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[2+2=5]

I think that i should mention moonstone for the amiga because some consider it a sort of ancestor of the souls games(aesthetic, fight and difficulty wise at least)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y1lbCWqiqyk

It's interesting that this thread does not contain mention of probably the single most important action-RPG ever:

It's Diablo, by the way, if anyone doesn't know.

Diablo essentially invented the most widespread subgenre of action RPGs and was so much faster than the other games in the genre -- both in terms of gameplay and in long-term decision making, with most of the game being randomly generated -- at the time that the genre was irreversably changed in its wake. Really, having a thread about early action RPGs without mentioning Diablo is like a thread about influential platformers without Super Mario Bros.

If you just look at the PC there really aren't too many examples of action-RPGs before Diablo but the ones that exist are fairly notable.

Dungeon Master is a game that, if you looked at it only through screenshots, you may not be aware that it is one of the original action RPGs:

Dungeon Master took the original conception of dungeon crawling (a la Ultima, Wizardry and especially Might & Magic) and gave you the ability to attack and move in real-time, leading to a bizarre and frantic style of gameplay where you dance around your opponents swinging at them wildly. It seems almost like a parody of a traditional dungeon crawler, since you and your opponents are still wandering around, clumped together in groups, on a grid.

If you've never played Dungeon Master, it's really worth checking out and surprisingly easy to play today for a game originally released on the Atari ST. There are also games that play very similarly (Legend of Grimrock is a modern example) that are also quite fun and contain handy interface improvements, but the original maintains a very real fanbase.

Another big one that comes to mind is Ultima Underworld, but UU is only "action" in that the world is entirely real-time and your reaction times technically have an effect on the outcome.

Another action RPG that is perhaps less "important" than the previous two games I mentioned (but probably my favorite out of the three) is Might and Magic VI.

Might and Magic VI is a real-time game that broke the tradition of a long string of turn-based titles within its series; it replaced traditional party combat with a more modern version of the type seen in Dungeon Master, where you can move freely and attacks operate on a delay system instead of strictly regimented turns.

What makes the game so fun is that it delivers all of the usual Might and Magic stuff -- a world where you can do whatever you want pretty much whenever you want, a truly staggering amount of different items to use and quests to do, and a world tenously placed between the past and very far in the future -- but it adds on top of that thousands upon thousands of enemies to fight. By the end, Might and Magic VI plays a lot like what Doom would be like if you were fighting dragons instead of imps.

Well diablo 1 and might & magic 6(my favorite rpg ever ) are not that old after all.

 

[Justinh]

King's Quest has nothing on Quest for Glory.

you just made my shit-list.

It's a list of people In the world I'm not to shit on. It's a good list to be on...

I friggen' loved Hero's Quest/Quest for Glory and never got to play the sequels until about 5 years ago(2&3/4 isn't my jam). I didn't think of them as RPGs at the time because back then RPGs were Wizardry and D&D stuff. I guess looking back, they are RPGs especially since you can kinda mold your character to how you liked him. Although, I always did the cheat on the character start screen where you can put at least 1 point in each skill so you could have anything...

edit: man, i really disliked Diablo back when it came out. So much that I hardly played it and gave up on the series until I played Torchlight, which made me curious about Diablo 3. My best friend was totally into it though, and now I wish it'd get released on Blizzard's digital store so I can give it a fair shake.

 

[SparkTR]

I've never played it myself, but I've heard Times of Lore (1988) described as proto-Diablo. It was also designed by Chris Roberts, whose currently designing Star Citizen.

I'd love to get my hands on some Amiga RPGs sometime, I feel from like 1985 to 1991 that system was top dog in terms of PC stuff, but it's largely forgotten now. Amberstar/Ambermoon and Black Crypt in particular.

 

[Mental Atrophy]

I just wanted to use this thread as yet another opportunity to blast Hydlide as my most-hated game of all time. It sucks and I should've gotten Zelda instead, but that god damn dragon on the box was so convincing so I begged Mom to get it.

 

[Worldshaker]

Two of my childhood favorites.

 

[Haruka]

The Magic of Scheherazade.

 

[petran79]

Icon: Quest for The Ring (1984)

Seven Spirits of Ra (1987)

One of the greatest PC games of all time. Its like Atari Adventure meets The Legend of Zelda. This game was way ahead of its time in both game play and concept. The graphics might be dated but the fun remains. I have played countless video games in my lifetime for over 30 years and this one is still by far one of my favorites along with Tunnels of Doom for the Ti994a which was also far ahead of its time and has never lost its flavor. This game represents everything that makes RPG gaming fun and classic.




ICON: Quest for The Ring and Seven Spirits of Ra are two very revolutionary real-time RPGs that are unfortunately overlooked by most gamers. The reasons on why they deserve a permanent spotlight in RPG history are elaborated in great detail in MobyGames' feature article about Macrocom, the company behind the games:

A small and interesting pocket in PC gaming's history is filled with products like ICON: Quest for the Ring and Seven Spirits of Ra, both developed by a small company called Macrocom. Unconventional only begins to describe these two products, which not only pushed the early IBM PC to its technical limits, but also broke new ground in gameplay ideas and execution.

You'd be hard pressed to find a more unique game than ICON in the 1980s, for example: Based on Wagner's Reingold opera (!), it featured 16-color graphics on a video card that was only technically capable of 4-colors in graphics mode. The gameplay was real-time, and was calculated and animated at 60 frames per second. And this was in 1984 -- their later project, Seven Spirits of Ra in 1987, was even more ambitious as it tackled the Osiris resurrection myth of ancient Egyptian mythology.

If you are looking for truly revolutionary games that broke the mold, look no further than these two forgotten underdogs. Designers Neal White III and Rand Bohrer have also made ICON freeware following the MobyGames interview, a generous act for fans of old-skool RPGs. Two thumbs up, way up!

Review By HOTUD



Faery Tale

Released in 1987, one of the first Action RPGs

 

[NinjamicWZ]

My favorite genre. Seen most of the stuff I'd wax nostalgic over ITT thread already. Not that old, but close enough:

Not all that fantastic, but a notable Zeldalike. Not sure if it's still on the store, but I got it on my Vita either in the PSP section or the Minis.

Oh yeah, Faxanadu and Willow on NES too.

 

[Fugu]

RPGs are probably the most misunderstood genre out there. The idea that turn based is some relic from the early PC days (or god forbid, the NES days) rather than an intentional choice, that open worlds are a new concept, that the advancement of technology has broadened their scope (it has mostly shrunk it)...

Action RPGs are nearly as old as the genre itself. That's just a fact. Even PnP RPGs have LARPing. Nerds fencing and pantomiming spells while a GM resolves it. Turn-based is a choice, not a necessity.

I don't think it's at all true that, within the realm of videogames, action RPGs are as old as turn-based RPGs, especially if we take ubiquity into account. The big three (Ultima, Wizardry, and Might & Magic) were all turn-based for a very long time and I've got to believe it's at least partially because computers simply weren't capable of the kind of math it takes to operate a universe in real time. Turn-based is definitely a choice now, but I think the record of games indicates that it's only really been the case that real-time games were capable of managing the complexity of all but the most basic of roleplaying elements for 25 years or so.

To use your tabletop analogy, imagine the GM had to process all of the information he normally does in a game of D&D in real time. That's like, the minimum baseline for an action RPG, with many of them being far more complicated than that.

It's kinda funny because Diablo 1 is really just a simplified roguelike that runs in real time. In fact the original concept for it was to make a roguelike with a modern presentation.

While it's true that roguelikes and Diablo have plenty in common, they diverge in a lot of very important ways that make Diablo decidedly not just a roguelike in real time. The end product is a testament to the fact that the designers had some kind of crisis about how seriously they wanted to take their roguelike origins. A good example of this is item identification (a defining trait of any roguelike); Diablo lets you equip unidentified items but there is rarely a drawback to doing so since the number of cursed items is very limited and cursed items can simply be removed when identified anyway. It seems that they intended to hold this feature of roguelikes over but abandoned it when they realized it would clash with the design of the rest of the game. For what it's worth, I think they made the right call, since doing it roguelike style would require making explicit identification very difficult and implicit identification -- identification by exclusion or experimentation -- would be too hard (or too easy if the character screen factored in unidentified items) in a game where most items simply modify stats. By Diablo 2, the notion of equipping unidentified items and of items that had negative modifiers were gone entirely.

I guess the big divergence is that in Diablo, you're always meant to be able to finish the game. Roguelikes almost universally operate on the notion that you're going to die eventually, and what you're trying to do as the player is prolong that death until after you finish the game. In Diablo, you can always win if you play your cards right.

 

[Psxphile]

Originally, I thought this thread was going to be about older games (pre-PS1) that were strictly RPG to the core (experience levels that rose as you defeated enemies, weapon/armor gathering, managing a party) that employed something other than a turn-based menu system for fighting, but it seems to have gone on to include games like Zelda and the Quintet games, which mostly lack those (j)RPG-defining features. Rather, they rely on finding tools and power-ups through exploration and gameplay to strengthen your character.

If that's the case, I might as well mention The Guardian Legend on NES, which had a similar structure of a typical Zelda-like with an explorable overworld, shops to buy sub-weapons and power-ups to find/win from enemies but with "dungeon" stages that were basically fast-paced "shmup" sequences complete with big bosses at the end:

The Guardian Legend

Besides that, there's another game that fits the bill: Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves. Yes, a movie license turned action-rpg. Made for the NES, It's crafted a lot like the western-made RPGs of the time. It follows the plot of the movie rather loosely, but that's not really a problem. Collision detection was wonky though, and the graphics leave something to be desired:

The gameplay was very fast-paced, swinging swords overhead like a madman (but the bow and arrow game, ridiculous). I liked the equipment menu, dragging items w/ the cursor to equip, inspect or eat. There was also a side-view battle system that was pretty terrible and abuse-able, and giant overhead battle sequences that utilized your band of merry men which was kinda neat but rarely used.

 

[djtiesto]

Bumping this because I saw it linked in another thread. Really cool to see a post about Villgust on NES, I actually helped J2E with some of the enemy/weapon/name translations in that game! Pretty fun game too, I should go and try a replay.

I do love the early action RPG, I think Dragon Slayer or Xanadu by Falcom... or even earlier, Panorama Toh... were some of the first action RPGs ever made. Though the games have plenty of arcane design decisions and are brutally challenging, they influenced a whole lot of other RPG devs.

Other great, underrated action RPGs from the days of yore:

Neugier (SFC) - a really short action RPG with a score-attack that's made for speed running. The first game of Yoshiharu Gotanda of tri-Ace fame.

Willow (NES) - really fun licensed game by Capcom. A bit mazey and some annoying grindy elements (passwords don't save experience progress to the next level and you lose your exp progress too if you die... Still worth playing.

Sylvan Tale (Game Gear) - Japan only but with a fan translation. One of the best GG exclusives around, an action RPG where you can change into animals with different abilities to progress.

Exile (PCE/Turbo Super-CD) - An awesome game with overhead exploration segments and side scrolling action segments. Has an Arabian theme and takes place during the Crusades. Use narcotics to heal you (changed in the American version). Also has a prequel for Japanese PCs and a sequel for the Turbo CD, the sequel is notorious for a glitch in the localized version which increased the difficulty to the point of being all-but-impossible.