Dragon Quest
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49 free Dragon Quest trivia questions with answers — entertainment quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
Dragon Quest is the game Japan treats as a national pastime: schoolchildren were arrested for skipping class to buy the third one, every release landed on a Saturday for a quarter of a century, and its overture was the first piece of music played at the Tokyo Olympics opening ceremony. Yuji Horii built it from Wizardry and Ultima, Akira Toriyama drew the Slime, and Koichi Sugiyama wrote the theme in five minutes. These 49 questions cover the series from the 1986 Famicom original to the restart of Dragon Quest XII: the Dragon Warrior name and the tabletop game that forced it, Erdrick, Alefgard and the Dragonlord, the Zenithia trilogy and its floating castle, Torneko and the Mystery Dungeon games, mini medals, Puff Puff, the church saves and the half-your-gold death penalty. There are questions on the Adventure of Dai manga, the Legend of the Hero Abel anime, Luida's Bar in Roppongi, Google's NES-style Maps prank, the London Philharmonic, Famitsu's all-time poll and the four protagonists who share one slot in Super Smash Bros. Easy questions stick to the creators and the mascot; the hardest ask about AppleFest '83, Polari and the Wednesday that broke the Saturday streak. Every answer is cited to a page we checked, with a short explanation so you learn something even when you miss. Play it solo or print it for a JRPG night.
30 of 49 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01The spin-off Dragon Quest Builders borrows its block-by-block construction from which hit sandbox game?
Minecraft
Minecraft. Builders adds a story of its own, though: its ruined world is what happens if the first game's hero accepts the villain's offer to share the world with him.
Q 02Which manga artist designed Dragon Quest's characters and monsters from the very first game?
Akira Toriyama
Akira Toriyama was in the middle of drawing Dragon Ball when he took the job. For the first American release, his cover art was dropped in favour of a generic Western fantasy painting.
Q 03In Dragon Quest V, which childhood friend can the hero marry instead of the heiress Nera?
Bianca
Bianca. Nera's wealthy father offers his daughter only to a suitor who can pass his trial of fetching two magic rings, and a later remake added a third possible bride: Nera's haughty sister Debora.
Q 04Under what name were the Dragon Quest games sold in North America until 2005?
Dragon Warrior
Dragon Warrior. Nintendo of America published the first game in 1989 and overestimated demand so badly that it ended up giving unsold copies away free with Nintendo Power subscriptions.
Q 05Dragon Quest was renamed for its early North American releases because of a trademark held by what?
A tabletop role-playing game
A tabletop role-playing game called DragonQuest, sold by wargame maker SPI and later by Dungeons & Dragons publisher TSR, held the US trademark. Only after it lapsed did the video games reclaim their own name.
Q 06Which console did the first Dragon Quest debut on in 1986?
Famicom
Famicom. The original cartridge had no battery save, so Japanese players wrote down passwords to pick up where they left off; a proper save feature only arrived with the American version three years later.
Q 07In 2003, Dragon Quest's publisher merged with which rival Japanese game company?
Square
Square. Enix was the legal survivor of the deal, yet it was Square's president who ended up running the merged company.
Q 08Dragon Quest XI was released in the West under which subtitle?
Echoes of an Elusive Age
Echoes of an Elusive Age. In Japan it launched on the PlayStation 4 and the Nintendo 3DS on the same day, and the 3DS version let players flip between 3D and old-style 2D graphics.
Q 09Which small blue monster became the mascot of the Dragon Quest series?
The Slime
The Slime is usually the first and weakest enemy a player meets, yet it became the face of the whole series and even stars in action spin-offs of its own.
Q 10Which two Western RPGs did the first Dragon Quest borrow its core ideas from?
Wizardry and Ultima
Wizardry and Ultima. Yuji Horii took the overhead world map from Ultima and the first-person menu battles from Wizardry, and the mix became the template for Japanese role-playing games.
Q 11Dragon Quest's creator and its artist joined Final Fantasy's creator to make which 1995 role-playing classic?
Chrono Trigger
Chrono Trigger. Its publisher sold the game on its 'Dream Team': the creators of Japan's two biggest role-playing series, normally competitors, working side by side on a time-travel adventure.
Q 12Which kingdom is the setting of the first Dragon Quest game?
Alefgard
Alefgard fills the whole map of the first game, then shrinks to one small corner of the sequel's far bigger world. In Dragon Quest III it turns up again as a dark world hidden beneath the main one.
Q 13In Dragon Quest VIII, the jester Dhoulmagus's curse turns Princess Medea into which animal?
A horse
Q 21Which recurring Dragon Quest gag, named for a Japanese sound effect, was cut from some American versions?
Puff Puff
Puff Puff. Nintendo-era translations cut or rewrote the scene, and later games turned it into a bait-and-switch joke: the lights go out and the promised massage turns out to be something else entirely.
Q 22Which Dragon Quest game was the first sold in North America under the series' real name?
Journey of the Cursed King
Journey of the Cursed King, the eighth game, took back the Dragon Quest name in 2005 once the rival trademark had lapsed. A year later it became the first main entry ever released in Europe.
Q 23Which main Dragon Quest game was originally released only on the Nintendo DS?
IX
A horse. The same curse left her father, King Trode, a toad-like monster, so she spends the whole game pulling the wagon he rides in.
Q 14Which name does the original English version of Dragon Quest III refuse to accept for its hero?
Erdrick
Erdrick. Type it in and the game asks for your real name instead, because the hero only earns that legendary title in the ending: the twist that the third game is a prequel to the first two.
Q 15What is the floating castle that links Dragon Quest IV, V and VI?
Zenithia
Zenithia is not always in the sky: in Dragon Quest V the castle has fallen into a lake years before the story begins, and the hero has to set it flying again.
Q 16Which travelling merchant from Dragon Quest IV got his own roguelike in 1993?
Torneko
Torneko gets a whole chapter of Dragon Quest IV as an ordinary shop worker who is sick of his boss and sets out to open a store of his own. Players liked him enough to make him the star of a spin-off.
Q 17Which Chunsoft series began in 1993 with a roguelike starring a Dragon Quest IV merchant?
Mystery Dungeon
Mystery Dungeon. The series soon outgrew its Dragon Quest roots: later games from the same studio send a cast of Pokémon through its randomly generated mazes instead.
Q 18Which collectible debuted in Dragon Quest IV as an optional hunt, never needed to finish the game?
Mini medals
Mini medals are small star-stamped gold coins tucked away in chests, pots and drawers. Nothing in the story needs them: a medal-collecting king simply swaps prizes for them.
Q 19In most Dragon Quest games, where must players go to save their progress?
A church
A church. A priest or nun records your deeds there, though the first American translations renamed it a House of Healing because Nintendo of America restricted religious imagery in its games.
Q 20In Dragon Quest, what does the party lose when it is wiped out in battle?
Half its gold
Half its gold. There is no 'game over' in Dragon Quest: the hero simply wakes at the nearest save point with every item and experience point intact, and most games offer a bank to keep the gold safe.
IX was built around a console you carry: leave the DS asleep in a bag and its Tag Mode quietly trades guest characters with any other player you happen to walk past.
Q 24Which was the first main Dragon Quest game to skip North America on its original release?
V
V came out in Japan in 1992 and stayed there. English-speaking players had to wait more than 16 years, until a Nintendo DS remake in 2009 brought its first official translation.
Q 25Dragon Quest XII was announced in 2021 under which subtitle, before the project was restarted in 2026?
The Flames of Fate
The Flames of Fate. On the series' 40th anniversary in May 2026 its producers revealed that development had begun again from scratch, and the game re-emerged with a new subtitle, Beyond Dreams.
Q 26Which Monopoly-style board game series, created by Yuji Horii, pits Dragon Quest characters against Final Fantasy's?
Itadaki Street
Itadaki Street was long sold only in Japan. When it finally reached North America in 2011, Nintendo published it under a different name: Fortune Street.
Q 27Dragon Quest Heroes borrows its hack-and-slash gameplay from which Koei Tecmo series?
Dynasty Warriors
Dynasty Warriors. Its own studio, Omega Force, built the spin-off, so instead of waiting politely for a turn, a single hero carves through whole armies of monsters at once.
Q 28Which Dragon Quest manga grew out of a two-chapter trial story in Weekly Shōnen Jump in 1989?
The Adventure of Dai
The Adventure of Dai borrows the games' world, spells and monsters but retells none of their plots: its story, about a boy raised by friendly monsters on a remote island, is all its own.
Q 29Which studio animated Dragon Quest's Jump manga for TV in both 1991 and 2020?
Toei Animation
Toei Animation. Its 1991 series stopped after 46 episodes with the story still unfinished, so the 2020 version went back and started the tale over from the very beginning.
Q 30Which 1989 American cartoon used Dragon Quest's Dragonlord as a recurring villain?
Captain N: The Game Master
Captain N: The Game Master threw the worlds of many Nintendo-era games together, and its Dragonlord kept trying to conquer one of them, a realm called Dragon's Den.