What Was Your First JRPG (Japanese Role Playing Games)?

Thread: What Was Your First JRPG (Japanese Role Playing Games)?
Cryptek

Cryptek

Japan? I'll pass thanks
Platforms
  1. Nintendo
What was your first ever Japanese role-playing game that you played or bought?

For me, I'm pretty sure it was Dragon Warrior on the NES. The game is known as Dragon Quest in the Japan.

It would later become Dragon Quest in America like it was in Japan.

Dragon warrior had a rather complicated story that involved saving a princess and fighting an evil dragon lord who wanted to take over the world. Extremely complicated stuff.

Nonetheless, it has great memories and was great game. In fact I never really played the sequels except I think it was Dragon Warrior 3 or Dragon Warrior 4. It was the sequel that actually revealed the first game takes place underneath the actual world. The reason there's no night and day in Dragon Warrior is because there was an orb that acted as a son in this hollow earth. That blew me away as a kid the way that interconnected with the original game and how you found out it was all taking place in an underworld, sort of.

Dragon Warrior, in a sense, was the Ultima of Japanese role-playing games and I think that's why I liked it so much because I really loved the Ultima series by none other than Richard Garriot. Lord British.

You should play the original one day even though it's extremely outdated in its graphics, it's story and especially how slowly you move. And the amount of combat you get into. There is a lot of slow-moving and a lot of combat so be prepared for that.

But it's sort of like watching a silent film or a really old movie. It's very charmful.

I'm not even sure if they've ever remade Dragon Warrior, the American version? I guess they should if they haven't but I can also understand it is a very simplistic game that really doesn't need to be remade other than adding some quality of life features like faster movement and less random combat.

But anyways this is not about Dragon Warrior or Dragon Quest. This is about you, my friends. This is about your first Japanese role playing game. What was it?

A wise man from Western role-playing games once said "stay awhile and listen" and so should you and I.
 
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Legend of Mana (2000) for the PS1

I beat the game too, surprisingly… Was only a nine year old kid and the ending came abruptly. Was totally shocked when it came too, like I knew a lot of hours had passed since picking it up but at the time, I'm not sure if I had ever beaten a game before…Before Legend of Mana it was probably only Golden Axe that I had completed and that was it
 
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Final Fantasy VII for me. I had seen the first Final Fantasy on NES when I was a kid and couldn't figure out why anyone would play a game that was all menus when they could be playing action games and platformers. I went to a friend's house years later and saw FF6 on SNES and couldn't understand what he saw in it. I just sorta wrote off the JRPG genre completely for a huge chunk of my childhood gaming years.

The commercials and hype of FFVII somehow got me to have my mom drive me to CompUSA to buy a copy with my own money from being a bagger at a grocery store. I was immediately blown away. I pretended to be sick the next day and played it for 8 hours straight. I had never even skipped school like that before, but I was more immersed than I had ever been in a videogame.
 
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Lufia & The Fortress of Doom. After that I was hooked. After that came Breath of Fire, Breath of Fire 2, Final Fantasy III and on from there.

Interestingly, I prefer the games that others do not. That's probably a result of which ones I played first. For example, most people prefer Lufia 2 to the first one and Breath of Fire 2 to the first one, I don't.
 
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The Secret of Mana for the SNES

2218599-snes_secretofmana.jpg

Damn fine game and one of the many great rpgs from that era of Squaresoft.
 
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GreyHorace said:
Holy shit, and looking like a based Iranian John Travolta to boot.

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Yeah, he's pretty amazing. He made some games on the Apple II and tried to get on at Nintendo but they weren't interested. Square was interested, he programmed the NES Final Fantasy games too. If memory serves Sakaguchi liked him so much that when he had to leave Japan for an expired work visa, they moved the entire team to California so they could continue to work with him.
 
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I was in the Pokémon generation, and Yellow was my first game. But that isn't what came to mind, even though Pokémon is valid. Final Fantasy 7 is the one I thought of, because it's a bit more involved than Pokémon. A friend and I cheated our way through it one weekend (cheat cartridges were great) but it still took us 24 hours. In our defence, we were 10.
 
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Pokemon Yellow was my first game and first JRPG to play. Outside of Pokemon, I think the first JRPG I played was Final Fantasy for the DS (3 I think it is) and I finally finished it on steam earlier this year. That last boss sucked so hard, I wanted to finish with 1 red mage, 1 white mage, 1 black mage and 1 ninja but I had to switch my red mage to the ninja for the final fight only.
 
Was either Dragon Warrior or Final Fantasy. Played them both around the same time. Probably 1991ish. There was a kid on my street who had them and I would go over to his basement and we would play Nintendo. We were awful at both and never got very far, but the fantasy/adventure theme kept us coming back.

It wasn't til I got an Snes a couple years later did I really get into JRPGs.
 
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p_xavier said:
Final Fantasy Mystic Quest. Even then I hated hard games and OST was GOAT.
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This is a good game, no matter how much hate it gets. It was a little ridiculous with the status effects but it had some good ideas and was fun to play for the most part.
 
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Can't remember for sure what the first one I played was, but the first one that really grabbed me and I played to completion was Final Fantasy III (VI). I was blown away. Couldn't believe such an amazing game existed at the time.

22870-final-fantasy-iii-snes-front-cover.jpg


Didn't quite get that feeling again until Chrono Trigger.
 
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FF6 for me technically, my older brother had it and I played it a few times. Too hard for me at the time though, as I was 5 years old. Super Mario RPG was the first one I beat and got into. From there I started checking out others (Earthbound, Chrono Trigger, Lufia etc...)

It's weird, I enjoy playing RPGs but I wouldn't consider myself a diehard fan of the genre or anything. I play them mostly as a time sink when I don't have a lot going on.
 
Dragon Warrior or Final Fantasy 1, whichever was released first in the US.

I also played a bunch of Ultima games on both PC and NES. If I remember correctly, the gameplay of the NES versions was very close to the gameplay of Dragon Warrior and Final Fantasy, so while they weren't technically JRPGs, I tend to lump them together.
 
Zefah said:
Can't remember for sure what the first one I played was, but the first one that really grabbed me and I played to completion was Final Fantasy III (VI). I was blown away. Couldn't believe such an amazing game existed at the time.

22870-final-fantasy-iii-snes-front-cover.jpg


Didn't quite get that feeling again until Chrono Trigger.
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After having a few RPG's under my belt I rented this one and was amazed, it was like the next level. I liked it so much that the same day I rented it, I returned it and went to Wal Mart to buy my own copy.
 
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I don't remember playing any on NES so it was probably something on Genesis. It was likely this:

co3ktu.jpg


Directed by Yu Suzuki when he was going crazy making Sega classics left and right, almost all of then in completely different genres. This game is all over the place in that the towns had a classic overhead RPG perspective but exploring the overworld and dungeons were in first person, only revealing the shroud as you explore. Combat was on an almost 3D tilted plane and boss battles were sidescrollers. The soundtrack is fire and the theme for the very first town set the tone of the game:



The first game I really got into and beat was Shining Force II. There's a narrative that the SNES dominated them in RPGs and while I agree there is certainly more gems, Sega still has to be respected. I still consider SFII one of the GOAT JRPGs today and a must play for any fan of the SRPG subgenre. It has some of the best artwork of the era on the battle action screen and the soundtrack is outrageous, sometimes doing some really creative things to simulate surround sound and reverb. There's no customization and the combat is simple but with just enough challenge and strategy. The team said they didn't set out to make a Fire Emblem competitor. They were trying to make Sega's answer to Dragon Quest with more compelling combat.
 
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Zelda 2 if that counts.

Otherwise it was Secret of Mana, closely followed by Final Fantasy 2(SNES).

Those two were rentals though. The first one I owned and finished was the infamous (But still good) Final Fantasy Mystic Quest.
 
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