Dragon Quest. It's one of the most famous game series in
Japan. Over thirty years old with 11 numbered titles
and countless spinoffs. There’s Dragon Quest Monsters, Dragon Quest
Heroes, Dragon Quest the Musical, a Dragon Quest themed restaurant, A Dragon Quest Amusement
park. There’s a lot of Dragon Quest to experience
out there, it’s a cultural phenomenon and it all started with one game. I’ve been making Dragon Quest videos here
on YouTube for a while now, if you’re watching this, chances are you’re already a fan of
DQ. If not, no worries, I have plenty of videos
on how to get into the franchise that you should definitely check out some time. Most may not know this, but there’s quite
a hidden side to Dragon Quest. An iceberg that keeps going deeper. I have been a fan of the series for years,
investigating every aspect of every game. The development, history, hidden trivia and
more. I figured I have the knowledge to do a video
like this. So for today’s video we will be exploring
the Dragon Quest Iceberg and I will show you just how deep it goes. Let's start with the low hanging fruit of
Dragon Quest conspiracy theories. If you’ve heard of Dragon Quest, chances
are you’ve heard that the game was such a huge hit that thousands of people across
Japan skipped school and work just to get it causing mass panic across the country,
making the Japanese government mandate that Dragon Quest only ever be sold on Weekends
to prevent this from happening again. Imagine that. An actual law that prevents a specific company
to release their game on a certain day of the week. Sounds almost too crazy to be a true story... Well, it is. You see, there is no Dragon Quest law. This is a widely circulated urban myth. And it wasn’t the first Dragon Quest game
that caused this myth either, it was Dragon Quest III which was where the series hit new
highs in popularity. Believe it or not, Dragon Quest I actually
didn’t do that well during its first release month. It actually sold really badly at first, mostly
due to Japanese gamers not knowing what an JRPG even was since they didn’t even exist
at the time. But eventually, the franchise started to gain
traction, resulting in the insane popularity that the franchise has, with dedicated fans
waiting in lines that stretch over blocks whenever a new entry in the franchise is released. It got so bad that fans were skipping both
work and school. To avoid further controversy, Enix took it
upon themselves to release future games on Saturdays instead of Thursdays like most other
game releases, since schools aren’t open on weekends and a lot of people didn’t have
work. The first Dragon Quest game is an adventure
chock full of secrets. In Dragon Quest I, when you get to the final
boss, the Dragonlord, you actually talk to him a bit before the final confrontation. He offers you “half the world” if you
decide to join forces with him. Obviously being a hero, we would never do
that. Hey what are you doing! Okay. So if you say yes, you get stuck on an ominous
game over screen in the NES version. In the Game Boy version, you wake up in the
nearby Inn with it all being just a dream. It’s weird that this is even in the game
considering that choosing this option makes potential hours of exploring the Dragonlord’s
castle just to get to him completely worthless. If you choose to side with him you don’t
beat the game and you just wasted hours of your life. Serves you right I guess. The main character of Dragon Quest III…
is Australian. I’m serious. The crowned boy you might recognize from Smash
Bros, who is also the hero of the third game, is from Aliahan. At the beginning of Dragon Quest III, your
mother calls out to you saying “Cooee” which is a shout almost exclusively used in
Australia. Also Dragon Quest III’s map resembles the
real world with locations being based on Japan, South America, Africa and more. The hero’s hometown in Aliahan appears to
be right where Australia should be, giving more credibility to this. So yeah he’s Australian. In Dragon Quest III you can’t name your
character Erdrick. Go ahead. Try it. Boot it up and try naming him Erdrick, you
can’t. It will not work. The reason why is because in Dragon Quest,
Erdrick is a title that you have to earn by being considered a true hero. It’s not something you can name yourself
willy nilly. YOU GOTTA EARN IT. In the same game if you go to Patty’s Pub
where you make your own characters, if you try creating a new character and name him
Erdrick it still won’t work, this time the guy behind the counter will start freaking
out and tell you you can’t choose that name for whatever reason. Holy cow, calm down. Some of the weapons and armor in Dragon Quest
have strange writing on them. These are actually runes. And they translate to secret messages hidden
on the items. They were added to the designs by Jun Tamaya,
the man who designed most of the armor and weapons throughout the series. He worked at Gainax at the time, the famous
anime studio that eventually would make Neon Genesis Evangelion & Gurren Lagann. But at the time, they used to be a sort of
toy company that made model kits. Back then, they were called General Products. And during his time there, Tama-san designed
many iconic Dragon Quest weapons and armor including Erdrick’s Sword and the Zenithian
Sword. These weapons eventually made their way into
the series canon, showing up in the game guides and eventually the official art works. Anyway, back to the writing on the weapons. By using the cipher that Tama-san used during
the creation of these swords, we can actually decode a lot of DQ weapons, armor and items. And they actually spell something out if you
do this! Erdrick’s Sword literally has the words
“Dragon Quest” across the blade. That’s right, the words on his sword just
say Dragon Quest. The circle on the Zenithian Sword says Michibika
reshi mono, which in Japanese means “Guided Person” or the Chosen One, fitting well
in DQIV’s theme, Chapters of the Chosen. Erdrick’s shield is easy, it says Roto on
it and the Ra’s Mirror says “Its your real face you believe it or not.” So they put so much detail into theses early
items, going as far as hiding secret messages that can only be decoded by those who know
how! Thats really cool! In Dragon Quest IV there’s a priest character
named Kiryl who accompanies you on your journey. He’s become somewhat of a running joke in
the fandom. You see, DQIV on the NES was the first game
in the series to include party AI where your party members would attack on their own. And there’s a spell in the game that Kiryl
can learn called Whack, which has a very low chance of instabeating the enemy. This resulted in a strange phenomenon where
Kiryl would constantly cast the Whack spell on enemies because of how powerful it is,
not taking into account the low hit rate, resulting in this useless moron character
who keeps casting Whack every single turn with it missing every time. And in the original DQIV you couldn’t even
turn off the AI so it was an even bigger problem, you were stuck with him acting like this. DQIV’s remake for the DS tweaked the AI
heavily as Yuji Horii discussed in an interview in Nintendo Power, though at this point the
team realized that constantly casting Whack had become somewhat of a personality trait
for Kiryl, so they decided to still make him cast whack every once in a while, but not
as much, just to stay true to the character. His constant failed attempts of casting Whack
were even referenced in Dragon Quest Heroes. In Dragon Quest III, you can choose from a
number of different classes for your party members. Warriors, thieves, mages and other useful
vocations. However one class out of these is very bizarre
in its purpose. The Goof Off or the Gadabout class. This is a literal clown character that constantly
misses his attacks, sometimes doesn’t even bother to attack, has low stats aside from
Luck and just overall sucks tremendous ass. Why would anyone want to use this character? Well when you get him to level 20 somehow
and you change his class at Alltrades Abbey it turns out that the Gadabout is the only
class that can change into the Ultra Powerful Sage Class without a special book. The Sage class is a powerful cross between
a mage and a priest with both healing and offensive attacks at their disposal, making
for an extremely useful character. Though you have to drag along the most useless
character in order to get the most useful character so I guess it evens out. Some bosses have had changes to their design
based on merchandise and other out of game appearances. Zoma, the final boss from Dragon Quest III,
is typically shown with four fingers per hand in early illustrations as an indicator of
his demonic origins. He has four fingers in his art by Toriyama
and his initial sprites, however later on he would primarily be shown with five fingers
in mainline games such as DQIX, DQIII for Switch, DQ Heroes, and various kinds of merchandise. The reasoning why has never been stated, but
in Japan it has become somewhat of a taboo for characters to have four fingers due to
a connection to the Yakuza so this can explain why. Malroth the Destroyer from Dragon Quest II
was shown as green in his first appearance as well as all other mainline entries, however
in spinoff titles he’s blue for some reason. He appears blue in almost every spinoff title
where he appears except for DQ Builders 2 where he is green, possibly due to the strong
connection between Builders and the mainline games. Dragon Quest V. It started out on the SNES,
then was remade on the DS, then was ported to mobile phones. But did you know that randomly after years
of being on mobile devices, Square Enix decided to update it? Yeah, in July 2019 version 1.1.0 was released,
adding support for iPhone X and it added the Monster Magnet as a casino prize. This is nearly four years after the release
of the game so it came as quite a surprise. The item increases the Hero’s defense by
5 and it increases the chances of a monster joining the Hero’s party by a lot, being
a very useful item if players are trying to get a Liquid Metal Slime to join you. This item was initially a limited time item
in Japan at launch, so it’s nice that they added it permanently worldwide. Kiefer in Dragon Quest VII is the royal prince
of Estard and son to King Burns in the PS1 version. The 3DS remake however changed a few things
around, including the name of King Burns. This time, instead of being called King Burns,
he’s called King Donald. To me, this is clearly supposed to be a reference
to Donald and Kiefer Sutherland, the father-son actors, which is a nice nod they added in
the localization. In Dragon Quest XI, early on you meet Erik
in the castle dungeon and the two of you make your grand escape. During the breakout the two of you run into
a black Dragon sleeping under the castle who then gives chase. But have you ever wondered what would happen
if you stop running and decide to face the Dragon? Well as it turns out you end up in a fight
with the Dragon and being under level 5 at the time you have no hope to beat it so you
will most likely get your ass handed to you. However, if you somehow grind levels high
enough and manage to defeat the Dragon which is highly unlikely, you will actually be treated
to a special scene where Erik and the Hero defeat the Dragon and walk out of the cave
peacefully. It’s almost inconceivable for players to
beat the Dragon this early on in the game, but the developers put this scene in the game
anyway, just in case they do! That's the kind of attention to detail and
developer foresight that really makes me appreciate Dragon Quest XI. TIER 2 In the Game Boy remake for Dragon Quest I,
the first town you visit is Tantegel. In this town, there’s a random lady walking
around who, upon talking to her, becomes quite smitten with the hero and chooses to follow
you around. This has seemingly no purpose, she doesn’t
fight with you or give you anything. When you leave the town, she stops following
you. So why would they even put this into the game? Well, what some eagle eyed players might realize
however is that there’s a secret scene that occurs if you take her to the Inn and stay
there for the night. You see, when you stay at the inn, normally
you get the little inn jingle and when you wake up the innkeeper says “Good morning
and have a nice day!”. However, if you stay at the Inn while the
lady is following you, he says “Good morning. You were up late!” with some very obvious
implications. This easter egg is even in the Japanese version
of the remake as well. Unfortunately, the Switch version of Dragon
Quest I removed this Easter Egg. The lady is still in the game, but if you
take her to the Inn you just get the regular message. Obviously that little easter egg was going
way too far. That’s one reason why I don’t like the
switch remakes very much. Continuing with Dragon Quest I, throughout
the game the player is sent traveling all over the world to complete various tasks,
with the main quest having to save the princess and beat the Dragonlord. The princess is hidden in a cave to the East
and the Dragonlord is located at the top of his castle to the south. So they’re in two different locations and
saving the princess gives you a big hint on where to find Erdrick’s Token. However, you can actually skip over this part
and just defeat the Dragonlord if you want. The ending is changed if you do this additionally. There’s several different endings in DQI. The first is where you save the princess and
then defeat the Dragonlord which gives you the normal ending where the Princess comes
down the castle stairs to ask to go with you to expand your kingdom. The second ending is where you save the princess
and then head straight to the Dragonlord while holding her in your arms. Defeating him and taking her back to the castle
will give you a similar ending except she doesn’t walk down the stairs. Finally, if you defeat the Dragonlord without
ever finding the princess, you get the same ending except this time there is no Princess
in the castle so she doesn’t ask to go with you. And the king and townspeople don’t seem
to care about her either. Isn’t that nice. In the remake of Dragon Quest I, they add
a very interesting element to Erdrick’s tomb in Alefgard. When you read Erdrick’s final message to
his descendant, it is written out in plain English while everyone else in Alefgard speaks
in this Ye Olde English style with plenty of thous and thus’s. The reason why is just another example of
close attention to detail. Erdrick is originally from the world above
where they speak plain modern English, so it wouldn’t make sense for him to write
his final message in the old English style. Now the NES versions of the original Dragon
Quest games were no stranger to changing things around for Western audiences. We’ve gotten changes such as sprites being
improved from the original, to being able to look in four directions, rather than looking
just one way. A lot of religious symbolism was removed too,
such as crosses, priests and even coffins, which were replaced by non religious alternatives. Extra graphics were also added to make things
a bit fancier. This is especially shown in Dragon Warrior
II, which featured a brand new opening scene showing the Descendants of Erdrick walking
towards the screen, which is a very cool addition and even the ending card has a custom graphic. But probably one of the most fascinating changes
however lies in the North American Dragon Warrior III, which features a new opening
title with a mysterious title song that isn’t in the original. This theme is not in the Japanese version
of the game, and as far as I can tell, it wasn’t made by Sugiyama and seems to have
been made specifically for the North American version. But we have no idea who composed the theme. It is completely a mystery, no leads have
popped up as of now. Who knows if we ever will find out, I hope
we will, but only time will tell. Speaking of title theme songs, most Dragon
Quest games have a song called Intermezzo which plays when you’re selecting your save
file. Almost every mainline Dragon Quest game uses
this same jingle for when you’re selecting your save or making a new save file. All of them, except for Dragon Quest II which
interestingly uses a different song called Only Lonely Boy. This was originally a pop song that Koichi
Sugiyama wrote that was performed by Japanese Pop Star Anna Makino and they used it for
Dragon Quest II. And that was the only time in the mainline
series that a different song was used, from Dragon Quest III onwards they went back to
using the Intermezzo for the save select. Only Lonely Boy did however make a return
in the menu of Dragon Quest Builders 2, likely due to the connection to Dragon Quest II. A nice little touch for longtime fans. In Dragon Quest VII for the 3DS, eventually
Kiefer leaves your party to follow his own dreams, never to return. Therefore most players wouldn’t know that
if you somehow got Kiefer to level 50, he becomes SUPER KIEFER. At level 50, regardless of what his stats
look like, his resilience will shoot up to 660. This is high enough making him practically
invincible to enemy attacks, taking little to no damage from all of the enemies. Most players will never discover this because
he leaves your party much earlier than level 50. You’d have to grind for hours and hours
and hours to discover this secret. And unfortunately because he leaves your party
so early, you can’t really take advantage of SUPER KIEFER later on in the game. It’s a very interesting secret hidden in
the game, and they probably added it in because they wanted to reward your commitment to leveling
up Kiefer before he makes like the World Tree and leaves. In Dragon Quest VIII, the main character has
a mysterious origin that isn’t revealed until the postgame, after the credits roll
you go back to his homeland and find out that he is a Dragovian, part of a race of half
human half Dragons, making him the closest thing to a Dragon Warrior that the series
has seen. While this may seem like it came out of the
left field, there’s actually a lot of foreshadowing towards it early on in the game. Particularly when you get to the first dungeon,
the waterfall cave. If instead of going in the cave, you instead
follow the trail behind it to get to the top of the hill, you’ll find a hut with a mysterious
old man who appears to know about the Hero and Munchie’s true nature and hints at Munchie
being no ordinary mouse. He’s actually a Dragovian and he reveals
it to you after you get to the Dragovian village. Additionally another bit of foreshadowing
appears in the cave itself when you fight the first boss, Geyser. Geyser unleashes a cursed mist as one of his
attacks and while it’ll affect Yangus, the curse evaporates before hitting the hero and
you even see the Dragovian symbol flash in front of him, which is some cool foreshadowing. The hero is curse resistant due to his true
nature as a Dragovian and throughout the game he will be the only member of the party who
cannot be cursed no matter what, even being able to equip cursed items no problem. And these bits of foreshadowing all happen
within the first hour of the game which is especially cool as most people wouldn’t
even notice it. I certainly didn’t. Dragon Quest IX. We all know this DS exclusive Dragon Quest
game, it’s one of the most popular games in the franchise. But did you know that when the game was first
announced at 2006’s Tokyo Game Show, we saw a trailer that looked very different from
the final game. The graphics and menu looked different than
the final product, but more importantly, the game wasn’t turn based! You could clearly see players attacking a
boss enemy in an action RPG styled combat system. No transition from overworld to fight or turns,
they were really planning on making a mainline Dragon Quest game with action combat. Well, something must have happened because
the game was soon delayed from its projected 2007 release to a 2009 release. Two whole years of extra development time
and the final product looked a lot different, going back to the series classic turn based
style. Maybe it was the fan outcry or the devs thought
it wasn’t such a great idea after all? In any case, this change may have caused the
game to be delayed and is why we have the Dragon Quest IX of today. Speaking of Dragon Quest IX, it should be
mentioned that this game has its own share of Urban Legends. In DQIX there are procedurally generated dungeons
you can discover via treasure maps. The dungeons are made via an algorithm, resulting
in millions of different combinations, with each dungeon having a unique name, along with
the name of the player who discovered it. Through what the game calls “tag mode”,
two players can connect to one another’s DS’s and exchange popular dungeon maps. This quickly made many maps travel their way
around the world, which is an amazing feature that demonstrates how games can work in modern
times. One such map would go on to become the most
famous grotto map in the world. This map is the Masayuki map. I’ve talked about it before in previous
videos. It originated in Japan, the map’s random
name is the Ruby Path of Doom, but it is more commonly known by the guy who found it, Masayuki. The map is famous because on its final floor
it spawns nothing but Metal King Slimes, so everyone who plays DQIX would want this map
to grind faster. The map spread far due to its popularity and
eventually made its way westward, I even have it on my cartridge! And speaking of cartridges, there’s yet
another DQIX urban legend I wanted to go over. So when DQIX was coming out, it was being
touted as this grand RPG that would push the DS to its very limits, and it did. The game ended up taking 256 megabytes of
space, which was massive for a DS game at the time. Around the time DQIX was releasing, a viral
image started circulating around the internet showing a dual cartridge case for DQIX with
two DS cartridges, making starry-eyed fans like myself think that the game would be so
huge that it could only fit on two carts, kind of like multidisc games on the PlayStation
1. I myself saw this image and I was actually
fooled by it as well as many other people who were anticipating the game at the time. It’s definitely one of the most interesting
hoaxes that Dragon Quest fans have been faced with and it really hyped up the game for me
thinking that it would be that big. TIER 3 So earlier we talked about Dragon Quest I’s
secret ending where you don’t save the Princess. That one is pretty well known, however a lesser
known ending is the secret ending of Dragon Quest II. So in DQII eventually you’ll get to a point
where the Prince of Cannock gets sick and you and the Princess of Moonbrooke need to
travel to Yggdrasil to get a leaf that will heal him. In the meantime he’ll be bedridden in the
town of Beran. Now of course you can save him, but what if
you just ignore him and go beat Hargon and Malroth without him, just you and the Princess? First of all, this’ll make the final boss
extremely difficult. It was already excruciatingly difficult, but
imagine trying it with only two people? Well, you may be surprised to know that this
is still entirely possible with enough grinding and skill and if you beat the final boss without
the Prince of Cannock you can get multiple special endings. There’s one where you return to pick him
up after beating the final boss where he acts disappointed that you did it without him and
another where you go straight to the king of Midenhall without him where he catches
up with you, out of breath, and seems ticked off that you left without him. Really interesting that they hid these scenes
in the game, it shows that they thought of everything and is just another example of
how clever the Dragon Quest team really is. Speaking of Dragon Quest II’s endings, did
you know that Yuji Horii was originally going to include another alternate ending that ended
up being scrapped? In a 1987 interview, Horii tells it all. Supposedly they originally planned it so that
during the final battle the Prince of Cannock would sacrifice himself and perish, leaving
you and the Princess of Moonbrooke to have to return home without him, wishing him peace
in the next life. During the ceremony celebrating Hargon’s
defeat, they were planning on having the Princess of Cannock come out of a crowd and poke you
for failing her brother. They scrapped this ending because it was too
sad. Well it definitely would have been a bizarre
ending, maybe that was a good call. Before we move on from DQII, I also wanted
to mention that there’s some cut content from pre production that never made it into
the final game due to memory limitations. Originally the game was going to have these
big cutscene images like this one that appears in the game manual, but were unfortunately
scrapped. We would’ve seen a large landscape image
from the top of the lighthouse with hints of where to go next as well. Additionally, entire parts of the map were
rearranged, causing the game to be delayed for months. You can see Cannock castle in a different
location in an early beta screen on the back of the official vinyl record soundtrack. Another thing that was scrapped was the dangerous
swimsuit that the Princess of Moonbrooke was supposed to be able to equip. It was supposed to be a very strong and very
expensive armor piece that would actually change the Princess’s sprite to make her
wear it. While we didn’t get it in the NES version
of the game, the MSX version has it included in a hidden scene. In the MSX DQII, if you talk to the king of
Tantegel while the Princess of Moonbrooke isn’t wearing anything, he’ll comment
something like “Whoa, the girl behind you isn’t even wearing cotton clothes! It’s pitiful that someone so cute doesn’t
have anything to wear” and then he’ll give you the swimsuit with a special scene
showing her wearing it. This makes the MSX version of Dragon Quest
II the best version of the game obviously... because of the added content. This swimsuit would end up making it into
Dragon Quest III, changing the female party members' sprites who wear it, as its original
intention. Moving on from DQII finally, there’s some
interesting hidden scenes in Dragon Quest VIII as well. In the first town of Farebury, you’re asked
by a young woman named Valentina to go on a quest to find a new crystal ball for her
father, the fortune teller Kalderasha. And of course you’re given the choice to
say yes or no to her request. Unlike most RPGs that put you through a constant
loop if you say no, in this scene if you refuse she’ll be disappointed and you can actually
leave. Now most people would just talk to her again
and accept the quest, but not me. When I was a kid and I first played the game
I wanted to see what would happen if you left the town after saying no to her. If you report back to King Trode after refusing,
he yells at you and calls you an imbecile. I guess we deserved that. There’s another hidden scene you can find
later on. Later on in the game, you find yourself given
a quest by Yangus’ childhood friend Red, to find a jewel called the Venus Tear which
is hidden deep within a dungeon. Well, as it turns out, there’s nothing stopping
you from going to the dungeon and getting the tear before meeting Red. If you do this first, then upon getting the
quest and leaving her house, you get a special scene where Trode asks Yangus why he didn’t
give it to her there where Yangus responds that she would’ve been less impressed if
they had done that. This series has a lot of developer foresight
if you haven’t noticed. There’s so many moments throughout the series
where you can do things the developers probably didn’t expect you to do, and you will be
rewarded with a special scene as a result, this is very common throughout the series. It’s one of the reasons why I hold Dragon
Quest in such high regard, I’ve never seen an RPG that anticipates the player breaking
the game’s intended sequence like this and acknowledges the player’s tendency to color
outside the lines. TIER 4 Now we’re getting to the good stuff. Did you know that some Dragon Quest games
have hidden content in the game files? It’s true. To start off, let’s look at Dragon Quest
I and II collection for the Game Boy. This game has hidden sprites in the game code. If you look into the game sprites, you’ll
find that there’s some odd ones. First of all there appears to be an unused
sprite animation for the green dragon where he moves his head, which is interesting because
the game has static enemy sprites, but even more interesting than that, there’s a goshdarn
Pikachu overworld sprite in the game. Yes Pikachu from Pokemon is in Dragon Quest. What is he doing here?? I mean look at it, that’s a Pikachu in Dragon
Quest! What? Was he supposed to be a playable character
or something? Or maybe a boss? How or why did they put him in the game? Oh and that’s not even where it ends. There’s also a Gundam in here. That’s the Turn A Gundam, from the anime
show that debut the same year as Dragon Quest I and II for GameBoy. They stuck Pikachu and a Gundam in the game. There’s also a penguin and some sort of
car… creature... thing. I don’t really know what this one is. Crazy stuff though, bet you didn’t know
about that huh. More hidden content. In Dragon Quest III for Game Boy Color, there’s
a hidden spritesheet. This one is especially interesting because
it has many implications about a potential Dragon Quest IV remake for Game Boy. You see, Dragon Quest III has these Monster
Medals that you can collect by beating up monsters in the game. There’s a medal for every monster and boss
and you can collect them all. But what some people may not know is that
there’s an entire set of unused monster medals hidden in the game’s code. These ones are for the monsters of Dragon
Quest IV. There’s medals for monsters like King Slime
and Platypunk who first appeared in DQIV and even bosses like Estark have medals. This brings up so many questions that have
gone unanswered for over twenty years. Why are these in the game? It obviously took time to make all of them,
so why were they never used? Some people speculate that Enix was originally
planning Dragon Quest IV for GameBoy to be included on the same cart as Dragon Quest
III, just like how we got I and II in a bundle. Or maybe they were planning DQIV for Game
Boy and they wanted players to be able to trade medals between III and IV. Whatever the plan was, we have no clue about
it. It’s a mystery. We’re not quite done here yet. Expanding even further into this mystery is
the fact that there’s a new monster in the supposed DQIV medal set that we’ve never
seen before. The very last one at the end. It’s a design for a monster that does not
exist in the Dragon Quest series in any form. Not only has it never appeared in the original
Dragon Quest IV, but it’s not even in the Toriyama art book with the other scrapped
monsters. Square Enix has never acknowledged it either. It’s the most mysterious creature in the
series history. People refer to her as Queen Medusa. The only thing we know about this monster
is how the head looks from the medal and that it was most likely going to be the final boss,
possibly in an aquatic bonus dungeon as signified by the scrapped aquatic monster medals preceding
it. There are many things about this monster’s
existence that still bother me. It never became canon, with DQIV’s PS1 and
DS remakes not even acknowledging it. It’s completely lost to history, and the
only reason we even know about it is because fans hacked the game, so the developers clearly
did not want anyone to find out about it. I want to know what happened to this monster,
why these medals were included in the game, and what their plans were. I hope one day we could find out the full
story, but until then, this is a huge unsolved mystery. Hidden content can be found all over the series,
especially in Dragon Quest VIII which has locked off content including entirely new
NPC models that are otherwise never used, poses, unused maps, there’s even two completely
unused debug items called the Mimic Stone and Blarney Stone. The Mimic Stone lets you recover health in
battle while the Blarney stone wipes out your entire party instantly. What could possibly be the point of something
that stupid? It was obviously included for testing purposes. Going back to cool fan theories, there’s
one theory that persisted for many years and was eventually acknowledged by Yuji Horii. So in Dragon Quest VI there’s a mysterious
yellow dragon who appears to fly the party to Murdaw’s keep after being summoned. During this scene Ashlynn, one of your party
members, is reluctant to get on the island for some mysterious reason and so she is absent
during the Dragon ride. Many fans of the games have speculated that
the dragon you ride IS Ashlynn. And to be honest, there’s some evidence
backing this up. We already talked about how when you arrive
on the Isle of Murdaw, Ashlynn refuses to go, claiming that it doesn’t feel right. This makes it so that she doesn’t appear
in the same room as the dragon. On the Super Famicom version however, you
could actually go back to the Isle and summon the Dragon again with Ashlynn present and
they actually went out of their way to fix this oversight in the DS version by making
it so the Dragon can never reappear, very likely an intentional fix. One NPC among Ashlynn’s kind, the Sorcerians,
further hints towards this by saying “"We Sorcerians have the power to detatch our souls
from our physical forms. If we're blessed with enough magical might,
we can even transform our bodies. Ashlynn the Acolyte has the blood of Sorceress
Ashmerelda coursing through her veins. I bet she could turn into anything...even
a dragon!"” There’s just so much evidence pointing to
this being true, so whats the deal? Well, in a 2014 interview, Yuji Horii confirmed
it. It’s true. Ashlynn is the Dragon. He said that there was originally going to
be a more fleshed out storyline involving the dragon, but due to time constraints from
his other project at the time, Chrono Trigger, they had to scrap it. So there you have it, a fan theory that turned
out to be true. And of course it was Chrono Trigger that screwed
Dragon Quest VI over in the end. At least this theory can be put to rest and
players can be confident that Ashlynn is in fact the mysterious dragon. So there’s a lot of interesting naming conventions
the series uses. Did you know that in Dragon Quest XI, every
single character who was born in the Heliodor region is named after a rock? Think about it. First of all, the name Heliodor comes from
a real life mineral. Then when we look at the residents of the
region there’s Gemma, named after a gemstone, Amber, Sandy the dog is named after sand,
there’s Chalky, Cole, Carnelian, Jasper, practically every character from Cobblestone
and Heliodor are named after rocks. This includes random side characters like
Roxy the dancer. But then you have some characters like Erik
and Hendrik who aren’t named after rocks. This is because they weren’t born in Heliodor. Erik was born up north near Sniffelheim while
Hendrik is from the Zwardrust region. Pretty cool attention to detail. TIER 5 Now I want to get into more fan theories. There’s loads of fan theories in Dragon
Quest, we’ve already talked about the theory of Ashlynn being the dragon, which was later
confirmed as being canon. It makes you wonder if there’s other fan
theories that Japanese Dragon Quest fans come up with. Well there certainly are a few out there. When Dragon Quest XI was first revealed, we
didn’t know much about the game aside from the Luminary’s design. This didn’t stop fans from speculating however
and a common fan theory that was circulating around in Japan was that the hero of this
game was actually a younger Dragonlord and that the game would see the main character
become the villain at the end. The reasoning? The fact that the logo looks like an inverted
version of Dragon Quest I’s logo and how the Luminary’s color scheme had the same
purple as the Dragonlord. Yeah, he is purple therefore he is the bad
guy, that was the bulk of the theory. Honestly it was always a very flimsy theory,
but interesting nonetheless and it actually did manage to predict that there would be
a connection to the original game as I’m pretty sure the devs were silent on the plot
at that point. There are a lot of crazy theories out there
especially among Japanese fans. Some fans think that Terry from Dragon Quest
VI somehow becomes Estark, the lord of the underworld from Dragon Quest IV, by discovering
the secret of evolution, as hinted by the secret ending in the game. I think this is a cool theory. It’s backed up by Yuji Horii’s comments,
where he states that he originally intended for Terry, who was originally supposed to
be the main character, to eventually become a demon king at the end of the game. So basically the theory goes that in the game’s
alternate ending, which you unlock after defeating Nokturnus, you get a special scene where Terry
goes on his own to visit Nokturnus for an unknown reason. That’s the main difference. As to why he goes there to visit him? Fans speculate that he went there to learn
the secret of Evolution and become stronger than ever, eventually becoming Estark and
losing all of his memories. Estark is also not seen in DQVI while he appears
in DQIV and V. This is a bat insane theory, but I really
like how the vagueness of the series causes fans to come up with things like these. Another similar theory I’ve heard is that
Kiefer from Dragon Quest VII eventually becomes Orgodemir, the mysterious time hopping demon
lord who has threatened the world in the game. This is a really cool theory, and it’s backed
up by people pointing out that the two characters look somewhat similar and Orgodemir wears
a ring similarly to Kiefer. Fans also point out that Kiefer makes cryptic
remarks about how his destiny will change and the like. This one is an even bigger stretch, but it’s
an interesting theory nonetheless. Especially considering that since Kiefer leaves
the party early on, the idea of him playing an even bigger role in the story later on
is really intriguing. I like the concept of the main character having
to defeat his own friend in the end. It makes their parting even more bittersweet. So aside from these, there’s tons of weird
theories. Some people think Nevan from DQVI is actually
a Slime turned human because he can equip the Slime armor that only Slimes can typically
equip. Some people think Erik and Mia from Dragon
Quest XI are silver sabrecubs who turned human because of their blue hair and because the
sabrecubs typically roam the area they’re from. It’s the theories like these that really
interest me, the ones that have some evidence backing them up but are otherwise completely
insane. So here’s one of my fan theories, and this
is one I haven’t heard other people talk about and it just shows how many little details
go over so many people’s heads. A cool detail I noticed in Dragon Quest XI,
when you go to the town of Gallopolis, there’ll be this grand horse race going on, and you’ll
find out there’s a horseback rider there named Faiz, who is the champion and has won
the Sand National race countless times. He’s extremely famous throughout the city
and you’ll find just about every NPC talking about him. When you enter the stables, you can meet Faiz
yourself and you may notice something… a little different about him. Unlike the other knights of Gallopolis, who
wear yellow, his tunic is green, like a knight of Dundrasil, the fallen kingdom of the Luminary. Which makes me think that Faiz is actually
the last survivor of Dundrasil which is very cool to me and is just something I like to
think. Even though he has the Arabic naming convention
of Gallopolitans as opposed to the Scottish names of Dundrasil citizens, I still like
the idea of this great knight from a faraway kingdom coming here and becoming a champion. Not a detail most people would notice. So that’s about as much as I wanted to go
over in regards to fan theories. Now you may notice we’re inching towards
the end here. I’m going to tell you some real crazy stuff
you may not have known. Did you know… that Dragon Quest VIII may
have started out as Dark Cloud 3? Now if you’re wondering what the heck Dark
Cloud is, it’s Level-5’s first video game they ever made way back on the PS2, and it
was an action RPG. There was a sequel, Dark Cloud 2, that was
made a few years later. After that, the studio would go on to make
Dragon Quest VIII and we’d never hear about Dark Cloud again. Well, it’s possible that they were developing
Dark Cloud 3, but when Level-5 got the deal to make Dragon Quest VIII, they ended up scrapping
the game and used the assets they created for their new project instead. The evidence? Well, in the game files for Dragon Quest VIII,
a line of code can be found in the game’s ELF file saying “S:/DARK3/DC3_SOUND/”
for the sound system of Dragon Quest VIII. This clearly makes a link between Dragon Quest
VIII and Dark Cloud. Was Dragon Quest VIII originally supposed
to be Dark Cloud 3? Or maybe this was just a codename? In any case, Dark Cloud fans got screwed,
but in the process we definitely got a gem with Level-5’s Dragon Quest games. The Celebrity Dragon Quest IX party. When Dragon Quest IX was on its way to the
West, Nintendo spared no expense to promote it, it was one of their biggest releases of
2010 and they counted on it being a huge success. They made commercials starring Seth Green
stalking random kids, there were store events, they dedicated a whole segment of their E3
press conference to the game, they were pushing this thing hard. And one of the results of this massive marketing
campaign is the somewhat famous Celebrity Dragon Quest IX party. You may have seen this image of Sheldon from
the Big Bang Theory holding up a copy of Dragon Quest IX. This image is not fake, thats really Jim Parsons
promoting the game and he is not the only one. At Comic Con 2010 the Wired Cafe had this
DQIX pre launch event with a bunch of celebrities, it is absolutely insane looking at it now,
but they took pictures of all these celebrities playing Dragon Quest. There’s Zachary Levi who played Shazam,
there was Sam Trammell, Dylan and Cole Sprouse, Victoria Justice, the rapper Lil John was
there, playing Dragon Quest. Just so many random people there, Hideo Kojima
was even there. Like its amazing and bizarre looking back
at this marketing campaign and comparing it to how DQ’s marketing is handled nowadays,
this was pushed just as much as any other Nintendo game and its no wonder the game sold
over a million copies over here. Just insane. So going back, Dragon Quest VIII had some
promotional stuff going on too. According to an old Square Enix press release
from 2005, there was a multi million dollar marketing campaign for DQVIII in the West. Alongside commercials, print ads and giveaway
demo discs, Square Enix had their own dedicated Dragon Quest forums called Slime Knights which
had 7,000 members believe it or not. The Slime Knights forums are a relic of the
past since they are now long gone. The only thing remaining from there are memories
of people who used to post there. From what I could find, the forums had a points
system and prizes that members could earn. Accounts I’ve read mention that members
earned mini medals by participating in quests that includes things like art contests. You could win DVDs like Pirates of the Carribean,
PS2 Square Enix games, Dragon Quest Merchandise, t shirts, slime toys and an Apple Slimepod. I wonder what a Slimepod is, I’m guessing
its a DQ themed iPod which sounds very interesting. In 2007 the forums were unfortunately closed
however it looks like most of the community migrated to Dragon’s Den. Its a very interesting and obscure piece of
Dragon Quest history, these forums and I felt kind of sad investigating it and seeing a
community like that just disappear. Alright moving away from the depressing stuff,
we’re almost done here. Lets talk more obscure game trivia. So in Dragon Quest XI there’s loads of little
secrets I wanted to go over before wrapping things up. In DQXI, the final boss Calasmos is trapped
throughout the game in a floating space prison that characters in the game call Erdwin’s
lantern. Later on in the story it starts to fall to
the ground, eventually releasing him. While you might think that this giant orb,
which is supposed to contain Calasmos probably doesn’t actually have anything in it, you
would be wrong. As a matter of fact, Erdwin’s lantern hides
a secret within. If you activate the debug camera in the console
commands, you can zoom the camera into the heart of Erdwin’s lantern to find what lies
within. And what you find will surprise you. Within Erdwin’s lantern is a larval version
of Calasmos in the shape of a ball. This is mind blowing and I don’t think anyone
has ever revealed this before so for many of you this will be your first time finding
out about this. This Calasmos Ball is distinctly different
looking than the regular Calasmos. Its round and looks like its hibernating. This model is never used in the actual game. In the actual game, Calasmos awakens in a
pre rendered cutscene that doesn’t even use in game models, so there is literally
no reason for them to have hidden this in the Lantern, there’s no reason at all. This is never used and is one of the most
mysterious things you will find in the game. Even I don’t know what the purpose of this
is. Maybe its a leftover from some idea they had? Maybe they were going to give Calasmos multiple
forms? In any case, this is cool as heck. For our final part, at the very bottom of
the iceberg. The World of Erdrea. Dragon Quest XI’s world. This world is really mysterious. Its vast and expansive and there’s so much
about Erdrea that we don’t know and we might never know. There are so many gaps in the game’s lore
for players to fill in. Questions come up like, where did the forge
in Mount Huji come from? Its mysteriously shaped like Erdrick’s Ramia
emblem from the original Dragon Quest, but as far as we know its been there for hundreds
of years and its existence is never explained. There’s mysterious sites like this all over
the world of Dragon Quest XI and after taking a critical look at the world you’ll find
yourself with more questions than answers. There’s a random floating island in Erdrea
called the Battlefield where the Orichalcum used to make the legendary sword is found. What is this island? What is it doing here? What kind of battle occurred here? Why is there a random bunny girl here? How did she get here? Why is it that in the Japanese version the
bunny girl’s voice changes every time you talk to her to some random famous Japanese
voice actor? There’s a lot that isn’t explained in
the game. A whole lot. And whats most mysterious to me, are the glyphs. You see, you’ll find across Erdrea there
are these etchings found in certain places. There’s three main ones. There’s the giant glyph of Yggdrasil etched
onto the mountainside of Cobblestone Tor, there’s a Tockle over in the mountains by
Arboria and there’s the Yggdragon on Insula Incognita. Its brings up the questions of how these carvings
even happened? Characters in the game make mention of the
ancients throughout their party chat with Veronica even alluding to the ancients carving
runes on the side of the mountains. Who are these ancients? Are they referring to the Watchers? The ones who came before? So many questions. These runes are also likely inspired by the
Incan Nazca lines as Yuji Horii and the DQXI development team actually went to Machu Pichu
during development of the game and based most of the stone architecture and landscape of
Cobblestone on Peru. The glyphs in Dragon Quest XI are very reminiscent
of the Nazca lines found in Peru. And some of these glyphs even differ when
compared to the concept illustrations in the artbook. The glyphs are mysterious, unexplained and
mind boggling for their purpose in the world. And this brings us to our final point. The Dragon Quest XI beta map. In the PC version of Dragon Quest XI S, the
development team left a strange little secret that brings up even more questions. When you change the launch options for DQXI,
you spawn in a debug area and it is in this area where we see what looks like an early
beta map of Erdrea. It has the basic shape of Erdrea with a few
differences here and there. What is this map? What is its purpose? Well, it was likely created early on in development
so that there would be some consistent planning and worldbuilding. While it looks like the map of Erdrea, it
is full of differences. The map is very much a rough draft with some
towns and landmarks outlined, you can see the windmills next to the ruins as well as
the canals and other towns. The continents aren’t exactly to scale with
the final product and there are markers for some of the Whaleway stations, but not all
of them. There’s even markers to denote the places
where you can play Lorelei’s harp to transport yourself from one area to another, although
there’s two points linked to each other that don’t appear in the final game, so
the developers originally planned to have a point that would transfer you way farther
across the world. This harp point was removed in the final game. Whats most interesting though is that there’s
an emblem for the three glyphs located in the world. They’re marked by a real Nazca glyph that
you would find in the real world, solidifying my theory that parts of Erdrea are directly
based on the landscape and architecture of Peru. What this all means is that the three glyphs
found throughout the world of Erdrea are very purposely put in these specific locations
and it was planned out very early on in development. There must be something important about them,
some sort of secret meaning to why they’re there. As of now, the purpose of their existence
is unexplained and it might stay that way for a long while. So thats it. The Dragon Quest Iceberg. I compiled a lot of unknown facts and tidbits
I’ve collected over the years, every headscratcher and neat little easter egg I’ve noticed
since I’ve started playing the games, but the series is so huge, every game has so much
to unpack and analyze that there’s sure to be even more secrets that even I might
not know about. So until we discover them, I think this is
a good guide for the many mysteries and secrets of the Dragon Quest series. I hope you all enjoyed the video. Please let me know what you think about this
in the comments, was this interesting at all? I’d love to hear your feedback. Thanks for watching and I’ll see you next
time.
