Dragon Slayer

Overview

In 1984 three Japanese developers, working separately, had the same idea: take the real-time action of Namco's arcade hit The Tower of Druaga and fuse it with the statistics and growth of the role-playing game. One of them was Yoshio Kiya at Nihon Falcom, and his Dragon Slayer, released for NEC's PC-8801 on September 10, 1984, became a major success in Japan. The player's knight roams an overhead dungeon in real time, gathering strength, gold and tools, to slay the dragon that guards four crowns. It is widely regarded as the first Japanese action RPG, and it began one of Falcom's defining series.

Origins

Kiya had already experimented with the form in Panorama Toh (Panorama Island, 1983), a Falcom game with real-time combat, a day-night cycle and a need to find food, but without experience levels. According to one account, Dragon Slayer grew out of a friendly rivalry between two Falcom staff, each challenged to make a better RPG. Kiya drew on Druaga's action and, like the other designers of the moment, on the idea of a character who steadily grows stronger. Ports followed quickly to the PC-9801, FM-7 and Sharp X1 in late 1984, and in 1985 to the MSX, in a version published by a young company called Square.

How it plays

The screen shows the dungeon from above. You move and attack in real time by bumping into enemies, trading blows as health ticks down. Instead of shops and experience screens, growth is physical: power stones scattered through the maze must be carried back to your house, which stands inside the dungeon, where each one slowly raises your Strength; gold brought home temporarily boosts your hit points beyond their normal ceiling, and experience from fights governs how much health you recover. If you find a cache of stones far from home, you can push the house to them.

Once you have found a sword you can fight, and magic jars add spell power, but the key items are limited, because you may hold only one at a time: a cross that protects you but prevents attacking, a ring for pushing blocks and the house, a key for chests, or a power stone. Spells break or kick away walls, warp you home, freeze enemies and reveal the map, and an in-game map helps with navigation. Ghosts carry off items and a reaper hiding in chests blocks your magic, so progress can be lost as well as won.

Reception & impact

Dragon Slayer was a hit on Japanese computers, and it arrived alongside T&E Soft's Hydlide and the less successful Courageous Perseus. The rivalry between Falcom's and T&E Soft's series drove rapid development through the mid-1980s. Historians of the genre credit Dragon Slayer with item-based puzzles and inventory management that anticipated The Legend of Zelda, and with laying, together with Hydlide, the foundations of the Japanese action RPG, including Falcom's own Ys. Its MSX edition also gave Square, then a young publisher, one of its first releases, two years before that company's Final Fantasy (1987).

Legacy

The Dragon Slayer name became an umbrella for very different games. Dragon Slayer II: Xanadu (1985) became the best-selling PC game in Japan, a full RPG with side-scrolling exploration. Dragon Slayer Jr: Romancia (1986), Legacy of the Wizard (1987, originally Dragon Slayer IV: Drasle Family) and Sorcerian (1987) followed, and Dragon Slayer: The Legend of Heroes (1989) switched to turn-based battles and eventually spawned The Legend of Heroes, one of Falcom's longest-running series. The original was remade for the Sega Saturn's Falcom Classics collection in 1997 and released for the Game Boy in 1990. Together with The Black Onyx, it belonged to the first wave of homegrown RPGs that Japanese players knew before Dragon Quest carried the genre onto consoles in 1986.