Adventure game
An adventure game is a video game in which the player assumes the role of a protagonist in an interactive story driven by exploration and puzzle-solving. The genre's focus on story allows it to draw heavily from other narrative-based media, literature and film, encompassing a wide variety of literary genres. Many adventure games (text and graphic) are designed for a single player, since this emphasis on story and character makes multi-player design difficult. "Colossal Cave Adventure" is identified as the first such adventure game, first released in 1976, while other notable adventure game series include "Zork", "King's Quest", "The Secret of Monkey Island", and "Myst".
History of Eastern role-playing video games
In 1991, Nihon Falcom's "Brandish" was an early overhead action RPG to use mouse controls, where the player could move forward, backward, turn, strafe and attack by clicking on boxes surrounding the player character. The 1991 "Dragon Slayer" title "Lord Monarch" departed from the action RPG gameplay of its predecessors, instead using an early form of real-time strategy gameplay. The erotic adult RPG "Dragon Knight III", released in 1991 for the PC-8801 and as "Knights of Xentar" for MS-DOS, introduced a unique pausable real-time battle system, where characters automatically attack based on a list of different AI scripts, though this meant the player had no control over the characters during battle other than to give commands for spells, item use, and AI routines. That same year, "Arcus Odyssey" by Wolf Team (now Namco Tales Studio) was an action RPG that featured an isometric perspective and co-operative multiplayer gameplay. The sequel to the first-person shooter role-playing game "Star Cruiser", simply called "Star Cruiser 2", was released in 1992, for the PC-9821 and FM Towns computers. T&E Soft released the PC-98 game "Sword World PC" in 1992 and a console version "Sword World SFC" for the Super Famicom in 1993. It was officially based on "Sword World RPG", a popular Japanese table-top role-playing game. The video game versions were multiplayer titles and early attempts at recreating an open-ended, table-top role-playing experience on video game platforms, being set in the same world as "Sword World" and implementing the same rules and scenarios. Wolf Team's "Dark Kingdom", released for the PC-98 in 1992 and ported to the SNES console in 1994, featured a unique storyline that revolved around the players conquering the world as a villain instead of saving the world.