BODY: In Dragon Quest, opening a treasure chest is a gamble — sometimes it's gold, sometimes it's a Mimic with a grin full of teeth and a nasty habit of ending your party on the spot. Square Enix has now turned that trauma into living room furniture.
The Smile Slime Plush Tissue Cover: Mimic went on sale October 10 through the Square Enix e-STORE, priced at 3,960 yen (roughly $26). It's a returning item rather than a brand-new design, back in stock after an earlier run — a pattern Square Enix merchandise fans in Japan know well.
The product is exactly what it sounds like: a soft chest that slips over a standard Japanese box of tissues. Lift the lid and the Mimic's face is revealed underneath, tongue out, teeth bared, waiting for someone to reach for a tissue. It's made entirely of polyester — both the outer fabric and the stuffing — and measures roughly 280 x 140 x 200mm (width x depth x height in use), sized for the rectangular tissue boxes that are standard on Japanese kitchen counters and kotatsu tables.
The item sits in the long-running Smile Slime line, Square Enix's homeware-and-plush label built around Dragon Quest monsters. Alongside slime cushions, slime rice molds and slime coin banks, the range has quietly become one of the most durable character-goods brands in Japan, outliving several console generations.
The insider take
Box tissue covers are a real product category in Japan, not a novelty — tissues live out in the open on dining tables and in entryways, so covering the brash packaging is standard interior etiquette. That's why character tissue covers arrive with a practicality Western fans sometimes miss: this isn't a shelf collectible, it's something a Japanese household will actually use daily for years. The Mimic version also lands on a cultural in-joke, since Dragon Quest occupies a position in Japan closer to a national holiday than a game series, and the Mimic is its most reliable source of player panic. One caveat for overseas readers: the Japanese e-STORE ships to a limited set of regions, so getting one usually means a proxy shopping service or a trip to a Square Enix Cafe goods counter.
Originally reported by GAME Watch (Japanese).