Aidan Moher - Fight, Magic, Items: The History of Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest, and the Rise of Japanese RPGs in the West

As a kid in the 90s, I fought goblins and demons. I learned new magic spells and traded in old gear for shiny weapons. Raised rebellions, traveled through time, and rode a whale into space. I became the Dragonmaster and the Hero of Light.

Didnt we all?

Besides being a Dragonmaster, I was an otherwise average Canadian teen. Id regularly sequester in a dark bedroom with my friends, drenched in the phosphorous glow of a bulky tube TV, punk rock from The Offspring or NOFX drowning out the games built-in soundtrack, mutually entranced by the latest video game. We werent obsessed with the latest first-person shooter or strategy game. These werent Warcraft 2 LAN parties, and we werent playing DOOM II deathmatches into the wee hours. We were obsessed with Final Fantasy VI and Xenogears .

The creators of these Japanese roleplaying games (Japanese RPGs or JRPGs) handed me upgraded armor and sharper swords, pitted me against those goblins and dragons, and deemed me Dragonmaster. Like Warcraft 2 fanatics, Id haul my game console and trusty computer monitoran already-ancient-at-the-time Commodore 1702to a friends house, where wed set our tubes back to back (to avoid spoilers, naturally) and play these single-player games for hours. If youve got kids or a sibling, youre familiar with the term parallel play, where two young children will play within each others vicinity without necessarily acknowledging each other. Gamers do this, too, and those evenings with my friends have become one of my foundational memories.

Our homework neglected, the bus rides to school the following morning were filled with in-depth discussions of our experiences with the JRPG of the month.

Have you reached that part with Aeris yet?

Anyone got tips for the Black Dragon?

Hey, dude. Are you done with Xenogears yet? I really want to borrow it.

As creators of some of the most popular video game franchises of all time in Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest , Hironobu Sakaguchi and Yuji Horii are high on the list of visionaries to have left an immeasurable mark on the world. However, JRPGs like theirs werent always popular, and the genres rise to mega-popularity in the mid-90sas well as their lasting influence on modern games and pop culturewas a long and hard-fought journey.

This book is an exploration of how my experience wasnt unique, that the special coming-together of Eastern and Western design philosophy, storytelling, history, and pop culture in JRPGs is a shared experience among millions of gamers. Fight, Magic, Items is the story of how JRPGs brought a genre to the masses and reached meteoric success thanks to some of the most brilliant and bold creators in gaming history.

My first exposure to JRPGs was during a visit to my friends house. While I chased down Krang in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Fall of the Foot Clan on my Nintendo Game Boy, he was moving a squat character around a large, multi-screen map on his in a game called Final Fantasy Legend II . I knew The Legend of Zelda , so the adventure game concept wasnt strange. And when he let me give it a go, the maps shattered into a double-diamond pattern and were replaced with the static sprite of a cartoonish tiger and a menu with two options: Fight or Run. I was unimpressed. Who wants to be navigating slow-paced menus when I can be slicing and dicing the Foot Clan with every button press?

The Legend of Zelda
(1986, Nintendo Entertainment System)

Publisher: Nintendo