Slime (Dragon Quest)

Slime
Dragon Quest character
Rocket, a slime starring in Dragon Quest Heroes: Rocket Slime
First game	Dragon Quest (1986)
Created by	Yuji Horii
Designed by	Akira Toriyama

The Slime is the mascot of the Dragon Quest role-playing video game franchise. Originally inspired by the game Wizardry to be a weak and common monster for the video game Dragon Quest, Slime has appeared in almost every Dragon Quest game since. The character's popularity led to the appearance of many varieties of slimes, including boss characters, and even emerging as the protagonist of the Rocket Slime video game series.

The Slime has been placed on a multitude of different kinds of merchandise. The Slime's friendliness, limited power, and appealing form have caused the Slime to become a popular character and symbol of the Dragon Quest series.

The inspiration for the Slime came to Yuji Horii, the creator of Dragon Quest, from a role-playing game called Wizardry. "I was really hooked on 'Wizardy,' the PC game, ... There's...slime-looking characters ..., so I got the inspiration from it. I was doodling the slime-looking character and I took it to Mr. Toriyama, who did the character design, and he made it the Slime we see today." Horii said that when it was originally conceived, the Slime was "a pile of goo", but Toriyama's design came back as a tear-drop which they considered "perfect".

In most appearances of the Slime, it is an antagonist, and occasionally a boss. In some Dragon Quest titles, slimes also appear as friendly non-player characters and peaceful inhabitants of cities. Friendly slimes usually greet players with the phrase, "I'm not a bad slime!". Slimes, like many monsters in the Dragon Quest series, have a certain verbal tic, "slurp". Slimes also replace certain words or syllables with the word "goo" (i.e. "human" is "gooman"), or other words relating to slime or goo, when they speak.

There are many different types of slimes found throughout the Dragon Quest and Rocket Slime series. These include slimes in different colors, bubble slimes, which look like pools of slime, nautical slimes that wear conch shells, the rare metal slimes, which have high defense, give out large amounts of experience points, and tend to flee from battle, healslimes, which have tentacles, and king slimes, which are very large slimes wearing crowns and come in various versions, such as regular or metal.