Other History Lessons posts can be found here. This post makes many references to the entries for Dragon Quest III and Phantasy Star. As always, you may click on images to view larger versions.
I have been slowly playing through the early Japanese-style role-playing games, although I haven’t managed to do so in the right order. I most recently played Dragon Quest III, but then realized there were a few other games released before it that I also wanted to play. The first of those is Digital Devil Story: Megami Tensei, which was only released in Japan, in September 1987 (placing it three months before Final Fantasy and Phantasy Star, and five months before Dragon Quest III). In fact, there were two different games with that title, both based on the novel of the same name. The game for personal computers is a top-down action role-playing game, but the game for the Famicom (rebranded as the Nintendo Entertainment System in the Western market) is a first-person, tile-based dungeon crawl role-playing game in the mold of Wizardry or Might and Magic. It’s this one that proved popular, eventually spawning the Shin Megami Tensei series which rivals Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest in popularity in Japan, and has more recently enjoyed some crossover success in the west. The franchise includes the Persona series of spin-off games, which may be the most successful internationally. I had no idea that this series traced its roots all the way back to the earliest Japanese console role-playing games, so I was intrigued to try out the very first entry.