Toyotarou, the official artist behind the Dragon Ball Super manga, is taking on a classic role-playing game from Super Nintendo. This genre-defining RPG featured concept and character art by the late Akira Toriyama, who is better known throughout the world as the creator of Dragon Ball.
In the latest edition of "Toyotarou Tried to Draw," the official Dragon Ball website uploaded Toyotarou's artwork of Crono, the silent protagonist from the 1995 SNES game Chrono Trigger. "This game features lots of concept art drawn by Akira Toriyama himself, which is just one of the many things I loved about it," Toyotarou said. Toriyama was the lead character designer for Chrono Trigger, designing the human characters, mecha creations and amphibian warrior named Frog.
Chrono Trigger follows a time-traveling group of heroes trying to stop the chain of events that led to the end of the world. The game was developed by the "Dream Team" of Square Enix (formerly SquareSoft): Final Fantasy creator Hironobu Sakaguchi, Dragon Quest creator Yuji Horii and, of course, Toriyama, the creator of Dragon Ball and character designer of Dragon Quest. Upon its original release, critics praised Chrono Trigger for its innovations in gameplay, such as making enemies visible on the map, so that players could decide whether or not they wanted to engage in turn-based combat.
Chrono Trigger's engaging and emotional storyline was praised by critics as well, despite it being more simplistic than its competitors. Many of the game's characters share the same visual traits from Toriyama's artwork, such as the cavewoman Ayla appearing similarly to the trigger-happy Launch from Dragon Ball. The red, spikey hair of Crono is also similar to Toriyama's Super Saiyan designs, especially when compared to Super Saiyan God (Red) Goku. Before passing away this year, Toriyama developed the multimedia franchise Sand Land and the upcoming Dragon Ball Daima anime series.
Since its original 1995 release, Chrono Trigger has been re-released on numerous gaming platforms, including PlayStation and the Nintendo DS. The most recent re-releases have been on mobile devices and PC via Steam. The Dragon Ball Super manga remains on hiatus, but new artwork by Toyotarou suggests that the series may resume publication sometime in the near future. The Dragon Ball anime franchise is available to stream on Crunchyroll.
Source: Dragon Ball official website
It's probably not indicative of anything, but it sure would be cool if Square-Enix had been remaking (and preferably not ruining) Chrono Trigger with Toriyama before his passing and now Toyotarou is taking over in his stead. More likely this is just something random he did, but it's cool nonetheless. Crono is really cool, I always loved his design.
