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 providing those details, at least not outright. With Final Fantasy IV, however, the focus shifted, and with it came deeper narratives and characterizations that Square had more control over. The design had less to do with the player agency, basically, with more blanks pre-filled rather than leaving that to player imagination. Or, as Strunk said in Story Mode, “It was satisfying to have control over largely flat characters, but as it turns out, being the ersatz Dungeon Master (or DM) of a group of fleshed-out, conflicted characters in a full narrative was exponentially more satisfying.”

That was the most prominent RPG series coming out of Japan for years, but it was far from the only one. Enix’s Dragon Quest purposefully left its protagonist as a silent blank slate to be impressed upon, and was also initially attached to the idea of interchangeable party members without backstories and motivations and developer-penned narratives attached, but similarly moved to a more fleshed out world full of fleshed out characters as the series progressed. These were the heavy hitters that got traction outside of Japan, too, but lesser-known franchises were shifting away from this setup well before Final Fantasy IV. Falcom’s Ys games, for instance, first released in 1987, were full of notable side characters and personality in a fully realized world, with a named protagonist, Adol Christin, starring in games full of lovingly drawn and detailed artwork of him and his allies. Falcom’s attempt at a turn-based RPG, The Legend of Heroes, released in 1989, and told a story with named characters and defined narratives, far from the feel of the Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest games of the time even if the general gameplay had plenty of similarities. And two years before that, Sega’s Phantasy Star also avoided the “largely flat characters” of the era for a personal tale of revenge, featuring a woman rather than a blank slate create-a-dude stand-in for an assumed male player, Alis Landale.

These are not the only examples of games that either weren’t released outside of Japan at all, or just simply didn’t gain the same kind of traction as Final Fantasy, however. Glodia’s Emerald Dragon, for instance, is not just a game with a slew of fully realized characters with personalities and personal arcs, exploring a story of love and empire and literal hell on earth, but it’s also an RPG from 1989 that kills off multiple party members for good. It gets you into their whole deal, intrigued by or even invested in their stories, motivations, and personalities, then kills them. Usually in some dramatic sequence that progresses the overall narrative, but there are enough on-screen deaths of party members in this one that the developer, Glodia, felt it was fine to have one just be an instantaneous and inglorious end that came out of nowhere and without any time for your party to even react to it or even begin to mourn it. As a reminder, Final Fantasy VII didn’t release until 1997, and sure, that isn’t by any means the first game to feature the death of a party member. But it gets the credit as “groundbreaking” in this regard, anyway — that’s a lack of exposure to other games talking, or a belief that on-screen grief is only real when rendered in polygons.

Being unfamiliar with Emerald Dragon’s game is fairly normal, though. While it has seen release on seven different platforms, all of those releases took place between 1989 and 1995, and all in Japan. Emerald Dragon showed up on the Japanese computers PC-88 and PC-98, FM Towns, MSX2, and X68000, and was ported to two consoles, the PC Engine CD-ROM and Super Famicom. It’s a shame that the PC Engine CD port never received a translation and release on the TurboGrafx CD outside Japan, but as that version came out in 1994 and the Turbografx brand was basically dead by then, anyway — the base system was discontinued in May of ‘94, and the other versions would be discontinued worldwide by the end of ‘95 — that was never going to happen. Especially not with the small install base stateside; NEC itself published Emerald Dragon in Japan on the PC Engine CD and didn’t bother getting it handled outside of that, which should tell you everything you need to know there. And games from established series with North American fan bases didn’t even necessarily get every RPG from those series released in Japan, so a 1995 or 1996 SNES release of the SFC port wasn’t going to happen, either.

That is a shame, however, especially with regard to the PC Engine CD edition of the game, which recognized the flaws of the various computer releases and addressed them — optional quality of life bits, like options for walking speed and the ability to speed up battles — while adding fully voiced, animated cutscenes using established voice actors. The voice actor for Dragon Ball Z’s Mr. Satan, Daisuke Gōri, is here for instance, and he’s not even playing a character you have access to for the entire game.

Alfa System handled this port, as they did for so many other RPGs that came from Japanese computers under the care of NEC and/or Hudson Soft, and their familiarity with the system and what it was capable of shined through. Again: in 1994, the cutscenes in this game were not static, but animated — not as smooth as what was to come in the future, sure, but still animated, and the art was the full realization of the original design of these characters, which is easily visually confirmed by looking at the original art drawn by designer and illustrator Akihiro for Emerald Dragon. Oh, and the maps help a whole lot, too.

For all the forward-thinking design in Emerald Dragon, though, there is one thing about it that is a little funny and comparatively backwards. In Square RPGs released on the Super Nintendo/Super Famicom, the overworld sprite is always smaller and less detailed than its battle version, and the bigger and more detailed the character sprite in both instances, the later on the system it released, with games like Super Mario RPG going so far as to use the same sprite for each. Emerald Dragon goes in the opposite direction. The overworld sprites are the highly detailed ones, even in 1989 looking like they belong in a much later RPG, and in battles, you get the smaller, chibified edition of the character. It’s a comparatively rare thing, seen elsewhere in better-known games like Lunar: The Silver Star on the Sega CD, but not a strong trend or anything of the sort.

Emerald Dragon is full of little quirks, though, but the kind that make it stand out in a positive way. Battles are a combination of action and turn-based, with you only directly controlling the actions of the protagonist, Atrushan, despite having a party with up to five active members in it. You use a combination of bump combat and item usage in battle, but it’s not free-range fighting like in Ys; instead, you have a certain number of action points per turn, and everything you do, from taking a step to attacking to ordering another party member to perform a task, consumes those action points. Different weapons have different action point requirements, too, so a strong weapon might do more damage per attack but be wielded fewer times per turn, or some armors might increase your defense but at the expense of how many action points you have per turn. Where you hit an enemy isn’t the strategy in this iteration of bump combat, but when and how often, since you also have to consider the distance between yourself and the enemy, where you want to place yourself after attacking, all of this matters. Getting in a boss’ way to make them spend their own action points to walk around you to get to your allies behind you, for instance, might be more valuable than sneaking in one last hit — the larger, inhuman creatures you sometimes fight are both easier to block this way, and also the blocking is more necessary.

After your own turn, your allies will fight in the order you have arranged them in, interrupted by enemies who are fast enough to do so — Atrushan’s only constant companion, Tamryn, is your primary healer/buffer, and also a deadly offensive attack user, and should be prioritized for this reason. Other allies might have long-distance attacks or also heal, or get up close and personal just like Atrushan does. You can also pause the action to use items, whether they are being used to try to put enemies to sleep, or to heal a character — some will go to the party member most in need, others can be directed — or to set off what is basically a bomb that inflicts a set amount of damage on every on-screen foe.

Here’s another major wrinkle to consider, though: everyone besides Atrushan and Tamryn is entirely dependent on new equipment in order to improve, whereas those two gain levels that increase their base statistics, as well. This means that a party member might start out as much stronger than Atrushan or a stronger magic user than Tamryn, but with enough fighting, that just won’t be true anymore. They might even start to be a liability if you don’t spend to improve their gear, but there’s the rub: the game starts either killing off party members or sending them away — permanently or temporarily — often enough that you have to start to wonder if it’s worth it to invest in upgrading them. If you have the money, do it, but know that you should always prioritize Atrushan and Tamryn’s gear if you have to make decisions like that and can’t just buy all-new everything for everyone. Especially since a non-Atrushan or Tamryn party member falling in combat is only an inconvenience in that specific battle: they don’t miss any experience points for being knocked out, since they don’t gain any in the first place. You do, however, have to contend with being down a party member for the rest of the battle, which can be a problem in boss fights if a healer goes down, or just because you lost out on some muscle you can’t revive since they don’t “die” or get KO’d, officially, but retreat from the field. You can’t use a Phoenix Down on a guy who bailed, you know?

Each battle is self-contained like this in other ways, though. Your hit points don’t automatically recover in between battles, but characters return after battle with a single hit point after fleeing, and there are no magic points to speak of. Your computer-controlled companions using spells have a growing list of them to utilize, and if they have the action points and the need to deploy a specific spell, be it healing or buffing or attacking, then they will. Tamryn will straight-up ignore offense for rounds at a time if healing is necessary, and errs on the side of overhealing just in case, but if she has the action points to spare for an attack spell that will just melt the health right off of a demon, you’re going to see her cast it.

Being able to speed through battles by just holding down a button is a huge benefit. You might not think so, in a “purity of the original design!” way, but believe me when I tell you that you will spend 75 percent of your time in this game fighting battles, and that they often involve 6-8 foes taking turns, plus your four additional party members, and you only control the actions of yourself. Holding down a button to speed up everyone else was done on purpose after five years of going “hey you know what’d help,” don’t be weird about it. You can similarly hold down the button to make traversing the map happen faster, too, or if you’d like, just set the walking speed to a default run. Either works fine, and are welcome changes, especially in dungeons that are massive in scope but are also purposefully maze-like with few corridors that have hidden treasure chests down them enticing you to explore. You’re just supposed to get lost in them, but that’s where the maps come in to make it easier, aka less grindy, to explore these spaces.

The world itself isn’t fully open, but it does have that Ultima-esque setup where there are plenty of places you can technically go to, but you’ll just die in combat if you do. Speaking with NPCs is not just encouraged, but often required. It’s worth the effort, however, since some of the non-required interactions can give you mini quests to complete, which will earn you some weapons or armor that you might not find in a shop for another few hours of gameplay. Be curious! There are rewards out there for those who are.

The game’s story is genuinely compelling. Glodia based the game’s world on Zoroastrian mythology, utilizing many names and locations from that ancient Iranian religion, to tell a story of dragons cursed to leave the land that humans now occupy. That world is in danger, however, so the dragons feel compelled to do something, especially since a human who had come to their world — and bonded with Atrushan, in dragon form — sends out a call for help. Atrushan, as a young dragon, completes an initial quest that gets him access to a special object that allows him to transform into a human — that will let Atrushan go and save Tamryn, rather than being killed by the curse that keeps dragons from roaming the land of Ishubahn. It turns out that Ishubahn has been invaded by a demon army, the Hellions, and the humans are losing — and losing bad. They are already at the stage where the dominant human kingdom is on its heels and loosely organized rebellious factions are having more success with guerrilla tactics and infiltrations, and this is where you come in, allying with these groups as needed, integrating with their members in your own party as it suits both of your needs, in a quest to drive the Hellions out of Ishubahn. Friends and comrades will die, missions will fail, but Atrushan’s quest to revive the titular Emerald Dragon and drive the Hellions and their leaders from this world will remain at center stage — especially since Tamryn’s own safety and happiness is tied up in this occurring, as well, and there is nothing Atrushan cares about more than that.

The story would still be compelling without the animated cutscenes and voice acting, but they do go a long way toward adding to the overall quality of Emerald Dragon. And you can finally play the superior version of the game — the PC Engine CD release — in English after years of that not being the case. “Supper” released an unofficial translation of this edition of the game at the end of 2025, over a decade after the still good, but nowhere near as much SFC edition got an English patch.

You know what else would be compelling, though? Releasing Emerald Dragon on modern systems in a more official capacity. Not a remake, but the PC Engine CD edition would play just fine in the present, and an English localization is already out there. That’s unlikely to happen, of course, but don’t let that stop you from emulating an RPG out of Japan that has little in common with the general western idea of what a Japanese RPG was at this point in time. It should be a classic — the reworked PC Engine CD edition was considered one of the top RPGs on a system full of them — but at the least you can experience it yourself and know that to be true even if it’s not common knowledge.

This column is “Re-release this,” which will focus on games that aren’t easily available, or even available at all, but should be once again. Previous entries in this series can be found through this link.

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