Toei Animation released a teaser trailer for its upcoming anime series Dragon Quest: The Adventure of Dai. A spin-off of the RPG series Dragon Quest, The Adventure of Dai is based on the manga of the same name that was published by Weekly Shonen Jump from 1989 to 1996 and was translated and published in much of Europe and South America as Fly.
Released on YouTube, the trailer comes in at just over a minute and show protagonist Dai. The video also announces that anime will release in the fall of 2020. The plot of the manga, which is unrelated to the plots of any of the games, involves Dai, a 12-year-old boy raised as the only human on an island of peaceful monsters who wants to train to become a hero. His training is interrupted when the once vanquished demon lord, Hadlar, returns to start a new reign of terror over the world.
This will be the second anime adapted from Dragon Quest: The Adventure of Dai. The first ran for 46 episodes from 1991 to 1992 before the manga had wrapped up. The new anime will also get a video game tie-in in 2020 produced by Ryutaro Ichimura, who was the producer for the most recent installment in the series, Dragon Quest XI, along with other Dragon Quest games.
The Dragon Quest series remains hugely popular in Japan, so much so that because kids in Japan were skipping school to buy new releases of the series, the publisher Enix (now Square Enix) instituted a policy that new Dragon Quest games will only be released on Saturdays. The first manga adapted from the video games, Dragon Quest: The Adventure of Dai, was just as successful as the games, selling an estimated 2 billion copies throughout its entire run.