Because this is a typical fairytale story and the year was 1982, the promised reward is the princess’ hand in marriage. Each adventurer also comes with a percentage hit chance and a starting amount of hit points.Īfter naming your team, you start out in the royal castle of a medieval fantasy land, where the king tasks you with the quest to exterminate a gang of bandits and return the treasure they’ve stolen. It’s is possible that it means speed as the ability to avoid getting hit, but it’s difficult to confirm or deny this without access to the manual. There are no Spells in the game, while the order and range of moves is always the same. “Pw” stands for attack power, whereas “Sp” is a little harder to pin down. There are no additional options to customize the party, but everyone has their own predefined set of attributes. Right at the beginning of the adventure, you’re asked to name everyone in a band of five adventurers. This could either mean that The Dragon & Princess was actually released closer to Omotesandō Adventure, or that it was quite significantly delayed in the meantime.
There is an anecdote that Koei wanted it to become the first adventure game made in Japan, but was beaten to the punch by Omotesandō Adventure, whose source code was published in “Yearly Ah-Ski!”, a joke supplement to Monthly ASCII magazine for April Fool’s Day, even though that game relied entirely on English text. Some Japanese databases list December 1982, but there’s little to find in terms of actual contemporary sources.
Like many games of the time, it’s not documented when exactly The Dragon & Princess was published. Hayase at least is a real Japanese name, but there is no known game developer who would fit that initial and career time frame. HAYASE and LOCKE, but no one seems to know who that actually is. It’s not entirely false advertisement, as the game also has many elements of a traditional text adventure, but it is nonetheless clearly more than that.
Maybe that was the reason why Koei was still a little shy to use the label in the beginning – Dragon & Princess is instead described as a “fantasy adventure game” on the box. From the very beginning, the business was focused on simulation war games, but soon the Erikawas also started pushing a brave new genre in a time when hardly anyone in the country had even heard of RPGs.
Founded in 1978 by Yōichi and Keiko Erikawa, Koei was among the first software houses in Japan ever. But not many remember Koei as the pioneers of the Japanese role-playing world. Before that, the company was already famous for long-running strategy series like Romance of the Three Kingdoms and Nobunaga’s Ambition. When people think of Koei nowadays, the first association is usually Dynasty Warriors and its many spin-offs.