that Nomura gets more "characters the same" flack than he does. Good grief. But all artists have similar features...And I think his characters do look distinct, most of it is just in the face that gives him any criticism, that's all. His faces are very similar :O_O:

In fact, I think if he stopped working on Dragon Quest games the whole series would suffer an enormous blow in Japan. Since they worship the feces that he produces, they would not be happy folk in the East if he quit working on the games.

Well, how do you all feel about Toriyama? Does he hurt or help the series, or is he just a character designer and therefore has no substantial effect?

Well, he certainly helps in Japan. I like him too, but my god the faces are all the same. You could literally copy and paste the face of any male character he's made and put it in the head of any other male character while maybe changing the colour of the eyebrows.

I do enjoy his character designs, but the real deal is his monster designs. He's just fantastic at designing all sorts of different monsters.

I'm fine with them. For the most part, they've maintained the sense of imagination and innate charm that pervades the best of Toriyama's work--and have avoided the "bigger, stronger, dumber" spiral the Dragon Ball series went down as it progressed.

His human face designs are very simple, there isn't too much wiggle room for diversity for him in that sense. Yeah, they do all look the same, but I personally don't have a problem with it. I think it's silly when people write off a game entirely because of its art style. A good friend of mine--a Final Fantasy nut (whereas I am not)--truly pissed me off when he wrote off DQ8 because it looked like DBZ. And we both used to watch and enjoy DBZ together when we were younger.

Besides, they're not *all* exactly the same. Girls swoon over Trunks and Angelo (ok, they look like twins :P), but not so much over Goku. There is some diversity there :P

Toriyama's real range of creativity comes when he creates his non-human characters though. Humans are pretty boring--eyes, ears, nose, mouth, maybe some wacky hairstyle and glasses or a scar or cigarette or something. His monsters are always unique, and always look quite playful despite how nasty they may seem.

I think the inclusion of Toriyama on any project in Japan will help it. The people there love him. Heck, Blue Dragon sold 80,000 copies in its first week in Japan, which is quite respectable considering it's on a system that Japan generally doesn't care about.

I do believe that Dragon Quest will suffer a break dowm if Toriyama will leave, but I'm not much of love or hate his art style, everyone and their own style.
I do like his monster designs.

And now Toriyama is trying to do something new in, Dragon Quest Swords: The Masked Queen and the Tower of Mirrors.
I saw the character art scan, and it looks pretty sweet.

the only core thing I disliked about DQ was most of the music.

but I still enjoyed them.

His designs really put me off. However, what made me quit playing was the horribly outdated gameplay. Talking about DQ8 here, by the way, never played the others.