#Unless by folding it‚ but I'd rather refrain from doing that

[kyouka-supremacy]

Finally gotten around scanning the September Animage issue. Please enjoy!!

[self-loving-vampire]

To give a couple of examples from my area of focus specifically: Ultima and Wizardry.

These two are very old, incredibly influential RPG series. Many RPGs incorporate elements pioneered in one or both of these games.

So you might say "Okay, I'd rather play a more modern RPG that does the same things but better then".

But if you actually read the history of these things, there's rarely a case where a game is just "the same but better" unless it's something like a port or a different version of the game or something.

Ultima 4, for example, had a main quest that did not revolve around defeating a great evil or saving the world (as is often the case with RPGs even to this day). What you needed to do to win in addition to questing for certain items was to live as a good person in accordance to an 8-fold virtue system, doing things like donating blood, being honest, and refusing to withdraw from battle.

The implementation was rough, of course. This was 1985 after all. Despite that, it's an idea that remains novel to this day.

Meanwhile, Wizardry has spawned an entire subgenre of clones and spiritual successors such as Etrian Odyssey or Labyrinth of Refrain, but it too had some aspects to it that are not very common in these later games.

For example, the concept of having multiple adventuring parties. If your party died, you could create a second party to go retrieve the bodies and hopefully get them resurrected. This is something that has kind of gone away in recent years.