Pour one out for every time my heart skipped a beat while watching Dragon Quest: The Adventure of Dai (1991) and thinking I was finally about to see a DQ4 character but got juked.
See, part of the reason I put this anime on my list oh so many years ago now is because I grew up with the Dragon Warrior games on NES, and 4 in particular was one of my world-reshaping JRPGs (I feel like most everyone has at least one JRPG they played in their childhood or teen years that completely rocked them to their core; this was one of mine). In the early 00s when I learned what Google Image Search was, I got really into looking for fan art of characters I had only seen previously as pixel sprites. And while looking up DQ4 characters (I only knew their early NA translation names, not the modern ones they have today), I saw an image of what I THOUGHT must have been a screenshot from an anime featuring two of my favorite characters from DQ4. I only saw that one image by itself and nothing else like it, so I figured if it was a screenshot it must have only been like one scene in one episode, so it probably wasn't a big deal, but it was still cool and stuck in my memory for years.
Eventually, I found out that there was in fact a Dragon Quest anime, about original characters and an original plot with no direct ties to any of the games I grew up with. But it sounded like it could be fun nonetheless, and hey, maybe it still did have that screenshot after all! So now here I am in 2023, finally got around to watching it and keeping my eyes peeled for that so-called screenshot, just in case. This is also a big reason I watched the 91 anime instead of the new 2020 one, even though the 91 version doesn't cover the complete manga series. I've been catching all the little references to DQ trivia and monsters that I know along the way, but it's been mostly centered on stuff from DQ 1-3, with 4 mostly only reflected in the background music (which in hindsight makes sense, given that the game debuted around 1990, and the anime aired in 91-92, adapted from a manga that started in 89).
Anyway, I'm 99% positive now that what I saw back then was not, in fact, a screenshot of Mara and Nara (oh sorry, guess I should use their modern names now - Maya and Meena Mahabala), but just a really cool fan art. A mild disappointment, but I can't fault the anime for that. Now I wonder if I can still dig up that fan art to show what I was talking about...
