Akira Toriyama snuck a heartfelt message to his kids into Chrono Trigger

As you’ve likely learned by now from a shocked and possibly teary-eyed adult man, Akira Toriyama, the legendary Mangaka who also became a legendary game developer on the side, has sadly passed away at the age of 68.

In my opinion, Akira Toriyama immediately earned the status of everyone’s honorary dad when he came up with Goku, one of the most positive role models in the history of art that a kid could ever find. Unsurprisingly, it seems like he was a pretty great actual dad as well, looking at how he left the absolute most heartwarming message imaginable to his children on Chrono Trigger.

Akira Toriyama hid a sweet message for his kids in Chrono Trigger

Twitter user Rebecca Stone reminded us that Toriyama once wrote the beautiful text seen below to his kids in one of Chrono Trigger’s secret ending sequences.

The image shows sprites of various characters, including one meant to be Toriyama himself, all dancing in a room.

“Heey! Sasuke! Kikka! Pop’s working on game’s like this!” the Toriyama character says in a message. “Hey are you guys watching? Isn’t this great?!”

On top of the obvious amount of love, you can easily sense the almost childlike joy that he put into his work and the eagerness to see his children’s response.

The greatest creators today pay tribute to Akira Toriyama

Given his body of work, which included hits like Chrono Trigger and Blue Dragon, it’s no wonder that Toriyama is getting eulogized by basically anyone who’s ever read a manga, watched an anime, or played a game made in Japan. From masters of the gaming industry:

To masters of other industries pointing out how even Toriyama’s seemingly simplest work was gorgeous and extremely influential:

But out of the myriad of beautiful tributes, I do believe that the one below remains the most important one:

I’m pretty sure Toriyama got the excited reply he wanted from his real kids from his message in Chrono Trigger. I’m just as sure that he’d get the same response from all the surrogate kids he made along the way.

Also, Goku would WASH Superman. How is there even a debate past SSJ2?