The Japanese role-playing game began as an import. In the early 1980s the role-playing games on American computers, Wizardry and Ultima among them, were long, hard and full of numbers. In Japan, Edge wrote, it was Henk Rogers’s The Black Onyx that introduced their “quasi-medieval worlds and stark D&D mechanics”. Then in 1986 a team at Enix turned those rules into something a child could play on a Famicom, with a written story and characters drawn by the manga artist behind Dragon Ball. Dragon Quest is the game Edge credits with laying out “the fundamentals of the Japanese RPG”, and the loop it set up still runs underneath most of the games that followed.
Fast facts
- Term: JRPG, short for Japanese role-playing game.
- Pattern set by: Dragon Quest (Enix, Famicom, 1986) and Final Fantasy (Square, Famicom, 1987).
- Roots: American computer role-playing games, Wizardry and Ultima, and The Black Onyx in Japan.
- Main consoles of the period: Famicom/NES, Super Famicom/SNES, PlayStation and PlayStation 2.
Dragon Quest and the loop
Dragon Quest came from three people. Its designer and writer, Yuji Horii, had won a game-making contest run by the publisher Enix and written a detective adventure, The Portopia Serial Murder Case (1983), for the NEC PC-6001. Akira Toriyama, the artist of the manga Dragon Ball, drew the characters and monsters, among them the weakest monster, a smiling blue teardrop that was his answer to Horii’s request for a “pool of slime”. The composer Koichi Sugiyama, a television director and songwriter, joined after Enix noticed that he had sent back a questionnaire card praising one of its shogi games. For the Famicom, he told Edge, “I only had three tracks to work with.” It was Koichi Nakamura, another Enix contest winner who had worked with Horii on the Famicom version of Portopia, who proposed that they make a role-playing game, and his company, Chunsoft, developed the first five Dragon Quest games.
What they made was a loop. Edge described it as “simple battling earns XP and gold, which awards levels and buys equipment. This allows characters to access new areas of the overworld map and take on new bosses, propelling the story to its conclusion.” Fights are played from menus, one turn at a time. The loop asks for patience: “Grinding is in and the challenge is high,” Edge said of the first game. Horii’s other rule was that the game had to be easy to understand. “I remind myself that it must be easy to play,” he told the magazine. “There has to be warmth and humanity in the game.” Even death is gentle: a fallen hero wakes up in the local church with his experience intact and half his gold gone.
In Japan it became an institution. By 2010 the nine main games had sold about 35 million copies, and 53 million with the spin-offs, a total that only Pokémon and Mario beat there. More than 90 per cent of those sales were in Japan. The first game reached America in 1989 as Dragon Warrior, renamed because of a clash with TSR’s pen-and-paper game DragonQuest.
Final Fantasy and Square
Square’s answer arrived in December 1987. Final Fantasy, directed by Hironobu Sakaguchi, started a rivalry with Enix that, in Edge’s view, Enix “was easily winning — on home turf, at least” until the two companies merged as Square Enix in 2003. The first game let players build a party of four from six character classes, and later gave them an airship to cross the world. The series kept changing its systems from one game to the next. Final Fantasy III (1990) let characters switch jobs during play, and Final Fantasy IV (1991) brought in Square’s Active Time Battle, designed by Hiroyuki Ito, in which each character has a gauge that fills in real time and the enemy keeps attacking while the player picks from the menu.
In 1995 the two traditions met. Chrono Trigger, on the Super Famicom, was made by Sakaguchi’s team with Horii and Toriyama, and Edge saw Horii’s “twisting and playful scenario design” in it. Its players travel between historical eras, and the ending changes with when they face the final enemy: Nintendo Power reported “more than ten endings” in July 1995.
The games that stayed in Japan
For many years a great many of these games were never translated. Final Fantasy III stayed in Japan after Square dropped its planned translation to concentrate on the Super Famicom. The American translation of Final Fantasy V was shelved in 1994, and Final Fantasy VI reached American players as Final Fantasy III, so the numbers on the boxes did not match the Japanese series. When players outside Japan did get to play the missing games, it was often through fan translations: an English patch for Final Fantasy V appeared in 1997, two years before Square’s own translation.
Final Fantasy VII
The change came with the PlayStation. Square moved Final Fantasy VII off Nintendo’s hardware because of its size. “We need about 1,500Mb for FFVII,” Sakaguchi told Edge in 1996, “and we’re already squeezing it into two disks, maybe even three,” which ruled out the Nintendo 64 even with its disk drive add-on. The finished game filled three CDs, with 3D characters walking over pre-rendered backgrounds and about 40 minutes of computer-generated video, and kept the Active Time Battle system, with menus and a gauge for each character.
In the same article Edge noted that the series had “in Europe, never been more than a cult interest among grey import gamers”. A year later, Final Fantasy VII sold 2.5 million copies in its first three days in Japan. Sony predicted the largest launch in video game history for its American release on 7 September 1997, with 750,000 copies shipped, and it reached Europe in November 1997, the first Final Fantasy released there. It gave many Western players their first Japanese RPG and opened the market for the translations that followed.
Later games
The genre kept changing after 2000. Final Fantasy X (2001) dropped Active Time Battle, which had been in use since Final Fantasy IV, for a turn-based system in which each character’s speed decides how often their turn comes round, shown in a queue at the corner of the screen; and Final Fantasy XV (2016) moved to real-time action combat. Monolith Soft’s Xenoblade Chronicles (2010) fought its battles in the open world itself, with no cut to a separate battle screen. Dragon Quest changed least. Edge noted that its later games were often criticised in the West as old-fashioned, Dragon Quest VII’s battle system being called “primitive”, while Dragon Quest IX (2009) went to the Nintendo DS.
Sources
- Edge issue 217, August 2010, pp. 62–67, “The story of Dragon Quest”: Dragon Quest laying out “the fundamentals of the Japanese RPG” in 1986; Ultima, Wizardry and The Black Onyx; the gameplay loop and the difficulty; Horii’s background, Portopia and the Enix contest; Nakamura and Chunsoft; Toriyama and the slime; death and the church; Sugiyama’s questionnaire card and his three tracks; Horii’s quotes; sales of 35 and 53 million, and over 90 per cent in Japan; Dragon Warrior and the TSR trademark; the criticism of later games as old-fashioned and Dragon Quest IX on the DS; Final Fantasy in late 1987 and the Enix rivalry until the 2003 merger; Horii’s influence on Chrono Trigger.
- Edge issue 37, October 1996, Square Soft feature: Sakaguchi on the size of Final Fantasy VII and choosing the PlayStation; Active Time Battle in FFVII; Final Fantasy as “a cult interest among grey import gamers” in Europe; Final Fantasy V’s shelved translation and Final Fantasy VI sold in the US as Final Fantasy III.
- Edge issue 50, October 1997, p. 12, news: Final Fantasy VII’s US launch on 7 September, 750,000 copies shipped, 2.5 million sold in three days in Japan.
- IGN Unplugged issue 5, August 2001: Final Fantasy X’s Count Time Battle system replacing Active Time Battle, “in use since FFIV”.
- Nintendo Power issue 74, July 1995: Chrono Trigger’s “more than ten endings”.
- Wikipedia, “Final Fantasy (video game)”, “Active Time Battle” and “Chrono Trigger” (accessed September 2026) (web, secondary): the Japanese release of Final Fantasy on 18 December 1987, its six classes and airship; the job system of Final Fantasy III (1990) and its untranslated original release; Active Time Battle introduced in Final Fantasy IV and designed by Hiroyuki Ito; Chrono Trigger’s 1995 release and its team. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Fantasy_(video_game) · https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Active_Time_Battle · https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chrono_Trigger
- Wikipedia, “Final Fantasy III”, “Final Fantasy VII”, “Final Fantasy XV” and “Xenoblade Chronicles (video game)” (accessed September 2026) (web, secondary): Final Fantasy VII’s three discs, pre-rendered backgrounds, video and European release on 17 November 1997; the later battle systems and release years. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Fantasy_III · https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Fantasy_VII · https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Final_Fantasy_XV · https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xenoblade_Chronicles_(video_game)