In a role-playing game of the early 1980s, a fight was a menu. The player chose Attack, the program rolled the dice, and the monster took its turn. The action RPG kept the character sheet, the experience points and the ever-better sword, but put the fight under the player’s thumb: move, strike, back away, and live or die by timing. It grew up in two places at once, on Japanese home computers and in American dungeon games. Its descendants stretch from Zelda-style adventures to Diablo’s loot and the punishing Souls games.
Fast facts
- The idea: role-playing progression (experience, levels, equipment) with combat in real time.
- Beginnings: Japanese computer games of 1984, among them Falcom’s Dragon Slayer and T&E Soft’s Hydlide; American dungeon games of the same years, such as Epyx’s Gateway to Apshai, are also named as forerunners.
- Landmarks: Ys (1987), Zelda II: The Adventure of Link (1987), Secret of Mana (1993), Diablo (turn of 1997), Dark Souls (2011).
- Branches: Zelda-style adventure, Diablo-style loot games, the Souls-like, the looter-shooter.
Where it began
No single game can fairly be called the first. Writers on the period name several from 1984. Falcom released Dragon Slayer for NEC’s PC-8801 that year, billing it as a “New Type Real-time Role-Playing Game”; Falcom itself now calls it a representative work of the action RPG’s early period. T&E Soft’s Hydlide, designed by Tokihiro Naito, came out at the end of the same year. Naito has said that “at the time, I was in love with The Black Onyx and Namco’s The Tower of Druaga”: one a Japanese role-playing game, the other an arcade maze game. According to John Szczepaniak, a smaller game, Cosmos Computer’s Courageous Perseus, came out before Hydlide and possibly before Dragon Slayer.
Hydlide was converted to other Japanese computers, among them the MSX. Reviewing the MSX2 version in December 1986, the French MSX Magazine noted that, according to its manual, the game “combine un jeu d’arcade, un jeu de rôle et un jeu d’aventure”: an arcade game, a role-playing game and an adventure in one.
American players had met the mixture already. Epyx’s Gateway to Apshai, a cartridge sequel to its Temple of Apshai that was new in the shops at the start of 1984, put a lone adventurer with “only a dagger, a suit of leather armor and a prayer” into 128 dungeons, controlled with a joystick and three buttons. ANALOG Computing’s reviewer opened in February 1984 with the effect it had on him: “I’m mad! Very, very mad! I just lost my last man to a Mamba Snake on level six of Gateway To Apshai”. “Game play is fast and furious,” he wrote, and he recommended it to anyone “into D&D games”.
Ys, Zelda and the consoles
Falcom followed with Ys (1987), whose red-haired hero, Adol Christin, searches for the six books of Ys. Falcom sold it on the promise that role-playing games were entering “an age of kindness”: it was meant to be a game anyone could enjoy. Nintendo’s The Legend of Zelda (1986) was an action adventure without experience points, but its sequel, Zelda II: The Adventure of Link, released on the Famicom Disk System in January 1987, turned side-on and let Link, in Retro Gamer’s words, “earn experience points to beef up his attacks, raise his stamina and also obtain magic points to cast spells”.
By the mid-1990s these games had become yardsticks. Edge captioned pictures of Ys I and II on the PC Engine and Zelda: A Link To The Past on the Super Famicom “classic action RPGs” in 1995, and wrote that “Nintendo’s Zelda is the benchmark for action RPGs”. Square’s Secret of Mana showed why the style appealed. Super Play explained in 1994 that its “action-based combat system (‘motion battle’, as those Square folk call it) is similar to that of Zelda”: hold a button to charge a weapon, then release it. The hit points and experience were still there, underneath, but a player could ignore them, which made the game “far more accessible than the turn-based, menu-driven combat” of Final Fantasy and its like.
Diablo and the loot game
On the PC the form’s great success was Blizzard’s Diablo, which began as a turn-based game in the roguelike tradition and switched to real time during development. Computer Gaming World hailed it in March 1997 as “the new king of action-RPGs”; Edge was cooler, calling it “essentially a Gauntlet clone”. Its loop of clicking on monsters and collecting what they dropped became a reference point, and years later reviewers used it to explain other games. Edge said of Borderlands 2 in 2012 that it was “like Diablo in terms of progressing your character through skill trees and gathering sackfuls of shiny loot”: a first-person shooter built on the same loop, and what Wireframe would call “a classic looter-shooter”.
The Souls games
The newest branch came from FromSoftware. Demon’s Souls (2009) and Dark Souls (2011) made combat slow, deliberate and deadly; Dark Souls had no difficulty settings at all, and its director, Hidetaka Miyazaki, told Edge he wanted “the most difficult game that it is possible to make, which at the same time can be conquered by those who persevere”. Other studios followed so closely that the press named the style after them: Wireframe reviewed games as “Soulslike” from 2019, and one of its columnists described FromSoftware’s Elden Ring in 2022 as its “latest entry into the genre they created, and still rule over”. The FromSoftware entry tells that story.
Sources
- ANALOG Computing issue 16, February 1984, p. 34: Charles Bachand, review of Gateway to Apshai (Epyx, 16K cartridge, $39.95), announced in the same issue as “new from Epyx”.
- MSX Magazine (France) issue 8, December 1986: review of Hydlide (T&E Soft, MSX2 disk).
- Retro Gamer issue 51, 2008: Zelda series feature (Zelda II’s side-on view and experience points).
- Edge issue 22, July 1995, p. 47: Japanese RPG feature (caption: “Classic action RPGs: Y’s I and II (PC Engine) and Zelda: A Link To The Past (SFC)”).
- Edge issue 25, October 1995, p. 28: Shining Wisdom preview (“Nintendo’s Zelda is the benchmark for action RPGs”; Zelda, Secret Of Mana and the PC Engine’s Ys series).
- Super Play issue 15, January 1994, import review of Secret of Mana; issue 25, November 1994, review of the English version.
- Computer Gaming World issue 152, March 1997: review of Diablo. Edge issue 42, February 1997: review of Diablo.
- Edge issue 246, November 2012, p. 88: review of Borderlands 2.
- Wireframe issue 42, August 2020, p. 33: Borderlands: The Handsome Collection (“a classic looter-shooter”).
- Edge issue 226, April 2011, pp. 51–57: Miyazaki on difficulty in Dark Souls. Issue 234, December 2011, pp. 106–108: review of Dark Souls (no difficulty levels).
- Wireframe issue 5, January 2019: Ashen reviewed as “a Soulslike”. Issue 61, March 2022, p. 34: Andrew J. Dickinson on Elden Ring.
- Nihon Falcom, “Dragon Slayer Project” announcement, 9 March 2026 (web, secondary): Dragon Slayer’s 1984 release and billing. https://www.falcom.co.jp/ir-data/20260309
- Nihon Falcom, Ys (PC-8801mkIISR) product page (web, secondary): the 1987 concept “今、RPGは優しさの時代へ” (“now, RPGs enter an age of kindness”). https://www.falcom.co.jp/games-data/egg_ys_pc8801mk2sr
- John Szczepaniak, “What Were Japanese Action Adventures Like Before Zelda?”, Time Extension, 2 January 2023 (web, secondary): Dragon Slayer, Hydlide and Naito’s quote, Courageous Perseus. https://www.timeextension.com/features/what-were-japanese-action-adventures-like-before-zelda
- “Hydlide”, “Dragon Slayer (video game)” and “Action role-playing game”, Wikipedia (web, secondary): Hydlide’s designer and December 1984 release; the forerunners named by historians. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydlide and https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Action_role-playing_game