Retronauts - Retronauts Micro 68: Dragon Slayer

Episode Date: August 25, 2017

Fresh from Long Island Retro Gaming Expo, Jeremy and Bob yield the floor to Kurt Kalata and Rob Russo from Hardcore Gaming 101 to explain the history of Falcom's Dragon Slayer series. Just in time for the PS4 debut of the latest spinoff, Tokyo Xanadu!

All right. This week in Retronauts, we are not talking about Olivia Newton-John. Long Island Retro Gaming Expo. Did I get that name right? I think so. Excellent. And we are here to talk about something incredibly obscure. If you came in thinking this was going to be about Dragon's Lair, the Don Bluth-produced Laserdisc game.

I'm very sorry, this is Dragon Slayer. Yeah. The doors are locked from the outside, though, so you're stuck here. So anyway, without further ado, I am Jeremy Parrish, one of the co-hosts of Retronauts. Hey, it's Bob Mackey. He's also a co-host of Retronauts. And we have special guests here to join us because they know a lot about this very obscure topic. So please, guys, introduce yourselves.

I'm Craig Codagh of Hardcore Gaming 101. And I am Rob Russo, also known as Xerxes, from the Hardcore Gaming 101 podcast. And so, yeah, like I mentioned, we're going to be talking about the Dragon Slayer series. What we've done over the past year or so has had a few. different episodes about series and franchises with incredibly convoluted family trees. We had bubble bobble and before that we had Wonderboy.

This might be the series to top them all. So it's kind of like the crowning conclusion to our obscure, complicated family lineage trilogy. And the Dragon Slayer series is one that most people here in the U.S. haven't heard a lot about.

It's not a very popular or common or well-known franchise in the states, but in Japan it's been extremely I wouldn't necessarily say extremely popular, but it was a really a landmark release. The series began almost

35 years ago and has been extremely influential on lots of other Japanese RPGs, which you know is pulled into like modern day indie developed RPGs in Europe and America. So it has like really deep roots and a really

really, I guess expansive spread and influence, but it largely has gone unknown here in the U.S. And there's a few reasons for that, which will probably cover in pretty good order. But I don't know if you guys have anything you want to add. Well, the main reason that at least the second Dragon Slayer game, Zanidu, was so well known is for this one of the best-selling Japanese PC games at all time. I think it's 400, 450,000 copies, which was insane to the how expensive those things were back then.

Right, and also that was the mid-80s, and selling, you know, five-digit, was doing pretty well. Selling six digits was doing incredibly well and getting to half a million on a PC, like Kurt said, you know, when those systems were thousands of dollars and priced well out of reach for most people was pretty significant.

So, yeah, the series has done, I think, pretty well for itself. And something we talked about yesterday when we were prepping for this panel was that the series really kind of fed into this sort of underlying game culture that was really prevalent in Japan in the 80s, where there was like this exchange of knowledge among fans. Like, you know, people go on message boards today or share things on Twitter or whatever. But, you know, before that existed, people just kind of shared ideas.

And so there was a whole, I guess, not necessarily movement, but it was pretty common to find these games like Dragon Slayer that were full of just incredibly obtuse, obscure secrets and demanded people talk to each other to figure out how do you beat this game? I don't know if you want to add anything to that. Well, I mean, I guess, so we're in the unenviable position of trying to explain why you should care about a series of action RPGs for computers you've never heard of

in a country you probably haven't visited. So, but think of it this way. Has everybody here heard of like Dragon Quest, Dragon Warrior? Never? Yeah. The heck? So that's, anybody here like JRP's? Show of hands?

Ah, okay, excellent. Okay, so Dragon Slayer is like a series of JRPs that do everything that JRPs don't normally do. But they do, it's like, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's, take on the computer RPG, like a take on Ultima Wizardry and other stuff like that. Whereas Dragon Slayer is, each one is its own separate take on what that could have been. And none of them really developed into a genre unto themselves like Dragon Quest did, but they could have, but they probably. Yeah, Rob, you just sent over an interview that you just found between, sorry, what was his name? Yeah, Yoshio Kia and was the creator of Dragon Slayer. And the interview with him in UG-40.

Right, the creator of Dragon Quest. And in that interview, they kind of touched on a point that's something that we've sort of talked about on and off over the past few years on Retronauts, which is that the idea of role-playing games has become pretty much cemented in people's minds as this journey to make numbers get bigger. And that's not really what the RPG was about. The RPG was about, you know, the tabletop RPG was about people getting together, sharing a story together, having an experience, doing improvisational things. Not necessarily watching their stats get bigger. I mean, at the end of a classic D&D tabletop quest, your wizard is going to have like six hit points.

He's not going to be a million hit points or whatever. That's just not really the focus of classic D&D. But RPGs on video games and computers have pretty much gone in the direction of the numbers, making the numbers get bigger, getting stats and becoming stronger. And it's just, you know, I think because that's what computers do best. They work with numbers. So that's where the focus is gone.

But Dragon Slayer, even though there is a lot of that, you know, the numbers get bigger. Those games were really kind of designed to focus on that sort of experience, I would see. In different ways, each one in different ways. And when we actually get into covering the individual games, you'll see how that plays out. Do we want to talk a little about, you don't have to, because you want to talk a little about, like, how Kia and Falcom kind of. Yeah, actually, it's an interesting story.

Like, Falcom, you may have heard of. They've created games like Ease and, let's see, Legend of Heroes. They've been around for 30 plus years and are still an active force, but they didn't start out as a video game maker. No. They started out, I actually have their,

what they were called before, they were called Falcons, right? just found this out. They were known as Computer Land Tachikawa. So they're in the Tachikawa neighborhood of Tokyo. They were a computer store. They opened their doors, I believe, on March 9, 1981. And they were mostly an Apple II importer. At the time, Apple II computers were really, really expensive

in Japan. So most people played their games in touch on NEC 88 98 or the sharp X1 later Right But the computer's made In Japan

For Japanese audience I think MSX Most people They're probably familiar With MSX They're kind of like that But they're a little bit Holder

So Yoshio Kia Basically got his start By being sort of bumming around that store I think he would code basic Games at home I believe on his 1001

I didn't hear of until I looked this up but he brought in a game a game he coded invasicates called Galactic Wars and we don't have images up on the slideshow but if anyone wants to go to my Twitter a pen tweet it starts out with some

at GTINX on Twitter the pen tweet starts a thread that has some images at this time period information. So out of curiosity has anyone here played a Dragon Slayer game? Got the two guys front and center.

Okay, so a few hands. You may have actually played some without realizing it. Have you played Legend of Heroes? Any of those games? That actually started as Dragon Slayer. Legacy of the Wizard for NES and Pazanadu both were spinoffs. Actually, Legacy of the Wizard was actually Dragon Slayer 4 in Japan.

So some of these games did kind of trickle over to the U.S. I think the third game Sorcerian made it to PCs. like really late and in really small numbers? Oh, that's the fifth game. Oh, my God, I've already messed up. At the time, Sierra Online was looking to the Japanese market to license a bunch of games. And most of the games they published were from B-marks,

who later did, like, the lunar games, but the one that they got from Falcom was in the process. Yeah, so some of these games have made it over, but none of them have come under the name Dragon Slayer, even though that's kind of what they're known as in Canada. So, again, it kind of feeds into the obscurity. of all of these games and did you happen to put up the image

of the family tree like all the games we forgot I put together back when I worked for OneUp.com an image that had like all the links and everything and showed which games started where and what they became I think it's too big for this planetarium screen

he wouldn't even be able to see it if we blew it up because there's only like eight core games but there's so many spin-offs and branches and ports and what I've used Oh, yeah, there's a joint between Sega and Falcom, which they brought out a ton of games, and I think one the only ones that came out here with Popple Mail. Which is out there. I saw it out there earlier. It's $300 now.

Yeah, you can get a disc-only copy for about $120 and won the guys here. Yeah, I don't think they did it. The thing about Falcom is that they were mostly a PC developer, so they licensed their stuff out a lot, and I think, I don't know, Sony or something that got me at the Dreamcast. So let's actually talk about what We've kind of danced around it. But the fact is there is no like central definition for Dragon Slayer. It's a bunch of games developed, kind of lead, designed by Yoshio Kia,

and he was one of the original employees. Once it transferred over from being a computer store to being a software publisher, and probably sometime in 1983, I think, they published his game Cosmic, or not Cosmic Wars One, which never got a single. In 1983, that was their first. game in his version. And another game that is called Panorama Island, which is his first part. Yeah, and so all of these games were designed by him, but they don't have any sort of unifying element to them. The first few games were sort of like pop-down games.

Then they went sort of side-scrolling platformers, some with some very strange ideas behind them. Wouldn't you say the unifying element is cruelty throughout? But, I mean, even toward the end, some of the later ones, like Dragon, I'm sorry, Legend of Heroes, which is a very Dragon Quest-style RPG. That's not really that cool. Then you get into, in the 90s, like, there's a strategy RPG. Like, none of these games have a story connection.

There's a sword called a Dragon Slayer, most of it. That's about it. It's just kind of a loose connection. There's a couple of recurring things that you sort of see, and then there are just ideas I think that here really like. Like, a couple of games of a karma system. this is the sort of idea that your characters might not necessarily level up

but your equipment does as you use them over and over. There's sort of small things like that. And if you look at Danadu and just sort of see the way the graphics are presented, you can sort of see the link between that and let's see the lizard. Yeah, you can definitely see some connections from time to time, but at the same time

you're like, I don't know, like trying to draw a line from the original Dragon Slayer to Lord of Monarch or something, the strategy RPG. It's really tough. So anyway, the games themselves, the first Dragon Slayer came out under the name Dragon Slayer. That's kind of where, like the one time it made sense. And that was in 1984. And that's sort of an action RPG, sort of a top-down perspective.

I've never played the original version because, of course, these games were made for PCs that only came out in Japan in the 80s. So I don't just have any of those laying around. But there was a Game Boy for it that I've covered and played. And it pretty much gets the basics. And it's such a big game, and there's no way to save your progress, that it may not actually be possible to finish it on a set of batteries. So some of these games, like, yeah, I don't know, some of the thinking behind them might have been a little muddled in transition.

But it's a very unusual game. It almost reminds me of the puzzle box-pushing game, Sokobon, because the main element of the original Dragon Slayer is, you're a hero who has a house and your house is in the middle of a labyrinth full of monsters and in order to become stronger you have to go into the maze and collect you know equipment and items and things and then take them back to your house and use those to power up like you level up when you go back to your house but you can push your house around through the maze it's like this you know kind of this gentrification project um and it's it's very unusual

it's very obtuse and I was not able to finish it I have no qualms about saying that it's very confusing and very difficult I think to get the true ending you have to beat it without dying maybe that's something someone told me

that kind of like tops it any way to continue oh yeah yeah you can totally continue but supposedly the way to get the true ending is not to die but that's more easily said than done because of course the maze is full of monsters. It has the, this is the game that I think

invented bump combat. You want to talk about that? That's your term. Bump combat? I don't know. Whoever wants to talk about bump combat. Someone put that in there. I can't remember. So it may be the first game that has this, but everybody, if you're familiar with the Ease games,

they're the first Ease games where you kind of collide with the enemies and that's how you attack them. It's not like Zelda where you press a button to extend your sword. You have to collide with them. it's much more refined than it is in Dragon Slayer or Zanadu.

Dragon Slayer Zanadu, you literally sliding. Yeah, I mean, it's Go ahead. This sort of descended from Ultima. I mean, those sort of had that thing, right? Like the older ones?

Little. I don't know. Not to the same degree. This is more of an action sort of thing. But you could think like Diablo. And just imagine Diablo without the clicking. You bump your dude into the demon

or whatever, and whichever has the higher numbers is going to come out ahead. So, yeah, that's pretty much the entirety of the game. So you have to bump into enemies that aren't as strong as you, that are a lower level than you. And as you level up, you become stronger, you can more easily kill enemies and you don't to worry so much about them sapping your health. The thing is, though, each enemy, like, you have a lot of different appearances for enemies.

Each enemy type is a higher level than the next, or the previous one. and whenever you kill an enemy, another one appears in the maze to take a place that is one level higher than the one you just kill. So it's actually pretty easy to go around on a killing spree and create this entire maze full of monsters

that you don't actually have the power to kill. So you have to be really careful about playing this game. It's designed, as so many of these Dragon Slayer games are, to kind of make you regret playing in a sense. No, I would say it's, very deliberate. It's slow down and if you want to have any chance of enjoying it, play very

carefully. But really, a lot of the pleasure of the game is just to go back in time. They're like a time issue. Anybody remember the game hide live? Yeah? This is kind of that same I would say like the same species of the RPG where

there's like, there are no rules. It's the wild west. And so they were trying all kinds of stuff. Yeah, literally, like this quote you pulled up from Kia, with Dragon Slayer, I didn't really have a clear objective in mind as I created it. I wanted players to experience a new style of gameplay. It turned out to be a mess after all.

People didn't like it. Yet somehow it just kept going. Any of the sequel. I was being a little self-deprecating there. It must have sold something. Because already he was being known as like the star programmer of Japanese. It really was like a big for that small community. yeah i mean if you if you kind of look at the way this game worked you have extremely simplistic

systems in place like there's only so much you can do with pc games this old and so the the complexity can't really come in how you control your character so instead it has to come in the way you interact with the world and the systems that are around your character so there are things like crosses that you can pick up and carry around and it will keep enemies from attacking you But you can only carry one item at a time. So if you're going to carry crosses, that means you have to not carry other things that might be more important in a given situation. So it really comes down to sort of learning the lay of the land, positioning yourself where you need to be, like, planning out your strategies, planning out how you're going to advance through the game, not going too fast so that the monsters don't all become impossible to compete. It's meant to be sort of a long haul period.

and if you look this game came out the same year in 1984 as Namco published Tower of Duraga for arcades. I don't know if you guys are familiar with that one. If you just picked up Namco Museum for Switch, it's on there and if you hadn't played it before, you probably picked that up and died

almost immediately and we're like, what's happening? Tower of Duraga is kind of like I would say the arcade approach to this concept, whereas Dragon Slayer is a PC approach. Tower of Duraga is like very fast-paced you stick out your sword and you run into an enemy and you kill it

and it's full of secrets and it's like you pick up jet boots so you can go really fast and you know you're progressing level by level whereas dragon slayer is this big sprawling maze and you have to take it more slowly you're kind of meant to tuck in and play for a few hours in time so you sort of get these two very similar looking games on the surface that have very different underlying philosophy but what they are both united by is the fact that they're incredibly opaque to a casual player and take a lot of mastery and are packed with secrets and strategies that aren't immediately intuitive and really demanded people share tips with each other and kind of socialize. So it does get that, you know, that tabletop RPG socialization

experience just in a different way. It's not like you're playing with other people, but instead you play with other, play on your own and then you're like, what's going on? And then you talk to your friends and you figure it out. Yeah, I believe we were talking yesterday, and somebody said that there were books you could write in in the arcade. So it was sort of like a paper Reddit thread about Tyra Drago? Yeah, I think it's except friendlier. Much friendlier. Yeah, so that's the original Dragon Slayer,

and its popularity, I guess, can be debated, depending on whether you believe it's creator or not. But he did go on to create another game the following year that would become incredibly successful. That's Zanadu, and like I said, not an Olivia Newton-John reference, but at any time I mention it, someone always seems. and this is a very different game in a lot of ways

and would be extremely influential. It's more of a... Is it up on the screen? Oh, there you go. Yeah. So it's got the side-scrolling thing and you're fighting a giant dragon apparently. Yeah, there's one of the big things about it

was the big boss creature. We have a dragon and a big old octopus. So, I think it originally came out for the Sharp X-1, which is another one of those computers I've never seen. Well, one of the most of the computers. main reasons why Zanidu became so popular is there's always been Japanese PC magazines of people to buy in type

in magazines, but the industry was starting to really pick up around them. So they would put strategy guides for Zanidu, and that sort of gave it free publicity that like made a feedback loop where people would see this in a magazine buy it. Yeah, so to describe the gameplay,

you see a picture of it when it comes up. I don't know how you'll know what it is, but it starts out and you're actually it's like a side side scrolling type thing where you're on you've got a little character

and there's like a castle and you go in you talk to the king and then it switches to like you know I don't know standard like

Apple 2 RPD type thing where it's got like you're in a tavern here's the tavern guy which is the whole picture and they actually

copied them originally out of what the Ultima manual yeah the Ulstma 3 manual if you look for the original version of the game and compare them like

they just took it and put it in pixel pretty much and there's this whole story behind it where apparently Richard Garriott had visited Japan with the possibility licensing from the Falcon game to origin

and when he saw this he apparently got so furious that the deal fell through I think there was a lawsuit I mean I think it's kind of a petty thing to get mad about but you never know

it's the one of these things that if anybody would have ever interviewed Richard Garrett would be a fun thing that happened they weren't great if you've ever played Fazzanadu for NES, then you would recognize

the way Zanadu begins. You know, it starts out with the town, like he said, and you talk to the king, get some money, and go into the shops and so forth. Like, I think Fazanadu actually started as a Famicom port of Zanadu and then mutated into something like an entirely new game. A more accessible game.

Yeah, I think what happened was they had licensed it to Falcom, or not Falcom Hudson, because it was one of the most popular RPGs on there. And then when they actually tried to make it suitable for a Famicom audience, broader and younger, they were just like, this is totally unworkable. Then they saw that Zelda 2 was

popular at the time and just read their own Zelda 2 train. Yeah, when Hudson Soft, the creators, or not the creators of the Adventure Island, but, you know, the Hudson Soft thinks your game is difficult in Byzantine for the audience, you know, there's an issue there.

But if you're familiar with insanity, like almost nothing else applies to the original. When you go down, there's swords. There's monsters and stuff. Yeah. So you go down into a cave after that. And like the king gives you money.

You use the money to basically build your character. So you go to like the vitality store and the vitality guy gives you vitality points. And then you go, et cetera. And then so you have to decide what your character is going to be like exactly down to the point. And you have no idea how that's going to apply to the rest of the game. Then you go down to the dungeon. And there's a copy protection thing where if you don't copy the game from your friend or somewhere.

You won't know how to get to the next part of the maze. You know, just loop endlessly. It's like the last dungeon. Is that made a manual or something? I would assume so. I did not learn it that way. I was very deepened. But all you got to do is like you go five steps at the bottom of the tunnel to the left

and then go and then you move back over to the right and there's like a shop. And from there you go into the dungeon. And then the dungeons are like different levels, I think. they're sort of set out in a grid they can roll in different directions and there's different enemies that you can if you crash into them it goes to a separate screen

like a bump combat sort of thing like the other game you see like a guy being like surrounded by skeletons up there that's what that is on the slideshow yeah all right so all of this is kind of skirting around the most horrible thing about this game

which is the karma system which sounds good on And, you know, in principle, like, you don't want to be a bad guy. You want to be a good guy and save the planet. But this is maybe not how you should necessarily implement the karma system. Right. No. Drinking poison gives you good karma.

Well, it lowers your bad karma. Exactly. And it hurts you. And so it's like you're doing like some kind of ascetic penance, like a monk of some kind. But you get, yeah, kind of, I guess. You have to, yeah. So you get, I think increases in karma points is bad in this one. No, you want to keep it at a level where it's not too bad because otherwise I don't level up or there's certain areas that you can't go into if your karma is too bad.

So if you kill regular monster, you've got two kinds of monsters in the game, although you can't tell them apart. Some of them are bad monsters and killing them doesn't hurt your karma. But some of them are good monsters, and they do hurt your karma and kill them. And they still attack you. They will just attack you like any other monster, but they're good. so I don't know what the and you have to kill them like it just you know

don't you or can you just I mean it's probably an essential I just racked up karma and then and then the only way to get your karma points down I think it brings the karma improving potion yeah the poison there's also a food system like a lot of those

RPG so you need to keep yourself fed but the big rub about the game is that everything is limited like there are only so many enemies in the game and only so much experience points And so eventually if you just stumble around without knowing what you're doing, you'll just run out of resources or find yourself too weak to go anywhere. And as cruel as that sounds, that probably took more effort to implement than it would have done.

It just have random drops and random enemies. And this was very intentional on this part. Yeah, I mean, people like to bag on BioWare games for having simplistic karma systems, like the Renegate Paragon thing and Mass Effect. But seriously, give me that any day over this completely opaque, system where you have, like, you have to do things and you don't know if it's going to be good or bad, and how you have to recover from it. And that's absolutely mandatory to beat the game. It reminds me more of ogre battle and more arbitrary morality.

Oh, man, maybe this is where Matsunov got his idea. And I guess we can move on from Zanidu. There's not, like, you need the, oh, don't you also need, like, good karma to level up? Like, you have to go to. Yeah, I think to certain areas we need. So you're held back in all kinds of ways by mechanics you don't totally understand. I guess what I was going to say, the last thing is that Kia in an interview, probably in 1987, I think, was really early on, was saying that he felt

like he didn't like how the way JRP's were developing at the time. He was very frustrated by how there were random battles and stuff. He said like, that doesn't make sense. Like it should be like predetermined or you know there's a monster there. You know this is where the shop is. You know this

and that. And you've got to plan how you're going to get there. And that's the challenge. And whether you like that challenge or not, I don't know. That's what he was intentional. Is this the one where he implemented a limited number of monsters, like a finite number of monsters within the Mayas? Yes. So if you do too much bad karma, then you're...

There's only so many karma-reducing potions. There's only so many everything. And how long does it take to finish this game? I would not know. I don't know either. I don't know either. I mean, if you... Especially on Nico Niko-Dogo, the Japanese equivalent of YouTube,

you could probably find people. I mean, there's like a speed run that doesn't, like, two hours. something bad. Anyway, yeah, all of this that we just described is the game that sold nearly happily in copies in Japan. So clearly, someone enjoyed this sort of

massacistic experience. And not only that, but it received expansions. It received sequels. It's still getting sequels. There was a sequel that came out this year in the U.S. on Vita and coming up on PlayStation 4 called Tokyo Xanadu. It's not recognizable in any sense as a sequel to this,

but it is an extension of the Xanadu concept. some sense. They like for using the name a whole lot, which is that we revisit in the PCNG game Legend of Zanidu, which has not very much to do with this. But they sort of were going, like using the Zanidu name

for significant games, like a prestige title. Yeah, prestige title. Like in 2005, it's a 20th anniversary game. They made Zanadu Next, which is a really good, it's like a combination between a Diablo Hackenslash and the Zelda game.

And it sort of takes the ideas of the mid-80s RPG. but puts them in a modern context. He was only released, I think, last year on Steam by X-Eat. And it's an excellent game, which is definitely worth picking up. I really need to play the Steam version of that, because the only version I

I played was the Engage version, which was not an excellent game. I mean, it was nice seeing the world at four frames per second. It was bad. And then Tokyo's identity was just something that they brought it as a 30th anniversary, but it has basically nothing to do with it. It has much more to do with the Trails of Cold Steel games.

It's basically an action version of that that take place in the quasi. It's kind of Trails of Cold Steel meets persona in a lot of ways. It feels very much like it takes a lot of cues from the persona, which, you know, that's pretty cool. I like that idea, but definitely has nothing to do with seeking karma points in a dark dungeon. About the expansion, they made a Zanidu scenario too, which by itself isn't really that interesting, but at that point, Yuzo Kishiro was one of the big video game music composers. he was just getting his start making his own music and he sent a tape to Falcom

and they were like, you know what, we like it, let's use it in the game. The original was Zanadu, it only had like one theme that was sort of played at different tempos and this one has a lot of music. And when the, like Falcom, especially over the 80s and 90s, became really well known for their strange soundtrack album.

And one of the first ones they did was called All Over Zanadu, which I think was even written vinyl and cassette because it was that era. And that was, it's like its first. music scene. For a gentle audience here, we should... What would they know Yuzo Koshiro from? Treats of Rage. Creeds of Rage. Anything else? Act Readeriezer

Revenge of Shinobie. Truly, that must be it. The mass system version of Sondon Hitchardt. His mom's company developed it. Isn't his mom's company? Yeah. It's a family business. They're great. So anyway, that was a game called Zanadu, and boy, Am I glad I missed out on that one?

And I kind of feel like the next game... Okay, so there wasn't no Dragon Slayer 3. There was a Dragon Slayer Jr., which sits in the third slot of the series, Romancey. But it's not actually called Dragon Slayer 3, is it? No. No. It's called Dragon Slayer Jr. And why would you think that it's because it's easier?

No, but it feels like in response to the fact that they created this game where you could spend 30 hours diving into a dungeon and then get to a point where it was unbeatable because you beat all the monsters, you used all the karma potions, and your character balance was still totally off. They created a game that had to be completed within 30 minutes, 30 seconds. No, 30 minutes, 30 minutes.

Also, I just realized Dragon Slayer has one thing in common with Leasersuit Larry, and that one of the numbered games is missing. And that's the joke. Someone needs to create a Dragon Slayer. Funny every time. You know, when you're a kid, there are a lot of things that you think exist. Unicorns, dragons, mermaids, you name it. When you're a kid, it's real. But when you

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So this game, like, I, again, have never played it because who owns a PC 8801 these days? But, you know, going back and looking at footage of it, watching play-throughs of it, it feels almost like the inspiration for Wonder Boy 3, like the games that West 1 and Sega created, and win in that kind of like action RPG. that direction like this is very much basis for that and this was 1986 it reminds me

like a thousand percent of Lamulana or even something like I want to be the guy just designed to screw you over at every turn I think it's better known here as Romancea Dragon Slayer Jr. Romancea but when it was released on the Famicom it was just called I think it was just called Romancea

and that was the first one that they actually I don't know if it came out before for Vanity or not that they ported pretty much directly to the Famicom Compile, the company that made a whole bunch of shoot-em-ups was later known for the Pollo Poyo Games. They had a working relationship with Falcom, and they ported that version of the game. And one of the main things about Romance is that it looks and kind of plays like an RPG,

but not really. It's more like an adventure game. Yeah, what did you tell us? How do you make an RPG that you have to finish in 30 minutes? That doesn't make any sense at all. The game world isn't very big, but it also used the karma system, similar to Zanadu but I mean there's all sorts of enemies

but you're not supposed to fight any of them because they're supposed to be like regular people that were turned into monsters you have to fight some of them because you can't get past the there's like a thing nobody tells you this in the game but there's like a thing in the beginning

like there's the forbidden forest you go in they can't go through the door just keep killing things and eventually like an orb drops and then you got that you go through the rest of the game and then from there the game becomes basically doing good deeds

to the town and people are sick. And you've got to do, I don't know, what is going to do my Mitzpah, you know? And it's, you got to do good teeth. So you go and get medicine and you bring it and hear people. And then they give you a karma ring. And so I try to play romantic because I'm like, hey, if it can be done to 30 minutes. You know, surely I could follow like a walkthrough or something. And that way I could just have finished the game before I talk about it.

So I played the deep Amicom version, which has been translated by somebody. which is which is uh does not mean you should play it but you could and uh what happened to me was is like one of the things you have to do is after you cure the sick people you have to get some angel robes and uh and then there's a guy on the cloud who will kill you if you're asking to and uh if you have the five karma rings you will go up to heaven and then from there you've got to be something i didn't get that far because it's supposed to get karma rings you're every time you kill somebody. But the game is so buggy

that one time it just gave me a coin instead of a karma ring. So I got like one gold. And I only had four karma ring. When I glint to the guy who kills me, I just got a game over. So it didn't even take 30 minutes. Yeah, I finished it really quickly.

Amazing. The game world isn't that big, and I think I read somewhere that it was designed within a month. And I don't know how big the... How much RAM did those things have? It was technically impressive because once the game starts, it doesn't

load again off a disc, which means the game itself is actually very small. I think it entirely in memory. That was a deliberate choice by of the people, I think, called Cody. Yeah, one of the reasons by Falcom became... It's kind of like John Romero that hates you. One of the reasons... Not John Carmack.

Yeah, like, one of the reasons that Falcum was so well known amongst Japanese PC players was Peace 3, which isn't really that impressive a game now, but it was a PPDA game and actually had multi-plane scrolling. And the fact that that system could scroll at all was like really technically impressive. They used that as a selling point. Much the same way for the American version like Kid Software and Commander Keene, the fact that they were able to move scrolling

on that. So with the next game, they kind of took a different approach. Instead of making it for a Japan-only PC, they made it for the MSX, which had some presence in Europe, and the Famicom, the NES, which of course was huge in less. could be the first international Dragon Slayer. I don't know if that was deliberate, but like the thinking there, but it definitely represented sort of the changing times. Suddenly, consoles were the games, where people were playing their game.

And so that was Dragon Slayer 4, Legacy of the Wizard. And I know some of you said you have played Legacy of the Wizard. How many of you have actually beaten Legacy of the Wizard? A lot of people shaking their heads. Fairly, fairly. I was so fascinated with this game. As a kid, I would rent it like a dozen times because there was five playable characters and like

20 items, but it was only until the age of Let's Play started that I realized this game had a point to it, that there were things you needed to do, and I was just like, oh, I was never told this. This is kind of an interesting game. So the idea of the game is, in Japan, it's called Dragon Slayer for Drosley

family, because it's a portmanteau of Dragon Slayer family. Brossley family. And so it's got like a mama, Drosley, and a Papa Drosley, and a brother Drosley, and a sister Drosley, and their puppy dog. And they're a pet monster, pochi, which is kind of like Fido in Japanese. That thing looks disturbingly close to Asmix Boomer character.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I wonder if there was a pending lawsuit. So when on this. I traced it from the boomer. On this slide show, when you see this map come up, that's drag, that's, yeah, legacy of the wizard right there. When you see a map come up that looks like a giant, like a confetti pixel bomb. I'm not going to wait for it.

It'll show up. That's the dungeon. and the dungeon is kind of divided up into kind of puzzle piece shaped segments, and each member of the family has one dungeon within the broader world. Pochi's dungeon, for instance, takes advantage of the fact that

he's a monster, and the monsters do not attack him and can't be heard except by the boss of that dungeon. That's kind of cool, and so the idea of the game is you start out usually with Pochi and you go and collect stuff without getting killed, and then you come back and you finish his dungeon, you want to the next character. Each character

has a special. skill. Yeah, and eventually you're supposed to get the Dragon Slayer sword again. And then you bring the boy. Yeah, the only thing he's good for is using the sword. Yeah, you just say, and then you fight the dragon, which you, when you go to the game, you can sort of see it near the entrance to the maze's big dragon.

Yeah, you're like, oh, is that a painting of a dragon? No, it's actually the dragon. Yeah, so once you have everything and you fight him, then you fight the dragon and then try to be the game. Yeah, back of the day, Nintendo Power was cool enough to post a password for having completed the four sections of the dungeon, where you just needed to take the kid down and beat the dragon. So I have beaten Legacy of the Wizard,

but I didn't do the Light War. But it is interesting because you look, you know, when the Xanadu photo shows up and it's got the little primitive pixel art guy fighting a dragon, that's pretty much how Legacy of the Wizard is. Like, that's totally a reprise of what happened in Xanid. So there is definitely some sort of recurring motif and themes happening here, but you really have to dig for them. I mean, we haven't said it yet, but it's, like a use the term because there is no better term yet

Metroidvania right got Mr. Metroidvania here I got to use it that's what it is and instead of one character like Samus or somebody

getting all of the powers that allow them to access new parts of the maids each one is a different character in the so for instance the Papa Drosley

what's it's been Zem Zem Zem he has a glove right is it the glove and what would a glove do well

if you stand on a block and like press I think you jump and then press a direction and then the block will move. Why you need a glove to do if you think it would be your foots. No part of that is intuitive at all.

It's really, it's once you get it, you'll never forget how to do it, but until that point you will be curious because his dungeon is kind of like a block pushing puzzle dungeon. It's like quirk or Sokubon or something like that. Boxle. That is so I prefer shove it.

Yeah, shove it. Shub it. The warehouse game. Anyway, so that is kind of like the, probably the best known entry in the Dragon Slayer series worldwide because it was released internationally by Broderbun. They kind of did back and forth. They licensed a lot of their games for conversion to Japanese Famicom

and then licensed Japanese games for release on NES. So they were an important gateway, bring children of the world together, and suffer under the hands of Al-Calc. It really is an eccentric and gorgeous-looking game in its way. It's super colorful. And it has a great soundtrack. That's another Uzo Koshira soundtrack. And someone did a remix of that, like 10 years ago,

and just put it up online. And that's been a permanent picture on my iPod. iPod. On my music player device, of choice. And it's just like, it's great music. and it's one of the reasons that you'll keep smashing your skull against this game because it looks nice

and the music when you're suffering is so good kind of almost makes it worthwhile. Should we describe like the way that potions and stuff working this game? I forgot about that. I get a headache just thinking about it. Okay, so when you see a screenshot

of the game up there, you'll see these like little basically like little meter. Status bars with like, you know, little notches. And so you can collect as many as what a hundred keys and you need keys to open everything and you're constantly killing enemies to get drops for keys

and get your life is like done with potions and so there's like 10 or 20 bread of bread yeah that's right potions are poisoned you don't want yes that's right it's got in it yeah

this is one of those games where there's this item drop that will just it harms you and you're not supposed to get it but it's there and you see it all the time and the more healthy you have the more likely it is Right. So if you're running low on keys, you're more likely to have keys. You're more likely to get, and there's magic. Right?

I think. Every time you attack uses magic. You constantly need to either keep killing things and spending magic to get it or get more money so you can buy something. Yeah, actually not a problem. It's keys that become a problem. Fortunately, there are a bunch of weirdos who opened up ends in the middle of this stateful dungeon. So you can stop in there and stay the night. and I'm sure they're happy for the business. It seems like a recurring trope

and RPGs this time period. It's like, well, I'm going to make my way in the world and start a tavern in the middle of this dungeon. Wasn't there a joking fancy star about it where there's like a total bakery in a dungeon? What's it doing down here? They have literally the most dangerous commute possible. You've got to be like a level 20

sorcerer or something to get to work as a pastry shop. But this is probably the first Dragon Slayer game that I would actually recommend people to play. I know it's, yes, it's brutally difficult, but it can be finished. It is fair in its way. And it's one of the, my favorite ennested. And then we'll wrap this conversation up and take a few questions or comments. With the last, I guess, the last Dragon Slayer of the 80s, Dragon Slayer 5 Sorcerian.

Yeah. After that, it's Legend of Heroes and Lord Monarch. Yeah, you can sort of sum those up real quick. Yeah, but Sorcerian is kind of the last, I think, sort of notable one in that it, well, it's insane. Yeah, like, it does the 2D platformer thing, but it gives you an entire RPG party. You create a guild of dozens of characters, and you can take four of them into the dungeon, and you get, like, the character train, kind of like Mickey Mousecapade, where Minnie was running behind. Or Mercenary, yeah, yeah, or, you know, like Final Fantasy 8, where you'd walk around and you have, like, the RPG train or dudes. we're just following directly in your footsteps,

almost like options in Gradius. So, like, everything you do, there's always, like, a wizard and a rogue running behind you doing the exact same thing. Yeah, and Japanese, like, the idiom for this would be, like, goldfish poop. It just trails after. They're, like, sycophanes trailing after the leader.

But you can cycle through the different characters. But so when you see, like, the character, like, there's, like, you'll see a character creation screen on the slide show there, and that's how you start out. And you can create, you've got a camera, You can create a dwarf. You can create an elf.

I don't remember what else. And then you have to give them their points. There's four races and 60 different jobs. Yes. For your 10 guild members. Right. And then you decide how old they are. Which their character portrait changes,

depending whether they're young, middle-aged, or elderly. And this game has so many things going on that we can probably only focus on the craziest parts. And that would be maybe more interesting than describing the gameplay, which really isn't all that great. So the age thing really factors in heavily to this because between every scenario or adventure you go on, your party, like, you have the choice of usually you want to take off a couple years. And so you can do like training, I think, and get stronger that way. And you earn money in the game mostly through just doing your job.

And all you do is like, you know, press a button that says something like low a year. you're farming or whatever. You know, it's like, that's what you're supposed to be doing. And it also has a weird thing with the age stuff where if the character dies and then is left dead for a long time, for example, you can resurrect them and they have amazing powers or hand you have. And depending on what it is, and it's really complicated, you should just look it up because it's crazy.

But let's say you've got like an elf and you let him die and you don't resurrect them for like 19 years, you know? In game years, or if it's a really high number, I think he becomes immortal and just can't die except by, like, you know, the hand. And so there's weird stuff like that. It also has a spellcrafting system. This is what Yoshokiya really wanted to do, because he was really upset, but not upset, but really kind of getting bored with the Final Fantasy Dragon Quest style of spell casting, which is basically I leveled up. now it's ice two. Ice two.

Blast the monsters. Ice two. You wanted to do something that's more like let's craft spells and have to learn a spell from somebody who knows it. You have to enchant weapons

and the weapons get abilities. I want to try how that works because I can't. I can't either. Don't ask me. I don't know. The other two main things about Sorcerian is that

these are two unfortunately elements that weren't carried over really for the DOS version was that it was very, very expandable. Like, the game comes with 15 scenarios, and you can play, I think, in almost any order. Almost.

Once you beat them all, then you can fight a dragon in it. And then you can replay them as much as you want. It's just like a dungeon. There's different people who talk to, miniature puzzles, but there were so many expansion packs made by even some third-party companies like Cicero. Where there's just the different music. Really?

Cacero? Yeah. Huh, okay, I didn't know that. Sorry. There were different music, you know, new graphics. There's a, I think, a Babylonian, version called Gilgamesh or the Pyramid version. The Sun Goku era version of it.

And this game was also ported a lot to the megadrives, the engine, screencast. There was even a remake for Windows. And each of them, they kind of switch out and they all have some shared scenarios, some completely new ones. So there's always something different to try it. And the other thing is also the excellent Yuzo Koshiro soundtrack, which sounds really good on the PC 8890s in.

But when they converted it, like, The sound driver programmers at Sierra, I guess, they weren't, like, a lot of American developers didn't really place a lot of emphasis on the FM sense, like they didn't Japan, so it doesn't sound very good at all. They didn't have, yeah. Yeah, well, like, ad lib FM sort of sense. So, yeah, so the way Kurt describes it is, I think you could look at it as, like, Sorcerian is, like, the base edition of, like, full-playing game, and there's expansion module. and it has a weapon crafting or spell crafting thing where there's what how many seven different gods and the gods all hate each other

so you can mix different you can either keep applying the same gods like magic spells to enchant the same item and everything plays nicely where you can mix gods I want to be weird effects and there's like whole tables how this works out and the game doesn't really even explain it to you have to learn that like oh now this thing I got is worth with Yeah, so that's pretty much like the weird five-year history of Dragon Slayer in the 80s.

After this, you know, you go to Legend of Heroes, which is a pretty standard Dragon Quest style game, Final Fantasy style game, and Lord Monarch, which is a pretty intuitive, like not baffling and weird strategy RPG. It's more like a real-time strategy game that predated a lot of he knows real-time strategy games. It's not really an RPG. It's sort of like this, like a strategy game. kind of plays itself. Like you have four kingdoms on a map and your goal is to expand your population and then conquer different parts in the map. But the idea is that I'm controlling everybody on a granular level is to just focus on much going on. So you sort of set broad commands

reach your characters and then rank up the speed up and down to see how while you're doing. You have to adjust your tax rate, which depends on how many things you can create and how much money you actually get. It's actually pretty neat to see an action because you can set up a speed really, really high and just, if you've done everything well, you'll just see the dude smash over everything on the map. And actually, there's a version of it that was released in English, called Lord Monarch online that you can still download from Calcom's website that has a whole guide on how to play

it and all the commands. There's no, like, storyline or anything. Even though it's developed for Windows 95, I'm pretty sure, it's still work from, like, Windows 10. So if you ever want to muck around with it? I would say this is probably the most influential game series that almost has zero traction in the West. If you look at these games, like watch videos of them, read about them. I think you'll really be surprised by how much of these games you see in other series they're familiar with. But, you know, because of the opacity of them or just, you know, the nature of platforms they were on,

most of them never made their way here and the ones that did weren't directly like no one drew a line between them as a kid I wouldn't have known that Legacy of the Wizard and Zanadu were related so yeah it's it's like this big thing that happened and influenced a ton of other game designers

80s 90s and were almost completely oblivious to it so it's really fascinating to look at that way and the games that have like spread out of this you know the Xanadu series the Legend of Heroes series there was the Gagarv trilogy if that's even I It's so many games that have kind of like trickled their way over here, but have nothing to do really with the original series that started at all. It's pretty fascinating. So definitely something that I think anyone who's interested in game history is worth looking into and studying a little bit. Maybe not necessarily playing because I feel like some of these games are going to be just incredibly unfriendly and not much fun these days. But even though there is sort of that sense of like roguelike.

or something along those lines where it's like it seems not fun but yet it's addictive. I think if they have that element. And I think that about Rapsett. So thank you, everyone, for coming out and hearing about this very esoteric topic. Thanks, long-line retrogaming expo people

for having us here and letting us talk for an hour about this esoteric topic. And we hope we'll see you again sometime and please continue listening to the show, Retronauts and Retronauts.com, etc. So thanks. Yeah, thanks good. We have a few t-shirts in kind of odd sizes, if anyone would have a t-shirt first come for serve.

You could make one of them into a kite. Let's say you just bought a house. You're one step closer to becoming your parents. You'll proudly mow the lawn. Ask if anybody noticed you mowed the lawn. Tell people to stay off the lawn. Compare it to your neighbor's lawn and complain about having to mow the lawn again. Good news is it's easy to bundle home and auto through Progressive and Save on Your Car Insurance, which, of course, we'll go right into the lawn. Progressive Casualty Insurance Company affiliates and other insurers, discount not available in all stages situations. The Mueller Report. I'm Ed Donahue with an AP News Minute.

President Trump was asked at the White House if Special Counsel Robert. Mueller's Russia investigation report should be released next week when he will be out of town. I guess from what I understand, that will be totally up to the Attorney General. Maine Susan Collins says she would vote for a congressional resolution disapproving a President Trump's emergency declaration to build a border wall, becoming the first Republican senator to publicly back it. In New York, the wounded supervisor of a police detective killed by friendly fire was among the mourners attending his funeral. Detective Brian Simonson was killed as officer started shooting at a robbery suspect last week.

Commissioner James O'Neill was among the speakers today at Simonson's funeral. It's a tremendous way to bear, knowing that your choices will directly affect the lives of others. The cops like Brian don't shy away from it. It's the very foundation of who they are and what they do. The robbery suspect in a man, police say acted as his lookout have been charged with murder. I'm Ed Donahue.