JRPG Journey 2024: Dragon Slayer: The Legend of Heroes (January)

Welcome to the 5th edition of JRPG Journey. That’s right, it’s the start of my fifth year playing and discussing at least one JRPG per month, and I’m amped for another great year of discovering games that, as always, I hope deserve their classic status. First up, the namesake of what has since become a rather popular series in my hemisphere, yet this important entry goes practically unknown in the West. Let’s discuss…

February’s game: Phantasy Star IV: The End of the Millennium

When you picture the most foundational, influential JRPGs, you’ve probably got Dragon Quest, Final Fantasy, or maybe Phantasy Star in mind. And you’d be crazy not to—those series had early entries that both made it big in the West and affected the entire genre going forward. But what if I told you I can picture an alternate reality where another game got just as big over here in the land of the free, had it been marketed as heavily as those other greats? It’s true—the first Legend of Heroes is just as competent of an RPG as its recent contemporaries, like the first Phantasy Star or Final Fantasy II.

See, before the series attained its current international juggernaut status, Dragon Slayer: The Legend of Heroes was but a humble spinoff from the fledgling Dragon Slayer franchise. After having published numerous sequels, side-stories, and related media to their now well-established hack-and-slash golden goose, in 1989 Nihon Falcom decided to try their on take on the newly established JRPG formula. Sadly, the only version of the game we gaijin got was for the TurboGrafx-CD, which nobody had, and it’s safe to say the lack of an accessible release, let alone any kind of marketing push, doomed the series to Japanese exclusivity for all of the 90s. That’s a shame, since it does a lot well. I went with the TurboGrafx, a.k.a., PC Engine version, which offers major upgrades over the original PC-88 release by adding CD quality sound, voice acting, and noticeably crisper visuals. It doesn’t look all that much different, however—it’s basically the same game with better audio.

With only the first Dragon Slayer under my belt, a decidedly old-school arcade experience, I didn’t know what to expect going into The Legend of Heroes. (As a side note, it’s cool how back in the day no one would bat an eye at a title as simple as “the Legend of Heroes”. Ahh, simpler times.) What I got was a bizarrely appealing hybrid of Final Fantasy and Phantasy Star. There’s just enough talking to townsfolk to figure out where to go next, with very little of the aimless exploration found in those more well-known games, especially Phantasy Star. The Legend of Heroes instead offers a more strictly linear experience that focuses on telling a more complete story, featuring plenty of dialogue, fleshed-out characters, and intriguing plots. (Relatively speaking—this is still an 80s game.) Remember, this came out a little after FFII and well before Phantasy Star IV, at a time when most NPCs were lucky to get even one line of dialogue in the whole game. In The Legend of Heroes, characters are happy spend multiple text boxes explaining their hopes, plights, or dreams. In a time where that’s been common for decades this may not seem special, but I noticed the difference right away, when comparing to something like Final Fantasy II, itself a dialogue-heavy JRPG for the time.

You play as Prince Logan, who sets out to rid his kingdom of the evil lord Drax and his monsters. There’s no belabored introspection or self-doubt here; this is a straightforward, heroic tale, and Prince Logan ain’t taking any nonsense from anyone. Various party members join and leave along the way in what eventually becomes a world-spanning quest, as Logan realizes neighboring kingdoms are in similar need of aid and, well, he’s got the experience, so why not help? OK, there’s more to it than that, a lot more in fact, and The Legend of Heroes sets itself apart from other early genre trailblazers by not shying away from in-depth cutscenes and anime interludes.

The game’s not afraid to try other new ideas, too. In a twist rather unlike Final Fantasy II, some dungeons have no monsters in them, which helps improve the pacing by breaking up the grind. That’s a forward-looking feature if I ever saw one; nowadays it’s common for JRPGs to go for lengthy periods with no combat. Inns are free—another prescient choice that simply saves the player time—and in what must be a punk on Dragon Quest, while most towns have a church, there’s nothing to do in them besides chat with the priest for some basic dialog—no benediction or healing. You can save anywhere you want, and characters automatically resurrect with 1 HP after battle, so there’s no need for such stodgy clerical services. Heck, characters even recover HP and MP upon level up-that was rare in the late 80s, and to this day it’s a coin toss whether a game’ll do it. You know, that’s a nifty example of a simple yet impactful design choice that causes ripple effects through many of a game’s systems, one that great developers make with care and intent.

But back to Legend of Heroes’s clever innovations, or at least, this is the first I’ve encountered this one: running from fights always works, then once you do, the enemy becomes visible on the overworld. I felt like a moron the moment I saw this and realized enemies are physically walking around on the overworld; they’re not just randomly triggered as you take steps. That’s a feature the Romancing Saga games would swipe later, but 1989 marks the earliest instance of it I’ve seen so far. Cool. It’s kind of neat, although inconvenient, how you can’t sell stuff to the weapons shop—obviously if you want to sell your random junk, the dude at the armory ain’t gonna buy it! You’ll have to go to the trader, which not every town has, making for a nice wrench in the formula that doesn’t get too annoying. I love how these old JRPGs all threw in their own tweaks and cosmetic changes to the burgeoning formula, whereas nowadays it’s rare for games to radically break from established genre tradition.

Oh, and did I mention there’s voice acting? It’s only in key story scenes and is as over-the-top as you’d expect for 1989. What’s strange is that while a few of the actors sound like random interns thrown into a sound booth for an hour, others clearly are trained actors having a blast hamming up these high fantasy lines. Big bad Strom’s VA is particularly hilarious, and I’ve got to admit the cheesy performances had me more engaged in the story scenes that I otherwise would have been.

The Legend of Heroes nails its presentation in general. Sadly, it does the whole “permanent windowed view” thing, where character stats are always visible on the right, but I tend to quickly forget about that sort of thing, so I don’t mind too much. Thankfully, the music’s freaking fantastic, easily landing an instant spot in my top 5 JRPG soundtracks of the 80s. It’s that good, full of the kind of funky, proggy sounds I love, and in all in CD quality on the TurboGrafx version. Composer Mieko Ishikawa was not on my radar before, but apparently she worked on most of the Ys games, and yeah, this pretty much sounds like an Ys game, which is a huge compliment.

So The Legend of Heroes seemingly has it all-fun gameplay, well-defined and bold characters, great visuals and sound—why wasn’t this series more popular a lot sooner? Even in Japan, this wasn’t one of the top series until much later. I believe the reason is that Dragon Quest III came out nearly two years earlier and blows The Legend of Heroes out of the water, gameplay-wise. Sure, Heroes’ll have you hooked on Prince Logan’s quest to rid his kingdom of evil, but the process to do so feels familiar as all get-out. This is one traditional turn-based RPG: go to next town, talk to NPCs, maybe get a new party member, repeat. There’s no real choices to make aside from how long to press on before heading back to town. By early 1988, Dragon Quest III had already given us a fully fleshed-out party system complete with optional hidden classes, a huge nonlinear world, side content galore, and all the charm of this game.

If The Legend of Heroes had out just two years earlier in Japan and landed on SNES instead of the Turbografx in the West, there’s a good chance the series would have taken hold over here, but more importantly, I’d bet we’d remember it at least as fondly as the early Phantasy Star, DQ, or Final Fantasy games, if not more so. It’s about as good as that original, old school JRPG formula gets.

Thanks for joining me for this year’s edition of JRPG Journey! See you at the start of March, when I’ll be covering February’s game, Phantasy Star IV: The End of the Millennium.