Dragon Quest, published as Dragon Warrior in North America until 2005, is a series of Japanese role-playing video games created by Yuji Horii and his studio Armor Project. The games are published by Square Enix (formerly Enix), with localized versions of later installments for the Nintendo DS and 3DS being published by Nintendo outside of Japan. With its first title published in 1986, there are eleven main-series titles, along with numerous spin-off games. In addition, there have been numerous mangas, animes, and novels published under the franchise, with nearly every game in the main series having a related adaptation.
The series has had a significant impact on the development of console role-playing games and introduced a number of features to the genre. Installments of the series have appeared on various computers, consoles, handheld devices, and mobile phones. Early in the series the Dragon Quest games were released under the title Dragon Warrior in North America to avoid a trademark conflict with the unrelated tabletop role-playing game DragonQuest. Square Enix did not register the Dragon Quest trademark for use in the United States until 2002.
The basic premise of most Dragon Quest titles is to play a hero who is out to save the land from peril at the hands of a powerful evil enemy, with the hero usually accompanied by a group of party members. Common elements persist throughout the series and its spinoff titles: turn-based combat; recurring monsters, including the Slime, which became the series' mascot until the English version of Dragon Quest VIII; a text-based menu system; and random encounters (in the main series), until Dragon Quest IX.
Dragon Quest has had the same general lead development team since its inception in the 1980s, as scenario writer and game designer Yuji Horii, character designer Akira Toriyama, and music composer Koichi Sugiyama have handled their respective roles on every major game in the series. The original concepts, used since the first game, took elements from the Western role-playing games Wizardry and Ultima. A great deal of care was taken to make the gameplay intuitive so that players could easily start to play the game. The series features a number of religious overtones which were heavily censored in the Western NES versions.
The Tokyo Kosei Wind Orchestra (東京佼成ウインドオーケストラ Tōkyō Kōsei Uindo Ōkesutora, abbreviated TKWO) is a professional concert band. It is widely considered as one of the world's finest, only to be rivaled by the Dallas Wind Symphony in the recent years.
TKWO was established in 1960 by the lay Buddhist organization Rissho Kosei Kai at its headquarters in central Tokyo. Originally known as the Tokyo Kosei Symphonic Band, it was renamed in 1973 to reflect its growing professionalism and scale of activities. TKWO Is highly active, both within Japan and abroad, as a professional touring and recording ensemble. Its members include some of the finest woodwind, brass, and percussion players in Japan.
From 1984 to 1996 the Tokyo Kosei Wind Orchestra was directed by renowned American maestro Frederick Fennell, and as of December 2014 is directed by Takeshi Ooi. TKWO has released more professional recordings than any other wind orchestra in the world, numbering in the hundreds of album titles. It has also played an active role in the commissioning of original works for wind band by both Japanese and foreign composers. Japanese composers whose works have been championed by TKWO include Yasuhide Ito, Hiroshi Hoshina, Tetsunosuke Kushida, Akira Miyoshi, Michio Mamiya, Bin Kaneda, Masamichi Amano, Toshiro Mayuzumi, Toshio Mashima, Isao Matsushita, and many others. Guest conductors of TKWO have included Alfred Reed, Donald Hunsberger, Arnald Gabriel, Robert Jager, Ray Cramer, Craig Kirchhoff, and Václav Blahunek.
The Tokyo Kosei Wind Orchestra has often performed in Fumon Hall, an enormous auditorium located on the campus of the Rissho Kosei Kai religious organization in central Tokyo. Fumon Hall also regularly hosted the final level of the All-Japan Band Association national band competition until 2011. With nearly 14,000 participating bands (and around 800,000 contestants nationwide) the AJBA band contest is currently the world's largest music competition. TKWO is usually hired to make the definitive premiere recordings of the required pieces commissioned each year for the enormous competition. TKWO is largely credited with defining the wind band idiom in Japan, where it is enthusiastically supported among school and community ensembles.
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日本、〒171-0021 東京都豊島区西池袋１丁目８−１ Map
This article uses material from the Wikipedia article "Tokyo", "Takeshi Oi", "Dragon Quest", "Tokyo Koisei Wind Orchestra", which is released under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0.
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