BODY: Nothing says "Japanese summer survival" quite like a beloved RPG mascot melting in your cooler bag. On July 4, Square Enix rolled out two new Smile Slime "Hiyahiya" cooling packs through its official e-STORE, giving Dragon Quest fans a stylish way to beat the heat.
The lineup features the franchise's most recognizable enemy in two forms. The standard Hiyahiya Slime cooling pack retails for ¥880, while the larger, crown-topped Hiyahiya King Slime cooling pack commands ¥1,100. Both render the gel monsters in a reusable freezer-pack form—an appropriately squishy match for creatures made of, well, goo.
The naming is a small piece of wordplay worth savoring. "Hiyahiya" (ひやひや) is the Japanese onomatopoeia for something cold and chilling, making it the perfect pun for a cooling pack based on a monster. It's the kind of gentle branding that has kept the Smile Slime merchandise line running for years across everything from plush toys to kitchenware.
Cooling packs (horeizai) are a summer staple in Japan, tucked into lunch bags, bento boxes, and neck coolers to fend off temperatures that routinely climb past 35°C. Turning that everyday item into collectible character goods is a classic Square Enix move.
The insider take
From Tokyo, this is merchandising that reads the room perfectly. Japanese summers have grown genuinely dangerous, and horeizai are less a novelty than a necessity—you'll find them in every convenience store and 100-yen shop by June. Square Enix knows that fans who might hesitate to buy a ¥5,000 figure will happily drop ¥880 on something they'd purchase anyway. It's the "affordable everyday luxury" strategy that has made the Smile Slime brand a quiet evergreen, and slapping a King Slime on a freezer pack is exactly the low-stakes, high-charm collectible that keeps Dragon Quest's mascot in daily rotation long between game releases.
Originally reported by GAME Watch (Japanese).