BODY: Every Dragon Quest veteran knows the moment: a treasure chest sitting in a dungeon corner, too conveniently placed, and the sinking feeling as it sprouts teeth. The Mimic has been separating careful players from reckless ones since the 1980s. Now it wants your tissues.
Square Enix has brought back the Smile Slime Plush Tissue Cover: Mimic, which went on sale at the Square Enix e-STORE on October 10 for 3,960 yen (roughly $26). The item is a returning release rather than a new product — a sign the original run cleared out faster than expected, which is routine for the Mimic among Smile Slime goods.
The design is straightforward and all the better for it. A standard rectangular tissue box slides inside the plush body, and sheets pull up through the Mimic's gaping, fang-lined mouth. The chest's wood-grain texture, iron banding and that unmistakable lolling tongue are all rendered in soft fabric, so the effect on a side table is less "video game merch" and more "a monster has moved in and is being weirdly helpful."
Smile Slime is Square Enix's long-running Dragon Quest lifestyle brand, and it has quietly become one of the most reliable merchandise lines in Japanese gaming — plush Slimes, bath goods, kitchenware, stationery. The Mimic occupies a specific niche in the catalog: the joke monster that is genuinely frightening. In the games it is notorious for opening with instant-death magic, and plenty of players have lost a long dungeon run to one.
The insider take
The box tissue cover is a category that barely registers outside Japan but is a genuine interior staple here. Japanese homes burn through box tissues at a remarkable rate — they sit in living rooms, bedrooms, kitchens and car dashboards — and because the cardboard packaging is aggressively branded with supermarket graphics, covering it up became a standard decorating move. Walk into any Nitori or Loft and you will find a wall of them in linen, leather and felt. That is why this product makes immediate sense to a Japanese buyer and looks like an absurd novelty abroad: Square Enix is not inventing a gag item, it is dropping a Dragon Quest monster into a furniture slot that already exists in millions of homes. The Mimic, a creature whose entire job is pretending to be ordinary household furniture, is arguably the most on-brand possible choice.
Originally reported by GAME Watch (Japanese).