Dragon Warrior III / IV

In Japan the story goes that when the third game came out, the streets filled with people heading off for their copy — a phenomenon so powerful that legends of schoolchildren and queues weave around it. Dragon Quest, released in the West at the time as Dragon Warrior, wasn't merely a game but a genuine cultural event.

Behind the series stand two names that together created the magic. Designer Yuji Horii gave the genre a comprehensible, accessible structure, and the artist Akira Toriyama, creator of Dragon Ball, dressed the world in unmistakably friendly, iconic characters and enemies. This combination made the Japanese RPG into something that could reach the masses.

Dragon Warrior III pushed the series fundamentally further. It introduced an elaborate class system, where the player assembles a party and changes its professions, and brought in a day and night cycle that changed both the world and the possibilities. It was a grand adventure whose scope and freedom astonished in 1988 and turned it into a national event in Japan.

Dragon Warrior IV then set off in a different direction — toward storytelling. It divided the game into chapters, each of which follows a different protagonist before the story lines converge. This structure gave the characters room and personality and foreshadowed the emphasis on storytelling that became typical for the JRPG.

By the way, the name „Dragon Warrior“ in the West didn't come about by chance — the original name Dragon Quest couldn't be used there due to a trademark dispute, and so the series long bore a different name than in the rest of the world.

Why play: To understand what the entire JRPG genre stands on — these installments laid the cornerstones, from the class system to chapter-based storytelling.