BODY: Few monsters in gaming have taught players a harsher lesson than the Mimic. Open a treasure chest in Dragon Quest, and there's always a chance those teeth are waiting. Now Square Enix is bringing that particular trauma back to desks and living rooms: the Smile Slime Plush Tissue Cover — Mimic is returning to the Square Enix e-STORE on October 10, priced at ¥3,960.
The product is exactly what it sounds like. A plush treasure chest, sized at roughly 280mm wide, 140mm deep and 200mm tall in use, slips over a standard Japanese box of tissues. Lift the lid and the Mimic's grinning face appears, with the tissue opening positioned so that each sheet is pulled from somewhere around the monster's mouth. Construction is polyester fabric with polyester inner material.
This is a re-release rather than a new design — the cover has circulated before and sold out, and Square Enix is restocking it alongside the broader Smile Slime line, the company's long-running house brand for Dragon Quest plushies and lifestyle goods. Beyond the e-STORE, the item is listed at AmiAmi, Amazon, Rakuten, DMM and Yahoo Shopping, which should ease the usual first-day crush on Square Enix's own storefront.
No preorder bonuses, bundles or shipping caveats were announced, which for a restock is normal: the item simply goes live and stays available until stock runs out again.
The insider take
Smile Slime occupies an unusual niche in Japan — it's one of the few game merchandise lines that has achieved genuine household-object status here. Walk into a Japanese home with a Dragon Quest fan in it and you're as likely to find a Slime-shaped humidifier or a Mimic tissue cover as you are a shelf of figures, in part because Japanese living rooms almost universally keep a box of tissues out in the open, making a tissue cover one of the rare pieces of fan goods that earns a permanent spot in a shared space. That's also why these items keep coming back rather than staying discontinued: the Mimic cover has cycled through the e-STORE repeatedly over the years, and the pattern of quiet sellouts followed by quiet restocks suggests Square Enix has a reliably steady demand curve it's happy to keep feeding.
Originally reported by GAME Watch (Japanese).