BODY: Pour the soy sauce, summon the slime. Square Enix's latest Dragon Quest collectible turns a humble Japanese tabletop staple into a tiny piece of interactive RPG nostalgia, and it landed in the e-STORE on May 2.
The new lineup comes from the "Smile Slime Wa Series" — the "Wa" (和) signaling traditional Japanese craftsmanship and aesthetics — and features four small ceramic dishes (kozara) priced at 1,320 yen each. The set covers the franchise's most iconic monsters: the standard blue Slime, the King Slime, the Metal Slime, and the She-Slime (Slime Beth). Each dish hides a translucent character silhouette in its base, invisible until soy sauce pools above it and brings the figure into view.
The dishes measure roughly the size of a typical Japanese soy sauce plate, making them functional rather than purely decorative. Square Enix has steadily expanded the Smile Slime Wa Series over the past few years with items like tea cups, chopstick rests, and small bowls, all designed to fit naturally into a Japanese household table setting rather than sit behind glass on a shelf.
Stock is being sold exclusively through the Square Enix e-STORE, and previous entries in this line have tended to sell through quickly, particularly when the lineup includes the Metal Slime — long beloved by fans for its in-game rarity and the satisfying "chiririn" sound it makes when it appears.
The insider take
The "reveal when wet" gimmick taps into a quietly popular niche in Japanese tableware called moyō ga ukabu (浮かび上がる, "patterns that float up"), commonly seen at souvenir shops in places like Kyoto and Arita. Square Enix borrowing the technique for Dragon Quest is a smart cultural fit — Dragon Quest is itself a deeply domestic franchise here, more of a generational shared memory than a flashy export, and slotting its mascots into everyday dinnerware leans into that homely positioning rather than treating them as collector trophies.
Originally reported by GAME Watch (Japanese).