Dragon Quest

Dragon Quest, previously published as Dragon Warrior in North America until 2005, is a series of role-playing video games created by Japanese game designer Yuji Horii (Armor Project), character designer Akira Toriyama (Bird Studio), and composer Koichi Sugiyama (Sugiyama Kobo) and published by Square Enix (formerly Enix). Since its inception, development of games in the series have been outsourced to a plethora of external companies until the tenth installment, with localized remakes and ports of later installments for the Nintendo DS, Nintendo 3DS, and Nintendo Switch being published by Nintendo outside of Japan. With its first game published in 1986, there are eleven main-series games, along with numerous spin-off games. In addition, there have been numerous manga, anime and novels published under the franchise, with nearly every game in the main series having a related adaptation.

The series introduced a number of features to the genre and has had a significant impact on the development of other role-playing games. Installments of the series have appeared on various computers, consoles, handheld devices, and mobile phones. Early in the series, the Dragon Quest games were released under the title Dragon Warrior in North America to avoid trademark conflict with the unrelated tabletop role-playing game DragonQuest. Square Enix did not register the Dragon Quest trademark for use in the United States until 2002.

The basic premise of most Dragon Quest games is to play a hero (actually named "Hero" in spinoff fiction, but in all games, the player is able to name their hero) who is out to save the land from peril at the hands of a powerful evil enemy, with the hero usually accompanied by a group of party members. Common elements persist throughout the series and its spinoff games: turn-based combat; recurring monsters, including the Slime, which became the series' mascot; a text-based menu system; and random encounters in most of the main series.