Mouth-on? with Dragon Quest X Monster Figure Collection!

The more often I'm compelled to buy crappy drinks in order to obtain video game-related trinkets, the more often I wonder whether what I'm doing really involves my mouth. With the release of Dragon Quest X imminent (no seriously, it comes out tomorrow), Square Enix has partnered up with Pepsi and their atrocious low-calorie Pepsi Nex soft drink to promote the game in its native land of Japan. With certain drinks it's easy to tell who's getting the bum deal, like when the drink is way better than the toy that's attached, like maybe Boss Coffee sticks a shitty F1 racecar onto it. But with Pepsi Nex, which I generally prefer to drink only when there isn't an ice cold can of leech sweat handy, Square is definitely doing the heavy lifting. I bought two bottles of the barely-consumable swill merely for their toys, and as I poked through the bottles on the shelf looking for the most easily-accessible figures that I preferred, I felt more like a huge dork than I generally prefer to. Was it worth it?! You decide!!


The Dragon Quest X Monster Figure Collection is composed of sixteen different monsters from the game, which are all listed on the back of the package. They consist of slime, slime drackey, metal slime, golem, silver devil, king lizard, and a bunch of other crap that I can read but am unable to tie mentally to any specific Dragon Quest monster because they like to change their names for the English releases. But wait—it's not just a figure in the pack! THERE IS MORE.

Yes, the more is that each monster also comes with a tiny blue stand to stick them on so you can stand them up, even though generally they can stand up without the use of the stands. These things sure are cute! If I could choose to either have them all or not have any, I'd have them all, for a while anyway, until I was tired of them.


Oh hey, the Pepsi Nex tastes like saltwater mixed with yeast, it is bad.

The fact that promotional efforts here are focused on the monsters is kind of interesting, really. Dragon Quest is one of those series of games that in Japan is primarily known for its monsters rather than its characters, which tend to be rather faceless. The slime character is so well known that I actually once read an article where some total dweeb did a survey asking like a hundred Japanese people to "draw some slime" and virtually all of them drew the iconic dollop with eyes that is the Dragon Quest slime. That stands in stark contrast to series like Final Fantasy, which generally promote themselves from a character perspective, even though they have their own share of iconic monsters (cactuar, tonberry, goblin) which could be used in a similar fashion.


The best part about Dragon Quest X Monster Figure Collection is that if you have a cat, the cat will try to chew dracky's wings off. At least someone around here's getting their tastebuds satisfied.