

Since the Famicom lacked a keyboard interface, these had to very specific to the things that you would have to do in the course of the game: Talk to people, open doors, go down or up stairs, search the ground, and so on. You are given a series of verbs to use in the world. The basic gameplay of Dragon Quest is essentially an attempt to translate tabletop RPG mechanics to a computer interface. These copies then started branching out, changing things up, adding new mechanics, doing things differently. It was a very early NES (or, rather, Famicom, the Japanese name for the NES) RPG, and inspired legions of copies in the immediate aftermath. But that’s a whole ‘nother kettle of fish.ĭragon Quest set the standard. That series went on to inspire its own particular sub-genre of RPGs focused solely on crawling through dungeons in first-person.
#Caves of qud roleplay mode Pc#
The first game was inspired by Wizardry, a very popular PC RPG by the American developer Sir-Tech, which was released in Japan the year before. The ur-JRPG is called Dragon Quest, a phenomenally popular series dating back to 1986. Much like the term “roguelike”, it has come to be very fluid, and could be used to refer to any RPG that was produced in Japan, or ones with a very specific set of features. It is sort of a sub-genre of RPG, with a set of particular traits. JRPG stands for Japanese Role Playing Game, a term coined to refer to a particular style of video game that was produced in Japan from the 80s to today. But what does that even mean, exactly? What are the fundamental features that make a game a JRPG? How could those best be translated into the traditional roguelike framework? What do they bring to the table in terms of clarity and flexibility?

I said in my first post that I wanted to make a roguelike JRPG.
