Action Role-Playing Game

An action role-playing game (ARPG) is a subgenre of the role-playing video game that combines core elements of the action game with those of the role-playing game, distinguished chiefly by real-time, action-based combat rather than the turn-based or menu-driven fighting of traditional RPGs.¹³ In practice the label usually means that the player has direct, real-time control of the character, mapping attacks more or less one-to-one to clicks, taps, or button presses.¹³¹

The genre resists a single tidy definition, a point acknowledged both by critics and players.¹¹⁶ One working set of traits offered by the outlet TouchArcade includes real-time combat, freely moving a character, defeating enemies to gain experience points that yield level-ups, a persistent inventory, a requirement for reflexive skill, and — generally — only one character under the player’s control at a time.¹ Because “adding RPG elements into every single game” became commonplace, the boundaries blur: writers disagree over whether titles such as Monster Hunter or the original The Legend of Zelda qualify, the latter often treated as an action-adventure? rather than a strict ARPG because it lacks experience-based level-ups.¹¹³ Definitions among players range from a strict “Diablo-like” reading to any RPG that is neither turn-based nor real-time-with-pause.¹⁶

Origins

Unlike other RPG subgenres, the action-RPG owes comparatively little directly to tabletop gaming beyond the general debt every video-game RPG carries to it.¹ The broader RPG lineage traces to the early 1970s and Dungeons & Dragons, developed by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, from which the Wizardry and Ultima computer RPGs descended in the West.²¹³ The action-RPG instead emerged as one of the earliest cases of genre-mixing in video games, pairing action with RPG progression.¹

Several Western games form its distant prehistory. Warren Robinett’s Adventure, released for the Atari 2600 in 1980, translated the text-adventure formula of 1977’s Colossal Cave Adventure into graphics, featuring 30 rooms, collectible items, and roaming enemies, though it had no experience points and no permanent character growth.¹ Its single-item-at-a-time inventory constraint was later echoed directly in Japanese action-RPGs.¹⁰ Gateway to Apshai, developed by The Connelly Group and published by Epyx in 1983 as a prequel to Temple of Apshai, offered real-time combat, improvable stats, and abundant loot, making it, by TouchArcade’s account, among the earliest games comfortably called an action-RPG ¹; TV Tropes, by contrast, holds that it lacked genuine RPG mechanics and was closer to an action-adventure.¹³ The Caverns of Freitag, developed in 1982 by future Ultima contributor David Shapiro with a hybrid turn-based/real-time combat system, is cited as having directly inspired Yoshio Kiya to create Dragon Slayer, thereby seeding the Eastern branch of the genre.¹³

The Japanese breakthrough

The genre broke open in Japan in 1984.¹ Namco released The Tower of Druaga? in arcades in June of that year, conceived as a fantasy version of Pac-Man with puzzles, monster battles, and hidden treasure; it has been cited as an inspiration for Hydlide and an antecedent to The Legend of Zelda.¹ Later in 1984, Nihon Falcom? released Dragon Slayer for the Japanese PC-88, widely described as the first action-RPG and, by one account, the “root node of the tree of influence” for the whole genre.¹⁰⁵ The 1983 titles Panorama Toh — an early work by Dragon Slayer’s creator Yoshio Kiya — and Bokosuka Wars are sometimes named as still earlier progenitors.¹³³

Dragon Slayer resembled a Rogue-style dungeon crawler but ran in real time, with the player bumping into enemies to attack them.⁵¹⁰ Rather than a conventional experience system, it required the player to gather power stones scattered through each level and carry them, one item at a time, back to a house located inside the dungeon in order to raise the hero’s Strength; coins boosted maximum HP, and killing enemies granted experience that governed how much HP was restored at home.⁵¹⁰ Its one-item inventory limit was borrowed directly from Atari’s Adventure.¹⁰ Falcom released the game under the Dragon Slayer name for many later, largely unrelated titles, forming a complicated eight-game lineage programmed and directed by Kiya.¹⁰⁶

The direct sequel, Xanadu (1985), practically restarted the design from scratch and sold more than 400,000 copies, one of the most successful Japanese PC games of its era.⁵¹¹ It presented a side-scrolling, dungeon-crawling world with shops, ladders, and pitfalls, where colliding with a roaming enemy triggered a separate top-down battle screen.⁵¹¹ Many of its statistics were adapted from Advanced Dungeons & Dragons, and it tracked melee and magic experience separately, along with a Karma stat and independently leveling weapons.⁵¹¹ Together Dragon Slayer and Xanadu are credited with influencing the entire subsequent course of Japanese action-RPGs.⁵ The Xanadu line later spawned Faxanadu on the NES in 1988 — developed by Hudson Soft and published by Nintendo — a side-scrolling action-RPG sharing many elements with Zelda II.⁶

This Japanese lineage culminated in The Legend of Zelda (1986), an influential action-adventure inspired by Druaga and Hydlide, even as the rival turn-based camp was codified by the Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy series, splitting the Eastern RPG into firmly separate turn-based and action strands.¹³

Western developments and legacy

Western RPGs largely remained turn-based through the 1980s.¹³ The Western game industry of the period tended to treat action games and RPGs as products for separate demographics.¹ Isolated experiments nonetheless appeared, such as Fairlight (1985), a Spectrum isometric game whose weight-and-size object physics, combat, and collectible potions made it an early entry in the mold.⁷ Distinct Western action-RPGs did not emerge with force until The Faery Tale Adventure (1987) and Times of Lore (1988), and the form did not become popular there until the 1990s.¹³

The action-RPG’s spread into adjacent genres was substantial. Robert Jaeger’s Montezuma’s Revenge (1984), an Atari platformer, drew on Adventure’s colored-key labyrinth structure to fuse RPG-style exploration with platforming.⁹ By the modern era the genre encompasses some of the most acclaimed games in the medium, among them Blizzard’s Diablo (1996), The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt (2015), Bloodborne (2015), and FromSoftware’s Elden Ring (2022) — the last set in a world created by Hidetaka Miyazaki and George R. R. Martin.¹⁴¹³ Diablo in particular came to define one dominant strain, described as hitting everything until it dies, leveling up, and looting for better gear.¹³