Re-release this: Emerald Dragon

The western conception of early Japanese role-playing games is skewed somewhat by two things: what RPGs were released internationally and when, as well as the comparative dominance of Final Fantasy over the rest of those games. Square’s early offerings weren’t necessarily story driven, at least not in the way we think of games being in the present, some of which has to do with the studio’s decisions for design. As Trevor Strunk detailed in Story Mode: Video Games and the Interplay Between Consoles and Culture, it took until 1991’s Final Fantasy IV for Square to take control away from the player in order to tell the story it wanted to, in the way it wanted to.Final Fantasy began with a heavy debt to western RPGs — themselves based on tabletop RPGs — and the freedom of choice that was central to them, which included creatable, modifiable, interchangeable blank-slate characters without backstories or motivations. The player could imagine their own, of course, but the game was not…