Action role-playing game
[6] Bill Loguidice and Matt Barton claimed that the Intellivision games Advanced Dungeons & Dragons (1982) and Treasure of Tarmin (1983) were action RPGs.
[7] Shaun Musgrave of TouchArcade notes that Adventure lacked RPG mechanics such as experience points and permanent character growth, and argues that Gateway to Apshai is "the earliest game I'd feel comfortable calling an action-RPG" but notes that "it doesn't fit neatly into our modern genre classifications", though came closer than Bokosuka Wars released the same year.
[9] It was released for arcades in June 1984, and was intended as a "fantasy version of Pac-Man, with puzzles to solve, monsters to battle, and hidden treasure to find".
[10] The Tower of Druaga, Dragon Slayer and Hydlide were influential in Japan, where they influenced later action RPGs such as Ys, as well as The Legend of Zelda.
[13] Originally released for the PC-8801 computer in September 1984,[14] it abandoned the command-based battles of earlier role-playing games in favor of real-time hack-and-slash combat that required direct input from the player, alongside puzzle-solving elements.
[22] In 1987, Zelda II: The Adventure of Link implemented a more traditional RPG-esque system, including experience points and levels with action game elements.
While not very popular in the West, the long-running Ys series has performed strongly in the Japanese market, with many sequels, remakes and ports in the decades that followed its release.
[26] In 1988, Telenet Japan's Exile series debuted and was controversial due to its plot, which revolves around a time-travelling Crusades-era Syrian assassin who assassinates various religious/historical figures as well as 20th-century political leaders,[27] The gameplay of Exile included both overhead exploration and side-scrolling combat and featured a heart monitor to represent the player's Attack Power and Armor Class statistics.
[30] Another 1989 release, Activision's Prophecy: The Fall of Trinadon, attempted to introduce "Nintendo-style" action combat to North American computer role-playing games.
[35] Arcus Odyssey by Wolf Team (now Namco Tales Studio) was an action RPG that featured an isometric perspective and co-operative multiplayer gameplay.
[39] Most other such games, however, used a side-scrolling perspective typical of beat 'em ups, such as the Princess Crown series, including Odin Sphere and Muramasa: The Demon Blade.
[40] LandStalker's 1997 spiritual successor Alundra[41] is considered "one of the finest examples of action/RPG gaming", combining platforming elements and challenging puzzles with an innovative storyline revolving around entering people's dreams and dealing with mature themes.
[50] FromSoftware's Demon's Souls (2009) emphasized unforgiving enemies and environments, combined with risk-and-reward mechanics such as limited checkpoints, collecting "souls" that can be consumed as experience points to increase the player's stats, or as a currency to purchase items, and penalizing player deaths without imposing an outright failure state.
Assassin's Creed, a long-running Ubisoft franchise, also shifted towards the action RPG formula, inspired by the successes of The Witcher 3 and the Dark Souls series,[55][56] with its titles Origins (2017), Odyssey (2018) and Valhalla (2020).
[59][57] In late 1987, FTL Games released Dungeon Master, a dungeon crawler that had a real-time game world and some real-time combat elements (akin to Active Time Battle), requiring players to quickly issue orders to the characters, setting the standard for first-person computer RPGs for several years.
[64] Toby Gard stated that, when designing Tomb Raider, he "was a big fan of ... Ultima Underworld and I wanted to mix that type of game with the sort of polygon characters that were just being showcased in Virtua Fighter".
It was an action RPG that used a mouse-oriented point-and-click interface and offered gamers a free online service to play with others that maintained the same rules and gameplay.
[70] Commonly, these games used a fixed-camera isometric view of the game world, a necessity of the limitations of 2D graphics of early computers; The Diablo series spawned many terms like being referred to as "dungeon crawler" "slasher RPG" "hack and slasher", the series was also heavily criticized by players and media for not being a proper RPG due to it being focused more on fighting enemies and creating character builds than following a proper narrative and dialogue-heavy journey.
[81] The prominence of Diablo 2 in the gaming market and its influence on the MMORPG genre [82][83][84][85][86][87][88] later popularized the strongly used mouse-oriented point and click combat.
Shooter-based action RPGs include Strife (1996), System Shock 2 (1999), the Deus Ex series (2000 onwards) by Ion Storm, Bungie's Destiny (2014), Irem's Steambot Chronicles (2005),[92] Square Enix's third-person shooter RPG Dirge of Cerberus: Final Fantasy VII (2006), which introduced an over-the-shoulder perspective similar to Resident Evil 4,[93] and the MMO vehicular combat game Auto Assault (2006) by NetDevil and NCsoft.
[94] Other action RPGs featured both hack and slash and shooting elements, with the use of both guns (or in some cases, bow and arrow or aerial combat) and melee weapons, including Cavia's flight-based Drakengard series (2003 to 2005),[95] and Level-5's Rogue Galaxy (2005).
[97] Borderlands developer Gearbox Software has dubbed it as a "role-playing shooter" due to the heavy RPG elements within the game, such as quest-based gameplay and also its character traits and leveling system.
[99] Other action role-playing games with shooter elements include the 2010 titles Alpha Protocol by Obsidian Entertainment and The 3rd Birthday, the third game in the Parasite Eve series, features a unique blend of action RPG, real-time tactical RPG, survival horror and third-person tactical shooter elements.
