eric__s
ass hater
- Joined
- Jun 13, 2011
- Messages
- 2,301
So over the past few years I've been saving pictures from old Japanese games that I really liked and I thought I'd share them with you all. Most of these pictures come from Japanese PCs from the 80s to mid 90s like the MSX, PC88, PC98, X1, X68000, FM Towns and a bunch of others. They're pretty impressive because they display a level of graphical quality that Western computers just weren't capable of producing until much later. Take a look at the intro for the PC88 RPG The Screamer. It's hard to believe that this game came out in 1984; there was nothing remotely comparable coming from Western computers at the time.
Another reason these pictures are cool is that they display the diversity of settings early Japanese roleplaying games took place in, a symptom of the fact that they weren't as married to core D&D concepts as Western RPGs. I feel that this was liberating in some ways. Japanese games were free to experiment with roleplaying ideas and mechanics without deviating from the standard model - a model that was not yet established in Japan. Let's go back to The Screamer, which has Wizardry-like first person dungeon crawling but real-time, statistic-driven combat. Another good example is Sorcerian, which has D&D-like character creation (even rolling!) but real-time, sidescrolling gameplay. My personal favorite is Last Armageddon, where your party changes depending on the time of day (also check out the intro which is insane). These games are interesting because they show this primordial soup of ideas, some that evolved into modern JRPGs and some that were discarded entirely.
I can't guarantee that all these games are RPGs and I don't even know what most of them are, but they're all pretty interesting and I thought they would be cool to share. I guess to me, these games represent potential - brilliant, game-changing ideas that we never got to experience because of language barriers. What did we miss? What Codex classics are out there waiting for us?
Anyway, enjoy these pictures! They're almost exclusively from the FM Towns Marty and noirlac tumblrs.
hope this didn't crash your computer!!
Another reason these pictures are cool is that they display the diversity of settings early Japanese roleplaying games took place in, a symptom of the fact that they weren't as married to core D&D concepts as Western RPGs. I feel that this was liberating in some ways. Japanese games were free to experiment with roleplaying ideas and mechanics without deviating from the standard model - a model that was not yet established in Japan. Let's go back to The Screamer, which has Wizardry-like first person dungeon crawling but real-time, statistic-driven combat. Another good example is Sorcerian, which has D&D-like character creation (even rolling!) but real-time, sidescrolling gameplay. My personal favorite is Last Armageddon, where your party changes depending on the time of day (also check out the intro which is insane). These games are interesting because they show this primordial soup of ideas, some that evolved into modern JRPGs and some that were discarded entirely.
I can't guarantee that all these games are RPGs and I don't even know what most of them are, but they're all pretty interesting and I thought they would be cool to share. I guess to me, these games represent potential - brilliant, game-changing ideas that we never got to experience because of language barriers. What did we miss? What Codex classics are out there waiting for us?
Anyway, enjoy these pictures! They're almost exclusively from the FM Towns Marty and noirlac tumblrs.
hope this didn't crash your computer!!
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what THE FUCK is happening in that intro ???
