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Japanese action adventures existed before Zelda. Meet the bold experiments, rival creators, and strange ideas that shaped the genre.
The Search for Zelda’s Ancestors
Before The Legend of Zelda made exploration, combat, secrets, and fantasy feel like four parts of one wonderfully readable machine, Japanese computer games were already fumbling toward that formula. Some experiments were elegant. Others were gloriously strange. A few were so obscure that even dedicated players might never have heard of them.
That’s what makes the search for early Japanese action adventures so entertaining. Pinning down the exact beginning of a genre sounds tidy until the evidence starts crawling out from every corner. A game may have real-time combat but no exploration, or dungeons without an open overworld, or role-playing elements wrapped inside what looks like a side-scroller.
A Genre Still Finding Its Shape
The problem begins with the label itself. Early Japanese role-playing games developed alongside traditional turn-based adventures, but real-time combat widened the field dramatically. Suddenly, games that had previously seemed unrelated began sharing pieces of the same design language.
Should a scrolling action game count? What about a dungeon crawler with statistics but no free-roaming map? Could a game such as Dragon Buster be considered part of the long evolutionary path toward later exploration-heavy adventures? There’s no perfectly clean answer, and that uncertainty is part of the fun.
For this discussion, the most useful candidates are games that resemble Zelda in spirit: fantasy settings, direct character control, combat happening in real time, and some degree of discovery. The resemblance doesn’t need to be exact. In fact, the odd mismatches are often more revealing than the obvious similarities.
Panorama-Toh: A Rough Gem from Falcom
The trail starts taking shape around 1982 and 1983, when Nihon Falcom developer Yoshio Kiya created Panorama-Toh. It was an unusual hybrid, combining first-person dungeon scenes, shopkeepers represented through text, and a real-time overworld populated by lions, tanks, and—because apparently the design meeting had room for one more surprise—Nessie.
The game was built mainly in BASIC with some Assembly programming. That technical background helps explain its rough edges, but also its charm. Panorama-Toh feels less like a finished genre statement and more like a developer tossing ingredients into a pot to see what might become edible.
It was sometimes treated as a spiritual predecessor to Dragon Slayer, though Kiya offered a more complicated story. The game originally began as a sequel to Falcom’s first title, Galactic Wars, before changing direction during development.
“Partway through making it I kind of changed my mind, and it came out differently to what I intended. President Kato came up with the title; there’s not much relation to Dragon Slayer.”
— Yoshio Kiya
That admission says a lot about the period. Developers weren’t always working from established genre rules. Often, they were programming first and discovering the game’s identity along the way.
1984: The Explosion Begins
By June 1984, the genre’s ingredients were suddenly everywhere. Namco released The Tower of Druaga in arcades, and later that year three important computer games appeared across several platforms: Kiya’s Dragon Slayer, Tokihiro Naito’s Hydlide, and the far less celebrated Courageous Perseus from Cosmos Computer.
Two software houses became especially important during this burst of experimentation. Falcom had Kiya, while T&E Soft had Naito. Their careers developed in parallel, and their creative rivalry gives this early period a particularly human shape. These weren’t distant corporate machines producing interchangeable fantasy games. They were programmers with strong personal instincts, competing with ideas that were sometimes brilliant and sometimes held together with digital string.
Kiya’s route toward Dragon Slayer was influenced by Kazurou Morita’s Alphos, an officially licensed interpretation of Namco’s Xevious. Morita’s work demonstrated that smooth scrolling was possible on the PC-8801, hardware that many developers considered difficult to push.
Kiya saw that achievement and drew a practical conclusion: if Morita could make a scrolling game work, then he could try it too. Dragon Slayer grew from that challenge.
Naito arrived at Hydlide from a different direction. He was drawn both to role-playing games and to action titles, especially The Black Onyx and The Tower of Druaga. His goal was straightforward: combine the two.
That sounds obvious now, but at the time it was a meaningful design gamble. Action games demanded immediate reactions, while role-playing games traditionally asked players to think through menus, numbers, and long-term progression. Mixing those rhythms could easily produce a confused mess. Hydlide instead helped establish a template that other developers could refine.
The Shock of Courageous Perseus
Courageous Perseus arrived before Hydlide, and possibly before Dragon Slayer, although its commercial impact was far smaller. Still, its advertisements made a powerful impression on the T&E Soft team.
Yasuo Yoshikawa recalled that Naito reacted with genuine alarm after seeing the promotional material. The graphics looked blended and polished, while the concept appeared almost identical to the action-RPG idea T&E Soft was developing.
Naito later played the actual game and felt relieved. Courageous Perseus leaned more heavily toward traditional role-playing, while Hydlide emphasized direct action. The two games may have looked similar from a distance, but their underlying priorities were different.
That little episode captures the nervous energy of the period. Developers were inventing new forms, but they were also watching each other closely. A single advertisement could make an entire project seem obsolete overnight.
Hydlide Finds Its Audience
Whatever its anxieties during development, Hydlide became a major success. By 1986, its console release had sold one million copies, while the combined total across computer versions reached another million.
Naito described the unusual recognition that followed. In Japan, million-selling music releases could receive a commemorative plaque from Toshiba EMI. Hydlide received one as well, possibly making it the only computer game to earn that particular honor.
Meanwhile, Kiya approached sales from an entirely different emotional angle. He said he wasn’t concerned with how many copies Dragon Slayer sold. In those early years, he didn’t begin with a polished design document or a carefully defined concept. He started programming, added whatever seemed interesting, and allowed the game to emerge from that process.
There’s something wonderfully reckless about that method. It’s also a reminder that early computer games often felt experimental because they genuinely were. The designers were learning what a game could be while building the thing itself.
Xanadu Changes the Conversation
Then came Xanadu in 1985, and Kiya’s ambition became much clearer. He believed earlier games had not yet fully understood what games could be. Xanadu pushed movement, disk usage, and the sheer number of characters much further than many players expected.
“Up until then the way disks were used was just wrong; people were also still using cassette tapes! I wanted to show: this is how disks should be used, this is how much better the hardware is.”
— Yoshio Kiya
His point wasn’t only technical. He wanted movement itself to become part of the fun, even though building games with extensive movement was difficult. Xanadu also surprised players with its variety of characters, encouraging Falcom to think on a larger scale afterward.
I’ll admit that my first instinct is to picture Xanadu as merely another early fantasy RPG, important mainly because of its reputation. Looking closer changes that impression. Its significance came from the way it treated the computer as something to exploit rather than politely accommodate. The game was asking what the hardware could do, then making that challenge visible to the player.
Books, Movies, and Imaginary Worlds
Naito’s ideas grew from a different mixture of influences. He drew from Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, Western fairy-tale illustrations, and his own interpretation of what role-playing games could be. He also loved Star Wars, which left a visible mark on his sequel to Hydlide.
That game included a “Force” bar, Jedi-inspired training, and black crystals that prevented health regeneration, suggesting the corrupting pull of the Dark Side. Naito’s affection for the films was especially strong when he remembered the X-Wing sequence in which the ship’s wings open. It was the sort of cinematic moment that could lodge permanently in a designer’s imagination.
Kiya and Falcom were also influenced by Albert Manguel’s Dictionary of Imaginary Places, a collection of medieval European stories and invented lands. The developers would decide what kind of game they wanted to make, then flip through the book for ideas and select a story almost arbitrarily.
That single volume helped shape the fantasy atmosphere of Falcom’s games and even influenced the creation of the Ys series.
Riglas and the Arrival of Zelda
The stream of Zelda-like games continued into 1986. Kazurou Morita’s Riglas appeared in January, offering full-color visuals and horizontal scrolling. One month later, The Legend of Zelda arrived and made the entire discussion feel newly complicated.
In a way, the release ended the game of chasing precedents. Once Nintendo presented exploration, combat, secrets, and accessibility in such a cohesive package, earlier experiments became easier to understand. They were no longer isolated oddities; they were steps toward a design language that had finally become legible.
That doesn’t mean the earlier games were all easy to play today. Some are awkward, obscure, or downright punishing. I’m not entirely certain every title mentioned here deserves the action-adventure label, either. The boundaries remain blurry, especially when scrolling action games and role-playing systems overlap.
Still, that roughness is valuable. These games show designers testing possibilities without a finished rulebook. Their strange enemies, sudden mechanics, and unconventional structures are the fingerprints of a medium still learning how to speak.
Conclusion
The greatest achievement of the original Zelda wasn’t inventing every ingredient from scratch. It was arranging familiar and experimental ideas into something inviting without sanding away the challenge. Dragon Slayer, Hydlide, Courageous Perseus, Xanadu, Riglas, and their peers helped prepare the ground, even when their designs wandered into wonderfully odd territory.
Which pre-Zelda action adventure would you most like to play today: the mysterious Courageous Perseus, the ambitious Xanadu, or the chaotic curiosity of Panorama-Toh?
FAQ
- What game came before The Legend of Zelda?
Several Japanese computer and arcade games predated it, including Dragon Slayer, Hydlide, The Tower of Druaga, Courageous Perseus, and Riglas. None matches Zelda perfectly, but each shares some of its action, fantasy, or exploration ideas. - What was Panorama-Toh?
Panorama-Toh was a 1983 Falcom game created by Yoshio Kiya. It combined first-person dungeon sections, shopkeepers, and real-time overworld battles involving unusual enemies such as lions, tanks, and Nessie. - Why was Hydlide important?
Hydlide blended direct action with role-playing elements. Its commercial success, including one million sales for its console version, helped prove that real-time fantasy adventures could reach a large audience. - How did Xanadu influence Japanese computer games?
Xanadu pushed movement, disk usage, and character variety further than many earlier computer games. Yoshio Kiya viewed it as part of a turning point when developers began to understand the possibilities of game design more clearly. - What influenced early Japanese action adventures?
Developers drew from arcade games, computer RPGs, tabletop fantasy, Western fairy-tale illustrations, science-fiction films, and books such as Albert Manguel’s Dictionary of Imaginary Places.
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