Designing Ys, Vol. 4: Pictimos

The first half of Book I takes place in a variety of rich environments: the sprawling fields of Esteria, the austere halls of the Shrine, and the eerie darkness of the Mines, its rough and winding corridors intermittently broken up by well-lit central shafts. By contrast the second half of Book I is set entirely in the confines of Darm Tower, which grows ever more bleak as Adol finds himself first imprisoned, then robbed, and finally racing against the clock to rescue a human sacrifice. If Ys had a larger historical presence in the United States, it might have joined the western canon of legendary last dungeons long ago--up there with Death Mountain, the Fortress of Doom, and the Black Omen. But it didn't, so here we are.

The time between Vagullion and Pictimos is vast. In that time the player climbs and retreads nine floors, loses all of the Silver equipment, regains the Sword and Shield, gains five levels, and faces off with some incredibly dangerous enemy ambushes. Thus when the player sees the telltale entryway and the accompanying crest of Ys for the first time in several hours, their first instinct will be to save. This instinct is entirely justified.

Pictimos follows a set of rules rather than a distinct pattern. The boss can only move horizontally, and can have up to three sickles in play at a time, which follow a boomerang motion out to the walls of the arena and then return to the main body. Unlike the last two bosses, Pictimos deals no contact damage. The sickles home in on whatever position Adol is standing in at the moment they're fired; thus the player is pressured to put distance between themselves and Pictimos until it sends out the first sickle, then make a run for the main body as it sends out the next two, ideally outpacing all three of them and having enough time to score multiple hits against it.

Like Vagullion, Pictimos cannot be wholly predicted, as the motion of its main body is subject to random determination. Of the bosses faced up to this point, Pictimos comes across as the best-designed: it rewards observations of its parameters and movement, but has enough variation that the progression of the fight can be unpredictable. In the same breath, it's not wholly subject to the whims of the RNG. It also introduces another recurring play element that becomes pivotal both to the final battle of Ys and to Ys II as a whole: projectiles. The use of homing projectiles sets the stage for the later games' danmaku-like attack patterns, and while needing to evade three sickles at once is a significant step up from past boss battles, it's not so far removed from evading the monsters guarding the Silver Shield that it becomes overwhelming.

If only the next two bosses were so well-made.

Designing Ys, Vol. 3: Vagullion

The single most important weapon in Ys I is the Silver Sword. It is not the strongest weapon in the game; that's the Flame Sword, which it's 18 points weaker than. But the Silver Sword is the only weapon capable of harming the final boss, so unlike the Flame Sword it is indispensable to the player's progress. The credits will never roll without it.

Most games would give the second-strongest weapon in the game to the player in the final dungeon, or shortly before entering it. Ys gives it to them less than halfway into the game.

There are two immediate reasons the player needs to explore the Mines of Esteria. The first is to acquire the third Book of Ys, and the second is to acquire the Darm Key necessary to open the way to the final three books. In addition to these, the Mines are where the game's antagonist hid the Silver Armor required for the final boss, and where the player can find the Roda Seed. This last item is what enables them to speak with the massive Roda Trees on the overworld, which will eventually let the player dig up the Silver Sword from within their roots.

While the player can enter Darm Tower as soon as they have the third book and the corresponding key, doing so locks them off from ever returning to Esteria. To ensure that the player has all of the Silver equipment before proceeding, the last boss faced before entering Darm acts as an equipment check—in other words, it's supposed to be impossible to defeat without the Silver Sword, Silver Armor, and Silver Shield. And for some, it's just impossible to defeat in general.

Conceptually, Vagullion is similar to the Yellow Devil of Rockman fame. The boss begins as a single enemy, then splits into a swarm of bats that fly across the room to attack the player. Vagullion is only vulnerable in its unified form and only for a few frames, and like Nygtilger has a form of contact damage that will harm the player if they bump into its upper body. The pattern the player finds themselves pinned into is to hang close to the swarm, teasing it into attacking Adol, before darting away as it closes in and repeating this process until Vagullion reforms.

While simple in theory, there are several wrinkles to executing this strategy. First, while Vagullion is balanced around level 17, these are the player's naked stats at that level:

HP 85
ST 42
DF 35

And these are Vagullion's stats:

HP 150
ST 75
DF 56

For comparison, these are the player's stats with the fairly-average setup of Talwar, Small Shield, and Reflex Armor:

HP 85
STR 58
DF 45

Vagullion's numbers are dramatically inflated for the purposes of the equipment check, and even with the Silver equipment the bat's output is devastating:

HP 85
ST 74
DF 67

Vagullion goes from taking off a third of the player's Hit Points with each attack to shaving off 11%, but his swarm is also designed to get in two to three hits every time it makes contact, which provides the player with very little room to learn the boss' pattern before eating a Game Over. The player takes 12% off Vagullion with each hit and can bump that up to 24% with the right positioning, so they only need five clean hits to end the battle, but getting those hits in can be difficult because of one other property—Vagullion can feint the player.

The swarm is not required to reform unless the player is sufficiently far away. Thus the player that tries to simply pull away and loop right back, expecting the converging swarm to become a vulnerable Vagullion, gets a nasty surprise when it stops reuniting and instead begins chasing a player that's walking right into its trap. The probability of Vagullion feinting is determined by how far Adol is from the boss when it starts reforming, which director Iwamasa later recalled as being an addition to Vagullion's pattern created by Hasegawa Hiroshi, the second main programmer of Ys I & II. This behavior discourages the player from puppyguarding the boss, and introduces an element of randomness to its pattern that prevents it from being the exact same fight every time.

The combination of high stats, stringent equipment requirements, semi-random attack pattern, brief phases of vulnerability, and contact damage, all make Vagullion one of the most infamous bosses in Ys. It's not the most difficult boss found in the duology, but it is the one that claimed the most casualties in terms of unfinished playthroughs. It's difficult to say if the boss was supposed to be that hard—but at least when rebalancing the game for its "definitive" overseas release, Iwamasa did not see fit to make any adjustments other than the pattern changes Hasegawa came up with, whereas at least one later Ys I boss saw its stats modified and almost all major encounters of Ys II got an overhaul.

Designing Ys, Vol. 2: Nygtilger

Ys I & II mark the beginning phase of Falcom's rubber-band level progression, though it was completely absent in earlier versions of the game. Stronger monsters up to par with Adol's level award more experience, while those beneath Adol award less, so as the player fights new monsters they'll find Adol's level "snapping" to the value the current dungeon is balanced for and then not budging any further. The function of this is made possible by giving each monster a prescribed maximum level at which Adol may obtain full experience from it—for every level over that, the EXP received is halved. For example, at level 9 Lyuses award 8 Experience Points; at level 10 4 EXP; at level 11 2 EXP; and at level 12 and above 1 EXP.

This allows each boss to be balanced for a specific point on the level curve, but because of both this and the subtractive damage formula, low-level runs range from impractical to impossible. Players can usually only function at the exact level specified for each area. The first boss of Ys is balanced for level 4; Nygtilger is balanced for level 10.

That's a significant gulf in experience, and it's facilitated by the layout of the first big dungeon. The player's progress throughout the Shrine relies on thoroughly combing the place over. None of the other treasure chests can be opened until they have the Treasure Box Key from the second basement floor, and Nygtilger's lair is double-gated behind doors requiring both the Ivory and Marble Keys, which are in locked boxes on the third and second basements. The Marble Key is further behind a door that can be only accessed with the Mask of Eyes, which can be found on the first floor but also requires the Treasure Key.

This model of progress—a kind of item checklist the player is gradually filling as they progress—is among the oldest tricks in the developer's book, akin to the item puzzles of Zelda or ability requirements found in Metroid. In Ys it's implemented with a specific purpose for how the game should play moment-to-moment: the continual retreading of past floors serves to bring the player in contact with more wandering monsters, which respawn the moment the player scrolls them out of view, building their character level up high enough in time for them to arrive at Nygtilger. As a resulting, there's no grinding. The player is already as powerful as they should be as soon as they arrive on the boss' doorstep.

The "centipede" as players so often call it is designed to draw the player into a chase. The head is the only part that can damage them, while every other segment is vulnerable to Adol's sword. Thus the player chases Nygtilger's tail while its head chases their own, causing the two to circle one another until they make a misplay and must break apart to find a new position to attack from. The fight contrasts strongly with the patient wait-and-charge pattern of Jenocres, and serves to reinforce a lesson about the nature of dungeons versus overworld areas. While the player was free to exit Jenocres' battle anytime and recover their Hit Points in the hallway, leaving Nygtilger's fight won't trigger the passive health regeneration because they're inside a dungeon area.

The battle can be over in seconds or minutes, but the longer it drags on the more likely the player is to fall, for one simple reason: Nygtilger is faster than them. This is the first of several unequal fights in Ys. In general, the difficulty of the game comes from how uneven the boss design is. Major enemies simply have more resources at their disposal, whether that comes in the form of greater speed or more angles of attack than the player. The simple fact that the odds are against them in protracted battles creates great tension for the player, but at times it can also be a weakness as one of Ys' strengths is its soundtrack, and because of these design sensibilities it can be rare to hear certain tracks ever fully played out.

Once the player has Nygtilger's vulnerabilities and pattern down, the fight becomes simple. However, this is the last fight where knowing such information can grant an easy victory. The next major battle serves as one of the defining gameplay moments of Ys I, and the reason that many players give up without seeing the game through.

Vol. 3: Vagullion

Nygtilger in the Ys anime series.

Designing Ys, Vol. 1: Jenocres

"Falcom's Ys series was one of the biggest games in Japan, while Hudson's version of Ys for PC Engine was regarded as one of the best conversions."

—Iwasaki Hiromasa, Ys I & II director & main programmer, The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers Vol. 2, p. 96

The early Ys games rarely seem to get much recognition in the western wing of the world. It's understandable why; the original personal computer iterations from the late 1980s were entirely incompatible with western Operating Systems, and the PC Engine bombed internationally, so their primary home console ports never reached a broad English-speaking audience. From an American's perspective, it might be tempting to think that the Action RPG genre got good with Secret of Mana—but there's so much more behind history's curtain.

In the context of 1989, Ys I & II must have seemed overwhelming. It was among the earliest of the PCE/TurboGrafx's RPG library, preceded only by the first Tengai Makyō game, Necromancer, and Dungeon Explorer. (Which admittedly has more in common with Gauntlet than Dragon Slayer or Tritorn.) While sales numbers for PC Engine software seem lost to time, it's clear from the prominent featuring of Ys in Gekkan PC Engine and other gaming magazines that this was a very significant title in its moment, and we know from Falcom's PC Engine-exclusives that all of the company's games performed well on the console. The PC Engine was something like the Vita of its day, and Falcom was still Falcom, producing games well into 1995 for a system that was abandoned by its own manufacturer in '92. Without this Ys port, we'd have never arrived at Legend of Xanadu or The Legend of Heroes.

Gekkan PC Engine #11, featuring an "Ys Adventure Report" on its cover story.

Place yourself for a moment in December of 1989, having gamed up to that point exclusively with a Famicom Disk System hooked up to a clunky little Sony CRT perched on your bedroom desk. You could've broken down and blown everything on a Mega Drive and Phantasy Star II any time that past year, but you heard everyone and their mother making a stink about the PC Engine in '88 and you swore you'd save up after seeing screens in Famitsu. Up to this point in your life you've been filling your evenings with the juggernauts of the FDS, pirated onto blank Quick Disk floppies like any sensible person: The Legend of Zelda, Metroid, The Adventure of Link, Dracula II, Dragon Slayer IV, and Megami Tensei. The only carts you've bought in a long time were Final Fantasy and Dragon Quest III, moments of weakness on the long road to this. Now the PC Engine is out of its box, seated in the massive CD-ROM² interface unit, and positioned to permanently replace the FDS in your tiny Tokyo apartment.

You flick the power switch and there are twenty times the colors on-screen.

And not just more colors, but Red Book audio, animated cutscenes, and voice acting—by the likes of professional seiyū Ginga Banjō (Mobile Suit Gundam, Fist of the North Star) Watanabe Naoko (Dragon Ball, Saint Seiya) and Mori Katsuji. (Gatchaman, Tekkaman) After Tengai Makyō this was only the second time an RPG had featured voice acting, and attempted to lip-synch its audio with the dialogue. Its international localization was incredible for the year it came out in, being the first English-language game to have an actual voice director and primarily professional cast, with key roles played by 80s TV animation actors like Michael Bell (G.I. Joe, Superman) and Alan Oppenheimer (He-Man, Transformers)—and by a pre-Jimmy Neutron Debi Derryberry, still early in her career.

The disc that first went out to retailers some thirty years ago wasn't just the proof of concept for the format, it was the state-of-the-art. Director and main programmer Iwasaki Hiromasa later remarked in The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers Vol. 2 that before Ys, everyone believed the CD-ROM format was slow; after Ys, "only a bad developer would make a really, really slow game." (Untold 89)

Four months later Final Fantasy III came out and looked like hot garbage.

Same year, vastly superior presentation.

What our hypothetical Japanese gen Xer buying in on the PC Engine in '89 doesn't yet realize is that Tengai Makyō ZIRIA handled the actual scene animation and voice acting much better. But the game beneath Ys' production values is also deeper than the barebones Dragon Quest clone lying at he heart of ZIRIA, a feat accomplished by abstracting and reducing the game's design down to a point where anybody can play but only the dedicated can play well.

Iwasaki Hiromasa was not involved in the original production of Ys, but fell in love with the games on PC while working at Hudson Soft, and was later approached by Hudson Company Director Nakamoto Shinichi to port it to PCE. He was granted the incredible opportunity to work with the fully-commentated source code of the original games—preservation practices at Japanese software companies are infamously poor, as even up through 2002 major developers like Square were clearing out their data to make room for the next project as soon as the previous one was finished. No one had remakes in mind in this era, yet because of Falcom's multiplatform release schedule across many different desktop standards, the tiny studio retained the Ys development assets in time for their definitive port.

It was Iwasaki who came up with the idea of bundling Ys I & II together into one unified game, chose Hasegawa Hiroshi of AlfaSystem as the compilation's other main programmer, and as the game's director also assumed responsibility for casting its voice actors, picking them based on anime VHS tapes he had rented out from the first floor of Hudson's Sapporo Sankei building. (Untold 92 & 94) Iwasaki and Hasegawa took certain liberties with Ys—liberties that director Hashimoto Masaya and scenario writer Miyazaki Tomoyoshi would later give their stamp of approval, declaring that Ys Book I & II was the game they "want[ed] to create." (96)

"You need to understand that in Japan, Ys I and Ys II are really, really, really famous games. Everyone loves them. But I felt the text in the originals was not good for explaining the background to the games. I couldn't change it for Japan though, because they're really famous, and if I change something for Ys: Book I&II, if I changed some text, perhaps a lot of players would complain about that. [...] But I knew that Americans did not know this game, and I wanted to explain it. About the background, characters, and everything. So I changed a lot of text. [...] So I think that Ys: Book I&II for the USA is really the best version—for me anyway." 

—Iwasaki Hiromasa, The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers Vol. 2, p. 95

The changes Iwasaki made were extensive. Virtually every common monster had its Defense and Experience values raised or lowered to subtly adjust the game's challenge and level curve. One late-game Ys I monster, the Riffligan, had its Hit Points, Strength, and Defense decreased from 150 to 135, 106 to 98, and 55 to 23, in order to prevent an underleveled player from becoming stuck once locked inside Darm Tower. Overall the amount of grinding demanded for Ys I was reduced, while individual battles in both games became more difficult. Iwasaki also introduced level carryover between the two books, with Adol's level being automatically raised to 34 at the start of II if it was lower. These decisions were informed not just by Iwasaki's experience as a game developer, but as a player—the decision to raise the fifth boss, Khonsclard's, Defense from 83 to 89 stemmed from his personal suspicion that it was too easy, and by how players tended to forget Ys I had a boss between Pictimos and Yogleks/Omulgun.

Ys as a whole is built atop a framework that dates back to 1984's Dragon Slayer and Hydlide, the "bump combat system." (Usually referred to in Japanese as 体当たり taiatari "tackling.") Essentially, the directional pad is the only input the player uses to battle; they joust at enemies on the overworld and bosses in their arenas, ramming through them to deal damage. Ys' implementation of the system is more refined than its predecessors, as the player can avoid mutual damage by hitting their target at an offset rather than head-on. This is a conceit pulled from Xanadu, but the hitboxes in Ys are less ambiguous than in Xanadu. Moreover, Ys has two different speed settings to turn the game into a much faster and tenser experience.

The bump combat system is generally unpopular with today's players, as it's less familiar than having a dedicated button for swinging a weapon in the style of Zelda or Terranigma, but there are a number of advantages to it. Going with bump combat allowed Falcom to create high-speed battles that simply couldn't exist in the 2D Zeldalikes, where the player had to stop moving to mash their attack button once an enemy was rendered vulnerable. Ys I is that rare 80s game to be totally free of button mashing, as the constantly moving enemies require the player to make on-the-fly adjustments to their angle of attack if they want to avoid damage. It's a system that on the surface sounds too rudimentary and crude to have any depth, but in practice requires finesse to do well. Ys is accessible, but it's not easy.

Aside from the gameplay advantages of it, the bump combat system also expedited the porting process—every computer has a set of arrow keys, and every console has a directional input. It's not a perfect system, as the game's lack of diagonal movement results in awkward "stair-shaped" motions when the player transitions from horizontal to vertical input, but as we'll soon see, the bump system has a vast amount of design space available, not all of which was realized within the first two games.

With Xanadu Falcom had innovated a system made up of swordplay and spell-slinging, assigned to the arrow keys and spacebar. Ys picks up where Xanadu left off, but focuses on one half of the system at a time. Ys itself is a story divided into two volumes, with the first book focusing on the melee combat through the directional pad and the second book emphasizing magic through the I button. Those books are themselves divided into two further halves. The first half of Book I sees the player traveling the open fields of Esteria while the second half has them climbing the 25 floors of Darm Tower, and the first half of Book II encompasses the ascent from the foot of Ys up through the frozen tundra and smoldering caverns of the island, before ending with Adol's adventure through the labyrinthian Shrine of Solomon and its interconnected canals.

The journey through Ys Book I is about tracking down the six Books of Ys to discover what happened to the titular vanished island and find a way to subvert the crisis befalling the present-day land of Esteria, but from the player's perspective these are just reasons to set foot in their next sword-and-sorcery fantasy. The six volumes act as the governing structure around the game: when the player has all six, the credits roll. Each book save for the last is guarded by a boss, with volume six having two consecutive bosses blocking the player's path. These bosses will be our main subject of content analysis, as dying and challenging them again accounts for most of the game's playtime.

Esteria is broken up into four principal parts: the towns of Minea and Zeptik, the Shrine, and the abandoned mines. Separate from these is Darm Tower, which the player cannot exit once they've entered. Ys can be loosely described as open-world, as the player's primary obstacle to exploring these areas is the strength of the monsters within them. Unlike more recent such games (Breath of the Wild) skill can't totally overcome those monsters because Ys uses a subtractive damage formula, so damage can be 0. (Attack - Defense = Damage.)

Aside from the monsters themselves, there are several elements in Ys I that serve to pressure the player into following a general sequence and discourage them from exploring specific dungeons until others are cleared. The Treasure Box Key is necessary to open all of the treasure chests in the first half of Book I except for the chest it's found in, and the key itself is nested two floors down into the Shrine, which the player can only access if they have the Tovah Crystal from the old woman in Zeptik village, which requires the player have already spoken with the fortune-teller in Minea and acquired a sword, shield, and set of armor. Without the key the player can't effectively explore the mines, thus discouraging them from acquiring the third Book of Ys before the first two. This type of item placement pushes the player to follow a loose sequence, so that by the time they get the key needed for the other areas, they are already deep enough in the Shrine that they're better off finishing the dungeon before backtracking to explore the rest.

Any player that gains entry into the Shrine will find their progress quickly halted by the first boss of Ys, Jenocres. Jenocres serves as the Barthesian threshold guardian standing between the Shrine's empty upper level and monster-infested lower floors. He does not attack the player directly, but instead teleports around the room, leading the player into the line of fire of one of his six torches. Each torch has a maximum range of about eight tiles, crossing just past the halfway point of the chamber. The flames can briefly meet, but if two flames touch then one of them will immediately recede, so that there is always at least one space to move freely between any two torches. Thus the player is challenged to watch and anticipate the torches Jenocres is luring them into, and find the one path that will let them ram Jenocres while still having the free movement to escape the torches unscathed.

Jenocres teaches the player several critical lessons:

• Unlike regular wandering monsters, the vulnerable parts of bosses do not deal contact damage.
• Charging at an offset still deals more damage than charging normally, which translates to less opportunities for the boss to deal damage. Even though there's no contact damage from a bad bump, there's still a penalty for poor execution.
• Evasion is just as critical as offense, and every attack one initiates should have an escape route out of it.

This last point is the most important, as later boss battles continually revisit the idea of needing to attack "safely." Making unsafe attacks is what leaves the player vulnerable to damage, and ultimately leads to their defeat. These lessons aren't confined to Ys I either—the design elements present in Jenocres even make up the skeleton of Ys II's final boss battle.

Ys has sometimes been positioned as a "beginner's" RPG, made to introduce players to the nascent Action RPG genre with an easier game, the idea being to eventually induct them into "real" games like Xanadu and Tritorn. While in the context of the PC-88 it's easy to see how that line of logic could emerge, it's doubtful for one overarching reason: Ys is hard.

Jenocres is the player's first major roadblock and the first thing that really threatens them with a Game Over. They will likely mount a dozen or so attempts before they finally nail his pattern down and do the wizard in. None of the bosses in Xanadu are that threatening on their own—sure you have the floaty jumps to work out, but the real threat to the player is the player themself, getting too greedy and bungling a run by killing too many enemies and not being able to level up the later weapons and spells. Actual Game Overs are rare in Xanadu. The big threat is just making the game unwinnable and being stuck in the dungeon forever. By contrast, in Ys death is lurking in every boss chamber with monsters that rival the best and worst of Zelda, Castlevania, and Legacy of the Wizard. It's a process facilitated by the game's save-anywhere and regenerating health features, and the player can actually leave Jenocres' room mid-battle to restore all their HP outside before heading back in to reset the fight, giving them the option to know when to fold 'em on battles that are too far swung in the opponent's favor. This boss is supposed to kill you again and again before you realize you can exit and restart.

And when Jenocres goes down, the game really begins...

Ys I: Ancient Ys Vanished Omen
Vol. 2: Nygtilger
Vol. 3: Vagullion
Vol. 4: Pictimos
Vol. 5: Khonsclard
Vol. 6: Yogleks & Omulgun
Vol. 7: Dark Fact

Ys II: Ancient Ys Vanished—The Final Chapter
Vol. 1: Velagunder
Vol. 2: Tyalmath
Vol. 3: Gelaldy
Vol. 4: Druegar

Further Reading
The Untold History of Japanese Game Developers, Vol. 2 – Yakuza, Robots and the PC Engine, John W Szczepaniak, published by Hardcore Gaming 101
"Nihon Falcom – Ys Developer Interview," 1987, translated by Shmuplations
"Ys I and II Developer Interview," 1988, translated by Shmuplations
Colorful Pieces of Game (Japanese, old), Iwasaki Hiromasa.
Colorful Pieces of Game (Japanese, new), Iwasaki Hiromasa

How Dragon Quest created the Survival Arc

The world of Alefgard is made up of 64 squares on a 8x8 grid, each populated by up to four kinds of monster. The discrete lines that divide these grids aren't normally visible to the player, but are usually flagged by geographic features--terrain changes from plain to forest or vice-versa, mountain ranges, bridges, and the like. At the outset of Dragon Quest the player is dropped into the Ladutorm/Tantagel region, a rectangular area of the map populated by Slimes and Slimebeths/Red Slimes.

The player character's starting stats in Dragon Quest are determined by the first four characters of their name; each character had a hidden numeric value, the sum of those values would be divided by 16, and the remainder would be used to determine the player's starting stats and growth type.

Japan has two phonetic writing systems, hiragana (for native words) and katakana (for foreign words), as well as a third writing system called kanji used to compress long phonetic words into shorter logograms. (For example, byouki "sick" is 4 characters long in hiragana びょうき but only 2 characters in kanji 病気.) However, Dragon Quest only uses hiragana in its text, for several reasons: it costs less memory to store 46 characters than the 82 including katakana or 2000+ kanji would require, and because hiragana is the first writing system a Japanese child learns. This makes the game accessible to people of all ages. Thus Dragon Quest mapped the 46 hiragana characters and two punctuation marks (゛and ゜) to numeric values 0~15.

Dragon Quest is a lot of things, but low-effort isn't one of them. Believe it or not, this system is streamlined compared to what came before--Japanese PC RPGs like Dungeon. For the better, Phantasy Star et al. rendered it archaic within two years.

Without going into great depth as to how the system works--you can find a Japanese-language guide archived here--let's use an example to gauge relative player strength. The common boys' name "Touya" is written とうや in hiragana, and so is three characters long. Any unused space in a name less than four characters is treated as a 0. と is worth 10 points, う is worth 13 points, and や is worth 14 points. Added together that's 37, divided by 16 we get 2.3125 rounded down to 2, and to get the remainder we multiply 2 by 16 and subtract that from 37: 37 - 32 = remainder 5.

The remainder is then compared against a table that assigns Strength, Agility, Hit Points, Magic Points, and Growth Type based on the remainder's value. In this case, remainder 5 gives us 4 Strength, 3 Agility, 15 Hit Points, 4 Magic Points, and Growth Type II. There are four Growth Types in all, with each one having higher growth in two stats and lower growth in two others. (Think like Natures in Pokémon, but they affect four stats instead of two and apply to every level-up instead of just being a flat 10% increase and 10% decrease.) Growth Type II raises Strength and HP growth but decreases Agility and MP growth, making a beefy physical attacker with low defenses and low magic.

The hero in Dragon Quest learns their first spells at levels 3 and 4--Hoimi/HEAL and Gilla/HURT, Hoimi recovering 10~30 Hit Points and Gira dealing 5~12 damage. Focusing on the early game, our sample hero Touya is relatively well built for survivability, but that isn't the case for all heroes. The lowest possible starting stats in Dragon Quest come from "remainder 6" names; these names produce heroes with 3 Strength, 4 Agility, and 13 HP. Only names whose sum is 6, 22, 38, or 54 can cause this. (Names that come to mind are the female names Aoi, Kirino, and Sara, the unisex name Yuu, and the family name Rikino. Yuu is particularly notable because it's also a common nickname for Yuuta, Yuuto, Yuuko, Yuugo, Yuuichi...etc.)

The first objective of the player in Dragon Quest is to get to level 3 so they can learn Hoimi and thus have the stamina to travel far enough to reach the Roto's/Erdrick's Cave, and eventually Garai/Garinham. Since magic is inaccessible until that point, the player's relative difficulty is going to be based purely off of their physical stats. For our examples, Touya is a 4/3 Strength/Agility with 15 HP, while Yuu is a 3/4 Strength/Agility with 13 HP. Agility is used to calculate the Defense stat in Dragon Quest while also determining one's probability to escape from battle, with Defense being equal to [Agility / 2].

In general, the damage formula in Dragon Quest is:

(Attack - ([Defense / 2] + Armor Defense Bonus)) / 2 = Damage

With 1 as the lower limit. The fact that the bonus from equipped armor is applied after Defense is calculated for the player is important. The structure of this formula means that it generally takes four points in Agility to equal one point of damage reduction, and reductions from armor are four times as effective as reductions from level-ups. This is a very influential formula, one that was mostly reused in future Dragon Quest games and copied by games that tried to emulate its style, especially with regard to RPGMaker. Odds are if you've delved into the world of Japanese Role-Playing Games beyond just Final Fantasy, you've played at least one game that used this formula or a variant of it.

The monsters of Dragon Quest will kill you with a smile.

Regardless of Growth Type, the hero's Agility is 0 until level 3 and from there goes up by 2 every level until level 7, after which those with enhanced Agility steadily gain one more point over those without until they cap at level 30 with 12 more points. This means that during the Survival Arc, the player will take damage equal to half an enemy's Strength until they equip some form of armor. Fortunately the game does give the player a pittance of Gold Pieces from the castle throne room to start with, but if they blow that allowance on a weapon instead of armor then they're in for a rude awakening.

Slimes are 5/3 Strength/Agility with 3 HP, Slimebeths are 7/3 Strength/Agility with 4 HP. If the player ventures to the south they'll be in the northern part of the Rocky Mountain Cave region and won't be able to pass over the mountain tiles, but they will start to encounter 9/3 Drackies with 6 HP. Closer to Roto's Cave they'll run into 11/8 Ghosts with 7 HP, and nearer to Garai 11/12 Magic-Users/Magicians with 13 HP. Not only are they physically stronger, the Magic-Users can cast Gilla, which deals a flat 3~10 damage irrespective of Agility.

Remember, at this point Touya is 4/3/15 and Yuu is 3/4/13. Unequipped both of them will deal 1 damage to any of these opponents, because the minimum damage output in Dragon Quest is 1, while on Critical Hits Touya will always instantly kill a Slime and deal 1~4 to a Slimebeth. Touya will take 1~2 damage from Slimes, 1~3 damage from Slimebeths, while Yuu will always take 1 damage from Slimes and 1 or 2 damage from Slimebeths. These enemies are both easily survivable since any hero we make will always have a 1:1 damage trade with the monsters each turn while having 3~5 times the number of Hit Points.

Dragon Quest in Famitsu #1.

The problems come in when you factor in the Drackies for the first time. A Dracky deals 2~4 damage while always taking 1 outside of crits, outpacing both heroes 1:2 or 1:4, taking between four and eight turns to defeat the player depending on variance while the player needs 6 turns of normal damage to defeat them. Critical Hits only have a 1/32 chance of occurring, meaning the player has a ~1% chance to take out the Dracky in two turns and not much other hope. Ghosts likewise outpace the player 1:2 or 1:5 and Magic-Users can go as high as 1:10.

This is the first Survival Arc. The only monsters in the game the player can survive against when they first turn the game on are Slimes and Slimebeths. This is a mathematical fact. The only means of changing this fact is gaining levels and/or equipment, and the +4 Defense Leather Armor costs 70 Gold Pieces out the gate. Both Slime variants award just 1 Experience Point on defeat, but Slimebeths also give 2 GP instead of 1. The player needs 7 XP to reach level 2 and 23 XP to reach level 3, which means that the player's first real objective in Dragon Quest is to run laps around Ladutorm Castle fighting 23 Slimes while running from Slimebeths to conserve their HP. (Grinding for the 60 GP Club for +4 Attack takes longer than grinding to level 3 even if the player purposefully only fights Slimebeths.) 

Past authors have thrown up their hands at this point and plead "Why?"

This is the first Surival Arc, and it is a seminal moment in the history of Role-Playing Games for also being the genre's first grind. Not in the literal sense of being the first game to have grinding, but in the sense that this was the model of grinding emulated by a greater industry, the first grind played by millions, the grind that inspired Sakaguchi, Itoi, and Naka. But as Leeroy Lewin illustrates in discussing Phantasy Star, the Survival Arc is not meaningless no matter how it unconscionable it may be. The Survival Arc establishes the hostility of the world and how unwelcome the protagonist is inside of it; the hero's job is to perform a role fighting monsters, but at the outset of their adventure they can do so only inside a limited space in which the conditions are right for them to thrive.

The hero of Dragon Quest can only survive fighting Slimes and the occasional Slimebeth until he reaches level 3, Alisa/Alis of Phantasy Star can only profit from fighting Monster Flies/Sworms on the outskirts of Camineet--and encountering nearly anything else is a death sentence until her first level-up. The Warriors of Light in Final Fantasy are stopped cold if they try to fight Gigas Worms before Goblins, and Ninten of MOTHER/EarthBound Beginnings won't get far against Alligators if he doesn't stop to beat up some Hippies first. Each and every one of these games follows a delicate but soul-crushing sense of balance in which the player must slowly acquire strength in a hostile world where power rules absolute over all else. So it goes for Courageous Perseus, Mugen no Shinzou, and Xanadu.

Over the course of a traditional Japanese Role-Playing Game the stat paradigm governing the Survival Arc shifts. The oppressor-oppressed relationship between the monstrous world and the player character transforms into one of predator and prey. The endgame of any RPG has the player hunting down rare monsters rather than hiding from them; chasing Grand Kuwagamon parties in the Destroyed Belt of Digimon Story for that maximized 4000+ XP, or hunting the Jachol Cave Skull Eaters in Final Fantasy V for 5~10 Ability Points. This curve reflects the development of the party into a functional and destructive force in the world.

Games which lack a Survival Arc and the subsequent transformation of the paradigm provide an entirely different qualitative experience. Pokémon has no Survival Arc to speak of because its encounters and roadblocks are designed in such a way that strong encounters are gated behind bosses the player naturally keeps pace with, resulting in the early game and the endgame often feeling identically-paced throughout. The progression of the player character(s) is presented wholly through the acquisition of new moves, new items, and changing forms. In fact, few games after 1991 have a "true" Survival Arc in the Dragon Quest sense of it. They may have a more abstracted form of "grinding," but the immediate threat of a game over from stepping too far out of bounds is rarely present. Instead, invisible walls or physical borders keep the player from going where the game designers don't want them.

"In the real world, doing all the right things doesn't guarantee you peace of mind or economic security. You can say all the right things, get the best grades, go to the right schools, and at the end of the day be passed up for someone else. In the real world most people must work hard, but only some of the people that work hard will be rewarded; in these video games, everyone who works hard will be inevitably rewarded, and everyone who does not will never make it."

This arc expressed in play what early RPGs lacked in words, demonstrating the growth of the player character(s) through their struggle and gradual progress towards overcoming difficult monsters. It also expresses an idealized model of work; there is no equivalent template for success in the world that created the RPG. There are strategy guides, but they don't always help. You can get the best education imaginable, place in the top bracket of your nation's standardized tests, graduate from an incredible university--and in the end, be passed over.

The numbers in real life are against you rather than on your side; there's a thousand, ten thousand, a hundred thousand other people applying for the job you found and your application may never even be seen by a human being. The real world requires hard work and good die rolls to succeed, and success isn't inevitable. Look at Lovecraft, at Marx, at Van Gogh and Edgar Allan Poe. You can create world-changing literature or art, capture the voice of your people or write the course of history in the next century, and never live to see your labor bear fruit. It's so easy to live and die poor.

Any one of us may live that life, dying unknown in some forgotten corner of the world, with no modicum of control over it. Even you; even me. There's no use fearing it, there's little we can do about it. Despite our pretensions to the legend of the self-made man, in truth we are eternally at the mercy of chance.

The Survival Arc stands in opposition to this. It imagines an alternative to our system, provides the hope that perhaps there can be a world where it is not our genes, the circumstances of our birth, or the fickle hand of fate that determines our course in life, but instead our choice to pursue a direct and obvious path to success. Perhaps one day everyone who desires financial and occupational stability will be able to have it simply by choosing to have it. Until that time comes, we will need to be reminded of what could be.