“Japanese people didn’t have a well-defined sense of the RPG”.
It’s fun to try to pinpoint the precise origin of genres. No matter which game popularised a concept, with enough digging and creativity you can probably find an earlier precedent. For survival horror, surely Pac-Man and Haunted House could qualify as progenitors? It’s the same with action-adventures and The Legend of Zelda, released on 21st February, 1986. We just have to comb through everything before that day… right?
This genre sphere is extremely complex, originating alongside and overlapping traditional turn-based RPGs. That classification at least is easy. In Japan, you have two distinct eras: experimental RPGs before Dragon Quest, and everything which came after Dragon Quest. But when the combat aspect is real-time, the scope expands exponentially, leading to many fringe examples. For example, to what extent should you include 2D side-scrollers? Could Namco’s Dragon Buster be considered part of the evolutionary tree which led to Symphony of the Night? Some say that Zelda isn’t even a “true” action-RPG. So let’s focus on games that, as much as possible, resemble it.
Read the full article on timeextension.com
“Japanese people didn’t have a well-defined sense of the RPG”.
It’s fun to try to pinpoint the precise origin of genres. No matter which game popularised a concept, with enough digging and creativity you can probably find an earlier precedent. For survival horror, surely Pac-Man and Haunted House could qualify as progenitors? It’s the same with action-adventures and The Legend of Zelda, released on 21st February, 1986. We just have to comb through everything before that day… right?
This genre sphere is extremely complex, originating alongside and overlapping traditional turn-based RPGs. That classification at least is easy. In Japan, you have two distinct eras: experimental RPGs before Dragon Quest, and everything which came after Dragon Quest. But when the combat aspect is real-time, the scope expands exponentially, leading to many fringe examples. For example, to what extent should you include 2D side-scrollers? Could Namco’s Dragon Buster be considered part of the evolutionary tree which led to Symphony of the Night? Some say that Zelda isn’t even a “true” action-RPG. So let’s focus on games that, as much as possible, resemble it.
Read the full article on timeextension.com