Dragon Quest III sold 1.1 million copies in a single day in Japan, hundreds of schoolchildren were reportedly arrested for skipping class to buy it, and Enix voluntarily moved future releases to Saturdays. This episode traces the franchise back to a 1982 Enix programming contest that sent Yuji Horii to AppleFest 83 in San Francisco, where he discovered Wizardry and Ultima and set out to bring statistical RPGs to the Famicom with composer Koichi Sugiyama and Dragon Ball artist Akira Toriyama.

The hosts break down Horii's obsession with accessibility, from tuning text speed to a natural reading rhythm to the locked-room opening that teaches talking, looting and inventory without a tutorial, and the forgiving death system that returns you to a church with half your gold but all your experience. They then cover the slime's origin as a puddle of ...