Japanese role-playing game

Japanese role-playing games are role-playing games made in Japan. Japanese role-playing games made their first appearance during the 1980s. Today, there are hundreds of Japanese-designed games as well as several translated games.

Traditional role-playing games are referred to as pen-and-paper RPGs, paper-and-pencil RPGs, or tabletop RPGs in English-speaking countries and table-talk RPG, TTRPG, or TRPG in Japan to distinguish them from the video role-playing game genre.

History

Early years

In the 1970s, role-playing games themselves received little attention in Japan as gamers only had English titles. Several gaming magazines and computer game magazines started introducing role-playing games in early 1980s.

Some of the earliest Japanese RPGs were science fiction titles, including Donkey Commando in 1982 and Enterprise: Role Play Game in Star Trek in 1983. Classic Traveller was the first translated RPG in 1984, with Dungeons & Dragons following in 1985. One of the earliest Japanese-designed traditional fantasy RPGs was titled Roads to Lord, published in 1984.

History of Eastern role-playing video games

Eastern role-playing video games are role-playing video games developed in East Asia, including Japan, South Korea, and, to a lesser extent, China.

Japanese computer RPGs

Origins (early 1980s)

While the Japanese video game industry has long been viewed as console-centric in the Western world, due to the worldwide success of Japanese consoles beginning with the NES, the country had in fact produced thousands of commercial personal computer games from the late 1970s up until the mid-1990s, in addition to dōjin soft independent games.

The country's computer market was very fragmented at first;Lode Runner, for example, reportedly required 34 conversions to different hardware platforms. The market eventually became dominated by the NEC PC-8801 & PC-9801, though with some competition from the Sharp X1 & X68000, FM-7 & FM Towns, and MSX & MSX2. A key difference between Western and Japanese systems at the time was the latter's higher display resolutions (640x400) in order to accommodate Japanese text which in turn had an impact on game design. Japanese computers also employed Yamaha FM synthesis sound boards since the early 1980s, allowing video game music composers such as Yuzo Koshiro to produce highly regarded chiptune music for RPG companies such as Nihon Falcom. Due to hardware differences, only a small portion of Japanese computer games were released in North America, as ports to either consoles (like the NES or Genesis) or American PC platforms (like MS-DOS). The Wizardry series (translated by ASCII Entertainment) became very popular and influential in Japan, even more so than at home. Early Japanese RPGs were also influenced by visual novel adventure games, which were developed by companies such as Enix, Square, Nihon Falcom and Koei before they moved onto developing RPGs.