The Unusual Rise of Fantasy RPGs in Japan

Dark Souls, Dragon Quest, Final Fantasy: so many popular fantasy RPGs have come from Japan. Now, we think of fantasy RPGs as being embedded in the Japanese media landscape, but this wasn’t always the case. Fantasy was a niche interest there until the 1980s. When it was ready for the big stage, Japanese developers ignored some of the well-established tropes of the fantasy genre to create something distinctive.

Quest Outside the Walls

Post-war Japan embraced technology to find hope. It’s no surprise, then, that science fiction stories, including franchises like Astro Boy and Space Battleship Yamato, were extremely popular following the war. Fantasy, though? That was not really on people’s radars, except perhaps for the bookworms who would read popular fantasy stories from abroad.

In the West, it was a different story. The works of C. S. Lewis, Mervyn Peake, and J.R.R. Tolkien kick-started a fantasy boom in that part of the world. Terry Pratchett once said of Tolkien’s influence in the Western fantasy genre:

Tolkien appears in the fantasy universe in the same way that Mount Fuji appeared in old Japanese prints. Sometimes small, in the distance, and sometimes big and close-to, and sometimes not there at all, and that’s because the artist is standing on Mount Fuji.

Still, the first Japanese translation of The Lord of the Rings did not appear until the 1970s. Epic fantasy — with its round tables, bearded wizards, and elves — was not a genre that most people consumed from a young age in Japan, though. It would have been like expecting a kid from post-war Lommel or Duluth to know about Kami and yokai. Some inquisitive people might have some familiarity, but we’re more exposed to the stories that are closer to home unless we seek out stories from other places.

A new wave of small, passionate groups started to enjoy Western fantasy in Japan, too. In 1979, Kaoru Kurimoto’s pulp-inspired fantasy novel series Guin Saga arrived on Japanese shelves, for example. Fan magazines published articles that introduced readers to the worlds of Tolkien and Dungeons and Dragons. Small groups, with the knowledge in hand, also played tabletop RPGs, even though the first official Japanese translations of these physical games wouldn't arrive until 1984.   

Character Sheets with a Difference

Another source of influence was video games. Wizardry and Ultima, both of which were also influenced by Dungeons and Dragons, grew popular among Japanese enthusiasts. Makoto Goto, a Japanese game developer, talks about his interactions with these early Western RPGs:

When I was a child, I felt a big impact when I played Ultima and Wizardry. It was fun when I talked with friends about these games.[…] I think that game worlds are filled with such dreams, and the worldview of Medieval Europe is better matched to that.

Fantasy was thus a free-fire zone for people’s imaginations. Enthusiasts were its lifeblood, and they were also often the ones with personal computers. Japanese computers were capable of higher resolutions than their Western counterparts at the time because they had to display all the details of the complicated symbols of Kanji, one of Japan’s three writing systems.

Early developers harnessed the ability of Japanese computers to display detailed still images in games, making visual novels a popular genre. It was a time of pet projects, small teams, and limited prints, so it’s difficult to identify who was the very first Japanese developer to design a fantasy RPG in this maelstrom of creativity. Certain text adventures might have a shout.

One serious contender is Dungeon (1983), by the company Koei. Stat values play a role in the game — often a prerequisite for a game to be considered an RPG — and items and dungeons feature in it as well. As Felipe Pepe noted, the creature sprites seem to have come straight out of that time’s Dungeons and Dragons rulebook, too. The developers were clearly still finding their feet in an unfamiliar genre.

Strands of a Song

Early the next year, in 1984, Henk Rogers (who was based in Japan at the time) released his own fantasy RPG, called Black Onyx, to capitalize on the lack of competitors in the market. Sales were slow at first, but through persistent PR, it turned into the first locally produced RPG hit. More Japanese consumers sat up and took notice.

Other developers soon released their own fantasy titles: Courageous Perseus, Dragon Buster, Dragon Slayer, Hydlide, and The Tower of Druaga, among others. Many of these titles combined action elements with certain fantasy RPG elements, creating variations of the action RPG genre. Several games of the period between 1984 and the end of 1985 were successful in their own right. Hydlide, for one, would sell around a million copies.

Workers at the development studio Enix felt that some factors still held fantasy RPGs back from attaining widespread success. For one, many of the games, including the popular The Tower of Druaga, were too difficult or too intricate for some younger or casual gamers. The second factor was that the computer was the primary platform of the genre — a problem because relatively few people owned one at the time.

They chose Famicom as the platform for their RPG project (what would become Dragon Quest) to increase its potential reach. Yuji Horii and the other Enix developers were fans of Wizardry and Ultima, but they had to translate fantasy into an experience that appealed to another section of Japan as well. Akira Toriyama, who was hugely popular because of his Dr. Slump and Dragon Ball work, translated the visual language of fantasy into a more manga-esque style. The story was also important, and Horii stated in an interview about that time:

Pushing along a scenario with text alone that is easy-to-read, entertaining, and as short as possible is essentially the same way manga artists use speech bubbles. Learning how to develop each conversation without dragging down the overall experience is something I learned from manga.

In contrast to then-contemporary Western RPGs, which often sought to simulate an experience through a focus on statistics and attributes, the developers of Dragon Quest sought to use the story as a guiding light. Dragon Quest would also highlight another aspect that would play a large part in the designs of future Japanese RPGs: combining various ideas into one product.

The scholar Daichi Nakagawa calls this approach “a bricolage of the various sub-genres of classic videogame expression”. The Japanese developers could knit together influences from various sources because they were only beholden to a story, not genre conventions.

A Sanctuary in a Line of Code

Dragon Quest became a Japanese phenomenon in the late 1980s. It would sell millions of copies and launch fantasy into the mainstream. To catch the wave, other competitors scrambled to create a reply or copy its specific formula. Within a short time, Japanese developers stopped looking for inspiration from Western RPGs. That Japan’s RPGs would mostly appear on consoles going forward — while Western RPGs still chose computers as their preferred platform — solidified the divide between the two schools of thought until the 2000s.

Dungeons and Dragons also faded in importance as a source of inspiration for many Japanese developers. Other TTRPGs, such as Sword World, had secured wider distribution rights and undercut it in price as well. As a result, the sales of Dungeons and Dragons dwindled in Japan.

Despite its drop in popularity, some Dungeons and Dragons fans would continue to leave their mark on the Japanese gaming industry. Hidetaka Miyazaki, one of the minds behind Dark Souls, is a prominent example. Fantasy has now rooted itself into the Japanese entertainment landscape, birthing stories that refract the genre through a kaleidoscope of early Western video games, manga, tabletop RPGs, and JRPGs.