Japanese role-playing games

Japanese role-playing games are role-playing games made in Japan. Japanese role-playing games made their first appearance during the 1980s. Today, there are hundreds of Japanese-designed games as well as several translated games. Traditional RPGs are referred to as tabletop RPGs or table-talk RPGs (TTRPG, or TRPG) in Japan to distinguish them from the video role-playing game genre.

In the 1970s, role-playing games themselves received little attention in Japan as games only had English titles. Several gaming magazines and computer game magazines started introducing role-playing games in early 1980s.

Some of the earliest Japanese RPGs were science fiction titles, including Donkey Commando in 1982 and Enterprise: Role Play Game in Star Trek in 1983. Classic Traveller was the first translated RPG in 1984, with Dungeons & Dragons following in 1985. One of the earliest Japanese-designed traditional fantasy RPGs was titled Roads to Lord, published in 1984.

It was not until the late 1980s, when role-playing video games such as Dragon Quest and Final Fantasy, modeled after the western computer RPG's Wizardry and Ultima, helped popularize the traditional role-playing games. The first Dragon Quest was published by Enix in 1986 for the NES and MSX/MSX2 platform.

Around the same time Group SNE pioneered a new book genre called Replay; this new genre consists of session logs arranged as publications (see #Replays below). The first replay, Record of Lodoss War, was a replay of Dungeons and Dragons that has been published in Comptiq magazine since 1986. Replays and novels of Record of Lodoss War gave birth to the fantasy RPG genre.

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