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The impressive five-piece handmade set also includes an adorable Slime!

With Dragon Quest celebrating its 30th anniversary in 2016, fans are showing their love for the gaming phenomenon through Lego, murals, guitars, and even amazing rice paddy art. One Japanese gamer,  however, wanted to do something extra special with his free time over the summer holiday period and so set about on a unique project that involved recreating the beloved battle screen from the original Dragon Quest game. The dedicated fan also apparently decided that the best way to recreate the memory of playing the game on Nintendo’s classic NES 8-bit home video game console was to do it with a massive array of cotton swabs.

▼ Hidden here in the status screen is Dragon Quest‘s 27 May 1986 release date: HP61 stands for “Showa 61” which, according to the Japanese calendar, is the year 1986, MP5 represents the fifth month of May, G27 is the 27th, and the year 1986 appears again as E1986.

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▼ While the basic black-and-white boards were time-consuming to make, they weren’t nearly as fiddly as the more colourful elements in the game.

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▼ Slime and Dragonlord look stunning. And they’re created entirely from cotton swabs!

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▼ The depth of shade and gradation of colour on the characters show painstaking attention to detail.

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Taking two weeks to complete, the large pieces were created with both plain white and coloured cotton swabs. To achieve just the right shade for specific areas, the artist custom made a large number of them by colouring them with magic markers, before securing them all in place with woodworking glue. One of the hurdles he discovered along the way was the variety of different sized swabs, which made it difficult to complete, but when it was done, the effort was all worth it.

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After sharing photos of his completed masterpiece on Twitter, @dqironbat received more than 14,000 likes and retweets.

Fellow fans were understandably impressed by the beautiful work, heaping the artist with praise.

“What a remarkable recreation!”
“It looks just like the original!”
“The Dragonlord’s robe and expression are absolutely stunning!”
“This is a work of art!”
“I can feel your passion for the game just by looking at this!”

With accolades and events continuing to be announced for the popular game in its anniversary year, the love for Dragon Quest shows no sign of stopping. We can’t wait to see what else the fans and creators have in store for us for the rest of the year!

Source: Togech
Images: Twitter/@dqironbat