Enix’s Dragon Quest is one of the most important Japanese RPGs, as it establishes many of the genre conventions that are used to this day. But it certainly wasn’t the first of its type, as Japanese gamers had been experimenting with their own ideas on computers.
Before getting into its history, it’s important to define what “role-playing game” means. Nowadays, it usually means any element that involves character stats and leveling elements, but the term was more loosely defined back in the 1980s, at least when it came to video games. Some early Japanese games were clearly inspired by American RPG series such as Ultima and Wizardry, while others directly took elements of pen-and paper RPGs like Dungeons & Dragons, such as equipment and random dice-rolling….
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