Released: Aug 28, 1987
Version played: Retranslated (2012)

If Zelda II is Dark Souls, a precise hybrid of RPG, adventure game and dungeon crawler that constantly propels the player to its next exciting encounter, then Castlevania II is Dark Souls II, a game which turns its systems inward against itself to invert the usual emotional journey of RPG game design. Zelda II is brutally hard, but levelling up gives you an immediate and satisfying increase in power. Castlevania II is easy, and levelling up a form of controlled tedium, as you balance gains in EXP and Money to ensure you always have enough to buy everything in the next town.

It would be easy to say such design is a mistake, why would the sequel to a hard as nails and constantly exciting masterpiece like Castlevania intentionally introduce elements of boredom? But the game’s most famous line proves the opposite. What a horrible night to have a curse. The night falls, the enemies get stronger, and most importantly, the towns become swarmed with monsters. You cannot rest, you cannot buy upgrades, you cannot obtain hints from the townsfolk; they’re all hiding behind closed doors anyway. What you can do, however, is wait. Find a nice grinding spot. And turn the demons of Evil into currency, one whip at a time.

Castlevania II is not a story of triumph, adventure, or even as its localised name would imply really a quest. It is the story of a curse. An extremely literal curse in Simon’s case, but also far more pervasively the sense of a truly dead world rotting from within. The monsters stay away from towns only when the preists are awake to pray. The townsfolk drop hints and give moments of levity, but are ultimately all trapped and hiding in their boarded up terraces, brown and grey and faded. These towns live under the shadows of grand aristocratic mansions which house only skeletons both animated and not, corpse filled dungeons that haven’t been put to use in however many years. Inside these monumental palaces the only objects of reverence and signs of intention at all are Dracula’s body parts, placed on Altars of worship to hasten his return.

It all adds up to a game that is extremely evocative and haunting. There is no onscreen cult, or dark wizard, or power mad scientist here to resurrect dracula, perhaps wishing to pay him tribute. Instead all we know is Dracula has allies, perhaps they are the monsters, perhaps the owners of the mansions; but why then is there no sign of life? No other signs of civilization or intent or planning. The monsters are all mere beasts, the mansions mere facades, yet someone or something placed Dracula’s body parts there. Obviously there is no answer, this isn’t a puzzle and just a tonal effect from the game’s NES presentation, but I really like the atmospheric effect it creates. The peasants are oppressed not by the church or by the king, but by the empty signifiers of aristocracy, with no way to know there are only bones inside. It’s an atmosphere that won’t truly become popular until the Souls games double down on this form of storytelling through absence, but thankfully this game was created in the 80s so I can’t read ten million item descriptions explaining the history of Rover Mansion. It simply is.

The game saves its best trick for last, with a completely silent walk through Dracula’s Castle leading to a total pushover of a Final Boss. Castlevania II takes the wind out of the sails both as an RPG about gaining power and as a blood-pumping action game with this deflating anti climax, that unless you were aware of the in-game time limit beforehand, almost inevitably also results Simon sealing the curse yet dying from his wounds.

This makes Castlevania II a trailblazer not just in how it’s one of the first sequels to go from linear action game to open world RPG, but also in the soon to be overcrowded line of you enjoy all the killing metacommentary. Pretty much twenty years ahead of its time. But while audiences didn’t wholly accept Castlevania II it’s alright because they did pivot to instead making the greatest 8 bit action game of all time instead.

Released: Dec 20, 1987
Version played: SEGA AGES (2018)

Phantasy Star is the third major pillar of the console JRPG, and despite being almost forgotten today, is inarguably the second most influential of the three. Final Fantasy, for all its western ubiquity, cannot lay claim to forever changing the design language of video games themselves the way that Dragon Quest did with its first entry, and Phantasy Star did with Online. Yet PSO’s monumental success has somewhat eclipsed perception of the mainline series itself, left to fade into relative obscurity without many modern versions and rereleases, concluded for good in 1993.

This is, I have to admit, one of the things that excites me most about Phantasy Star. It ended. It started in 1987 and then ended in 1993. Just four titles and a few bonus chapters, all release inside the span of a modern AAA development cycle. One of the worst things about video games is that with rare exceptions, they simply do not end. They may fail to sell enough and stop coming out, or maybe the team fell apart and went their seperate ways, but to make four successful games and then stop is something that almost never happens. Phantasy Star is a closed book.

Compared to its closest rivals I have to say Phantasy Star is operating on an entirely different level. Not neccesarily better qualitatively but certainly more ambitious and dense in ways that Final Fantasy will not be getting for around half a decade. There is an ambivalence that runs throughout Phantasy Star’s worldbuilding which is easily its most compelling element. This is a game about a colonizing force corrupted from within, and while you seek to restore it to glory, the questions of where that corruption truly came from is never really answered. Sure, narratively we have the soon to be incredibly common trope of behind the evil emperor was a disembodied force of darkness! But the game doesn’t really come down on what that darkness represents, the manual (what is consistent between the JP and US ones) offers only that Dark Falz influence spread through the Nobility with promises of Eternal Life. But Dark Falz is found within the Governor’s mansion, not in Lassic’s domain, he lives at the heart of humanity’s first colonial command post.

The Motavians hate the humans because they are colonizing their planet. They hated them before Lassic, and co-operate with Alisa and co. purely because getting rid of the evil guy is in everyone’s best interest. And despite all this Phantasy Star is still a game where Alisa turns out to be the long lost princess and ends the game a benevolent ruler of the entire solar system. To throwback to the entry on Dragon Quest for a second, this is indeed the first occurance in this project of what will go on to be a running JRPG tradition, games that seek to marry the restoration power fantasy of a good king with a more material understanding of its world and structures therein. And I think here that friction works extremely well, carried ultimately by the sparseness of the game and the character focus of its presentation.

Because this is still 1987 we are a long way from dedicated lore NPCs explaining how the Crystalline Dominion moved its troops east which matters because now they’re not in the west, and pretending that says something profound about slavery. Phantasy Star is not concerned with its big ideas, its concerned with providing its world with texture. NPCs travel between the three overworlds on scheduled flights, they complain when the guards are in the streets, each of their perspectives is limited by the part of the world that they inhabit. This combines with the intricately designed world which sends you criss-crossing between planets constantly, building out the map of the world not as one journey from level 1 here to 30 there, but as understanding how every disparate piece relates to the other. It’s an incredibly satisfying puzzle to put together.

And holding everything together at the heart of it all is, somehow, this project’s first instsance of what I would consider the beating heart of the genre. Not its systems or its worlds or ideology or design, but its characters. This is a game about four very different heroes coming together to form a party and take down the bad guy. When you finish the game you think about Alisa and Myau and Tylon and Lutz. Or whatever they’re called them in the translation you played. They don’t get that much characterisation, but there’s enough there to fill in the sketches, and they all come from very distinct archetypes. Myau finally getting his hero moment and growing wings to take the party to the final dungeon based on last year’s hit anime movie Castle in the Sky is a great payoff. It all comes together to form not the best JRPG of its era, but the most forward thinking and recognisable when it comes to where the genre was going.

I am very excited to continue the series and see how these seeds sprout into future entries, which I know tell a continuous generational story, which again, has a definitive ending. I’ll be done with the whole thing before Final Fantasy VI is even out. Now that’s exciting.

Released: Dec 18, 1987
Version played: 20th Anniversary Edition (2007)

And so, their journey begins…

Four heroes crest a hill as birds fly overhead, pure black silhouettes against the blue-green sky. A castle can be faintly seen in the distance, fading into the fog as the heroes begin their quest into the unknown. In this moment, this one final look back at their humble beginning, a melody plays as if carried by the wind.

Final Fantasy belongs to Nobuo Uematsu. Obviously Square’s original FF team is full of heavy hitters, from wunderkind programmer Nasir to Pixel Art legend Kazuko Shibuya – and I don’t mean to downplay any of their contributions – but Uematsu is the reason you have heard of this game. It is nothing without that theme.

Because Final Fantasy is ultimately not that impressive of a game. Not yet. It’s fine, but Dragon Quest is a masterpiece. It is only in fleeting moments, like that title screen, where you feel that you are standing on hallowed ground, with echoes of what this series will go on to become.

No, unlike its main competitor and rival, Final Fantasy has a much more humble beginning. Whereas Dragon Quest was extremely forward thinking, Final Fantasy is instead looking backwards at Wizardry and Ultima and seeing what elements can be reintroduced to the more simplified and approachable form of the console JRPG. You have a simplified version of Wizardry’s party mechanic, a simplified version of Ultima 1’s plot twist and a simplified version of the entire DND beastiary because copyright was more of a suggestion than a rule in 1987.

Amongst all the homage and blatant theft it is harder for Final Fantasy to establish its own identity, but not impossible. The two core pillars here are the tone and mood carried by Uematsu’s soundtrack and the graphical battle system developed with Hiroyuki Ito’s design and Kazukuo Shibuya’s spritework. You don’t just roll your party but you see them take the field, you see them get wounded, you see them celebrate their victories. This is the first step that differentiates Final Fantasy from the blank slate parties of Wizardry and The Bard’s Tale and the self insert protagonists of Dragon Quest and Ultima, towards the thing that will define not just Final Fantasy but JRPGs as a whole; the RPG not just as a vessel for player agency and scenario design but a form through which you can express characters. Party members you care about for reasons beyond their utility to you. Characters you invest in. Characters you would laugh and cry for. Characters you would harass Kazushige Nojima over for your shipping wars. Characters perhaps, you would pull for? Hiroyuki Ito, you are an almost singular genius in the field of game design but I’ve come back from the future and it’s for the greater good, I have to stop you from opening pandora’s box.

But that’s all in the distant future. Here and now it’s just sprinkles of personality and presentation on what is ultimately a pretty solid Dungeon Crawler. This time for a change I played the PSP version and did the bonus dungeons; everyone who said they suck was right. Why did I do that. You shouldn’t do that.

The best moment in this game, obviously, is the circle of sages. I love the circle of sages. The game is fairly light on story, and barely has what can be called characters, and chooses to reveal the bulk of the plot in a moment where you reach a village and find twelve sages standing in a circle, who simply explain the whole thing to you, which in what will become Final Fantasy tradition is of course way more complicated than it needs to be for basically no reason. It breaks my heart that no one in Square has thought to recreate this moment in a modern game, just twelve lovingly rendered old guys with their Unreal Engine 5 hair standing in a perfect circle saying shit like “the timestream was broken 2000 years ago but also today, to start the circle of hatred 400 years in the past.” That this has not happened demonstrates a fundemental misunderstanding of why Final Fantasy is good by the powers that be at Square Enix. But I digress.

Chaos.

Released: Jun 21, 1987
Version played: Ys I Chronicles+ (2013)

There is an invisible third pillar in the development of the first decade of RPG video games. The first pillar is of course Wizardry and Ultima, the two titans that emerged as the commerical successors to the early hobbyist RPG scene of the late 70s, and the golden age of Computer RPGs that followed as the 80s continued. The second pillar is Dragon Quest, combining elements of both with simple adventure game logic to create the Japanese Console RPG, the first domino in a chain that persists to annoying genre name debates up to this very moment. But Japan had computers too, among which developers and players evolved a scene of their own – both before and after Dragon Quest canonised what an RPG looks like. It is a scene that is hard to grapple with in the English speaking part of the world, for whereas ports and fan translations are rife on the Famicom, the various less popular RPGs for various less popular pre-Windows Japanese PC platforms were not so lucky. Safe to say, it was a thriving space in its own right, with tons of developers experimenting with the genre in many diverse ways. By which I mean I understand how reductive I am being when I say this, but nevertheless it must be said. The third pillar was motherfucking Falcom.

Xanadu sold 400,000 copies in 1985. This is a number that is legitimately bonkers given the size of the market at the time. It was so successful that it led to one of the funniest what if moments in video game history, Richard Garriott himself flying over to Japan to make a licensing deal with Falcolm, uniting the PC RPG giants of both sides of the pacific and cementing their dominance for years to come. It was not to be because it turned out all the art in Xanadu was traced from the Ultima III manual. Quite simply: lmao. One wonders what world we’d be living in if Richard Garriott had the foresight in that moment to let it slide.

I did not play Xanadu however. I didn’t play Hydilide and I didn’t play Dragon Slayer. I played Ys, an influential and important game in its own right but certainly less foundational a starting point than Dragon Quest and Wizardry when coming to look at the space of PC RPGs in Japan. I would have played Sorcerain but Sorcerain Original, the PS1 remake universally agreed upon to be the best version to play, doesn’t have an English Translation. Look what happens when you step outside of the light of privilege of “being a Final Fantasy fan.” Back in the day we watched Dragon Ball Z two episodes a time on tape, etc. etc.

The most remarkable thing about Ys is its to this day extremely unique structure. It is a game split entirely in half, the initial open world exploration and levelling, and then ascending the Tower of Darm, the game’s 25 floor final dungeon. As opposed to most RPGs both before and after, where progress in the dungeon is incremental, as you make decisions to stretch your resources to gain as much experience and gold as possible before returning to town and completing the cycle again, Ys locks you in the tower at max level, with no progress aside from equipment gains and losses along the way.

It is an incredibly effective choice. Dragon Quest uses RPG systems as the foundations on which to build an adventure, but Ys uses RPG systems as texture; as tempo; the rhythm section over which Falcom Sound Team JDK will be adding shredding guitar solos. It works in tandem with the famous bump system, to create a game in which every level gained and gear piece found is a change you immediately feel, taking enemies from walls impeding progress to buckling at your sword. The open fields and the cramped dungeon walls. Pressure and release. Builds and drops. The RPG not as self expression or mechanical challenge but pure backing track. No menus standing between you and the next bar.

This combines with a light narrative touch that tells a very simple story of getting the Things to stop General Bad Guy from bringing back The Darkness that had been sealed away Hundreds of Years Ago, with Ys choosing to focus less on this rote mechanical story and invest more in the sense of Esteria as an inhabited space. Every NPC is named, they worry about their family in other villages, they complain or make peace with their Islands supernatural stasis, they know each others names and react to the story in real and human ways. That girl that you rescued Adol, she’s waiting by the lake. Should I talk to her? Do you think she’d like me? When you find her sprite staring out at the ocean she tells you she doesn’t even need to get her memory back, she’s already so happy here. But it doesn’t ring true. She’s too important to the plot, and both of you know it.

It’s little touchest like this that make Ys really sing. The mysterious fae girl who immediately falls in love with you and is some type of reincarnation of the Goddess who exists to power up the shonen chosen one is boring and cliche, so Ys leaves that unsaid and does a really good job focusing on the small moments. The Seer who knew she would die as a result but still chooses to help you has a Grandmother across the Island, and that Grandmother takes care of Feena as she recovers. That Grandmother also has a son who leads the Thieves Guild, who the Mayor wrongly blames for stealing the Town’s supernatural treasure that has protected them until now – but he’d never tell the town. He can’t cause a panic. Lines drawn that didn’t have to be drawn, NPCs relationships crossing over in believable ways, it all creates a real sense of community in Esteria, a world worth saving because you know and care for the people in it.

Also the soundtrack is absolutely incredible. Like you already knew that but god damn.

Released: Jan 26, 1987
Version played: Switch Port (2019)

There’s one moment in Dragon Quest II that is so genuinely electric that it is, with no hint of exaggeration, genre-defining. The game has gone down in history as a somewhat awkward sequel and it certainly earns that reputation, replacing the original’s perfect yet simple minimalist recreation of the shape of computer RPGs with an attempt to build back up the scale and complexity in ways that leave the experience somewhat unbalanced. I am not going to argue that Dragon Quest II is better than the original. But the first Dragon Quest simply does not contain a single moment as powerful as when you finally unlock the boat.

It isn’t just that you can traverse the world map at greater speed and more easily; it isn’t even the boat itself. It is that the world transforms from a series of towns experienced largely in order to an interlocking puzzlebox of nodes and lines. Without the boat, you can generally do maybe one or if you’re lucky two optional tasks before moving on to the next town. You can go to the cave for the Silver Key. You can do the tombola before you meet the Princess. But you get the boat, and suddenly your next task is to gather five sigils from across the world, placed right in the path of your natural exploration.

This is absolutely an intentional moment of design but the trick is that it feels like you are getting one over on the game. You can go from saving up and scraping by to having all three keys, equipping multiple pieces of Erdrick Armor and a sizable warchest deposited in the treasury between mandatory dungeons. Dragon Quest II understands the motivation behind the average RPG player, the min-maxer, the grinder. What they are looking for is not mindless progression, but progression as reward for mindfulness. You pay attention to the world, the dialogue, the hints, the keys, your party’s strengths and weaknesses and for that you are rewarded with leaps in power that you can instantly feel.

And boy are you going to need them. Dragon Quest II is famously unbalanced, though it is much more approachable in the modern re-releases that you will almost certainly be playing now. But while the game is much softer there is only so much that could be done about the fundamental curve of the game’s progression. If the game’s high point is sailing free on the boat, the opening of the world into multiple regions replete with dungeons optional and mandatory, with dozens of different paths through depending on what breadcrumb trail you happen to follow first; then its low point is its endgame, where you simply have no choice but to walk back and forth fighting archdemons for a few levels.

It is remarkable how different Dragon Quest II feels from its predecessor considering it is, in one sense, literally the exact same game. The core loop is identical, the building blocks the same, but the increased scope and complexity radically change your interaction with the world and its systems. Dragon Quest was ultimately an adventure game wearing the clothes of an RPG, introducing RPG systems to a console audience mixing medicine with juice so your child can drink it. Dragon Quest II is a fucking dungeon crawler. You will be spending most of your time in dungeons, thinking actively at all times about resources, whether to engage in battle or risk running away, who to attack, who to defend, is this spell worth the cost, is this heal worth the cost, etc. etc. 1 v 1 fights over in seconds are replaced with battles where three party members go up against up to eight enemies at a time, not including possible reinforcements. The increased strategic depth is welcome but it also highlights a core tension that defines the genre to this day: the more time you spend in combat, the less time you spend exploring and feeling that sense of adventure. It is no coincidence that Dragon Quest II’s best moment is when you get a genuine extended break from all that exhausting dungeon crawling.

In the modern age there is a lot of discussion about turn based combat and whether it is “good,” but the difference between the first two Dragon Quest games draws attention to something I wish was discussed more in RPG and gaming spaces. Lots is often made of the simplicity/depth of a combat system, that is to say, how many active decisions are you making and what consequences do they have. And I want to be clear: I care a lot about that. I love playing games with complex and interlocking systems to dive into, rewarding mastery and providing opportunities for personal expression. But framing the discussion this way does place blinders on JRPG battles as aesthetic experiences, as punctuations in the rhythm of the greater whole. Dragon Quest II has better combat, that is to say, infinitely more depth than the none that its predecessor featured. But as a consequence far less time in Dragon Quest II is spent in the world, talking to NPCs, exploring towns and seeing what’s around the next corner. Dungeon runs become so routine that the towns themselves become merely extensions of the dungeon, places to rest and resupply, reduced to pure function simply because there is more function for them to fulfill. Dragon Quest is a sketch of a childhood idea of a fantasy story. Dragon Quest II is a video game.

Released: May 27, 1986
Version played: Switch Port (2019)

It’s still a masterpiece.

That’s the thing you have to understand about Dragon Quest. Yes it’s simple, not even reaching the level of what might commonly be referred to as “game mechanics.” Every battle is a pure numbers game with the only strategy being that you should probably heal when your health gets low. Yes, it’s also grindy, even in its modern ports. To defeat the Dragonlord you will have to fight the monsters standing right next to the Dragonlord a whole bunch, while he patiently waits for you to get strong enough to kill him.

None of that matters.

Actually it’s even more than that, the simplicity isn’t a blemish to be tolerated by the burgeoning start of a new genre, it is in fact the central pillar of Dragon Quest’s genius. To reduce Wizardry and Ultima to their barest essentials until nothing remains, a series of keys and locks spread across a vast open world, Dragon Quest reinvents the RPG as a true adventure game. The rate at which new clues are introduced to the player, and solutions made clear is so precisely calibrated as to make the game almost impossible to put down. Oh let me just get that one shield. Actually now I’ve got that I can see what’s in this shrine. Wait, he needs a harp? I think they mentioned one was buried with Galen in Galenholm. Why on earth does the Princess tell me my distance from the Castle how could that possibly be useful – oh shit it’s decoding the path to the Mark of Erdrick! And before you know it it’s been five hours and the Dragonlord is dead.

Not content with inventing the adventure game once, Yuji Horii decided to do it twice. If Portopia is a playable detective movie then Dragon Quest is a fantasy epic, as you gather legendary relics alongside proof of your noble bloodline and rid the world of evil once more. It is this second person nature which defines Dragon Quest, the genre starts not with a “silent protagonist” or even a “self insert,” but truly just “you,” the only party member, the hero, star of choose-your-own-adventure books and childhood fantasies.

“You” is crucially not anyone, “you” is Male and Young. I wouldn’t call these defining characteristics so much as boundaries that Dragon Quest places on its imagined audience. The youth of the protagonist is more malleable and as such more interesting, Dragon Quest is famously an all ages franchise to the point where today we can be honest and say it is for old ass men. The game is made with a knowing and warm nostalgia, its goofiness twinned with a hint of melancholy that comes from looking back on the simplicity of childhood, a hint that others like Shigesato Itoi (Mother) and Kaz Ayabe (Boku No Natsuyasumi) would drag to the forefront of their works. But “your” gender in Dragon Quest is etched in stone; if Dragon Quest has a narrative it is that of a boy becoming a man through their own strength and ancestry. “You” are better, and certainly special, blessed by holy lineage, but you must also prove yourself worthy of such a status through hard fought masculine strength, courage and resilience. You leave home and brave the wilderness to become strong, and with that strength slay dragons, for which you are rewarded with the undying love of the princess.

This isn’t a biting criticism, I don’t think Dragon Quest would be better if it deconstructed the foundational myths of its genre and their interfacing with gender as a method by which heroism and bravery itself is made masculine. It’s a fucking game where you press A and every monster dies. I bring this up to highlight the earnestness with which Dragon Quest reproduces its genre. This is not a game where the church is evil; this is not a game where you kill god. It is a straightforward restoration fantasy, its towns filled with comedic and charming characters but be they hapless, wise or terse they are all generally good people who help you if they can. Similarly, the lineup of incredible creature designs are merely beasts, either creatures of the wild or minions of the Dragonlord. They don’t have culture or personhood, they exist entirely as cute and contextless designs to fight. There are kings and nobility but no aristocracy, the signifiers of wealth but no class. All that is sanded off for pure fantasy, a world that is unreal but instantly familiar in its strict adherance to genre conventions.

Over the decades we are about to see a lot of games that attempt to introduce some of these complications and critiques into the body of their work, but at the same time still embrace the core fantasy and almost rip themselves in two at the sheer dissonance of the attempt. Dragon Quest has no such insecurity. It loves fantasy stories, you love fantasy stories, let’s slay the Dragon and marry a princess.