Emerald Dragon: A Magnificent Cut

He’s a dragon. She’s a human. They’re in love. 

That’s not all there is to Emerald Dragon, but it’s a solid elevator pitch for this undervalued RPG from Glodia and Right Stuff. True, it was perhaps destined for strictly cult-favorite honors. A following accrued in the late 1980s through the mid-1990s, but unlike other RPGs it never saw a sequel, never grew into a proper series, never had its own middling two-part anime OVA, and never enjoyed an official release anywhere but Japan. There are worse fates for a game, but Emerald Dragon deserved more attention back then—and despite the wear of a few decades, it deserves that today.

 

Emerald Dragon arises in grim circumstances: in an ancient era, the continent of Ishban fell under a curse that gruesomely infected and killed any dragon within its borders. The survivors fled to a remote isle and founded a dragon settlement of Dragulia, while humans prospered and dominated the mainland. One day a ship wrecks off the coast of Dragulia, and the only survivor is a human girl named Tamryn*. She lives among the dragons and befriends a youngster named Atrushan, but upon growing up she decides to return to Ishbahn and her own kind. Amid a tearful farewell Atrushan snaps off one of his dragon horns and gives it to Tamryn, telling her to summon him if she’s ever in need. Not so long after her departure, Atrushan hears the horn. With help from a local artifact, he finds a way to turn himself human, thus allowing him to visit Ishban and work out his feelings for a woman not of his species. 

Atrushan and Tamryn are a straightforward couple, despite the lingering problem of dragon-human romance simmering between them, and the game introduces the flirtatious prince Hathram and his justifiably irritated friend Farna as a tempestuous counterpoint to the more established low-key affection between the leads. While there’s a quest filled with magical trinkets and evil overlords and eldritch terrors, it’s really all driven by the characters in their interactions and arcs. Even the more sedate party members like the archer Yaman or the elderly wizard Bagin have their own quirks and secrets, and their various exchanges and bickerings enliven a standard plot, much like a Tales RPG or the original Lunar: The Silver Star. Yes, there’s a villain named Ostracon rampaging all over with his monstrous hordes, but that can wait until Hathram and Farna settle a spat over him masking the pressures of royalty under a playboy façade.

 

Many RPGs of the late 1980s stuck to familiar Dragon Quest menus and turns, but Emerald Dragon stretched to more interesting extents. Battles unfold on a field where allies and foes roam and attack as freely as their energy allows, inviting strategy when it comes to positioning party members and judging their range. While the encounters are random, the better versions of the game pace them out well and move everything quick and focused. Characters deliver physical attacks just by running into enemies, similar to an Ys game, and even the more elaborate spells waste little time. 

This brings out Emerald Dragon’s greatest flaw: the player controls only Atrushan. Despite having a full party of warriors, archers, sorcerers and more, you’re limited to directing Atrushan while the computer handles the rest of the characters. In some versions of the game, only Atrushan and Tamryn seem to gain levels and grow, with the rest of the cast coming off as overpowered long-term guests. It’s a curiously limited choice even by the standards of its era, and it hampers what’s otherwise an enjoyable break from RPG combat of this vintage.

 

Emerald Dragon elevates itself in other ways. The character art by Akihiro Kimura is striking in both the designs and the cutscenes. The story has some intriguing little references, with many names derived from Persian myths and Zoroastrianism. The soundtrack hits the usual RPG themes well, and its recurring main anthem is sweeping and catchy. In many respects Emerald Dragon plays it safe as a typical RPG, with anime heroes and familiar beats, and yet there’s always a quality above the norm, a compelling tone in the characters and their little adventure. 

And that’s what it comes down to, isn’t it? Video games, and RPGs in particular, can get away with a lot if the story lands right with you. One could quibble over the literary merits of everything from Earthbound to Ephemeral Fantasia, but a narrative doesn’t have to be a masterwork of subtext and eloquence; it just has to draw you in and make you care about the characters. That’s what fed the followings for many revered RPGs of the 1990s, and if you want one lesser-known game that should have stood among them, I’d point to Emerald Dragon. 

This would be the best-known creation of Glodia, one of a number of short-lived developers that broke off from Telenet Japan in the 1980s. They helped bring Emerald Dragon to various computers: the PC-8801 and PC-9801, the MSX, and the X68000. Glodia’s original vision of Emerald Dragon is best on the FM Towns Marty, retaining the same plot, static cutscenes, and that odd feature of many old RPGs: a constant sidebar that shows your party status. Some folks must have liked that. 

There’s a noticeable divide between those older incarnations and the later console versions. In 1994, Emerald Dragon appeared on the PC Engine CD, courtesy of Hudson Soft, Alfa System, and Right Stuff—the last of these being a developer founded by former Glodia staff like Kimura and Emerald Dragon’s scriptwriter and designer Atushi Ii.  And it emerged as a slightly different game.

 

I find that the PC Engine version is Emerald Dragon at its finest. The cutscenes are lavish and dramatic (or melodramatic, if you prefer), the soundtrack is crisp and thunderous, and the characters all benefit from quality vocal performances. The game dispenses with that ubiquitous sidebar and lets players wander the seamless overworld in smoother fashion, and there’s just a greater sense of scale and grandeur. 

The Super Famicom was Emerald Dragon's final stop. This port does its best to evoke its PC Engine counterpart, but the constraints of a cartridge leave it without a CD-based title's cinematic scenes and music (at best you’ll hear a few spoken lines). It’s an easier version of the game as well, and fans sometimes disparage it as watered down in both story and atmosphere.

 

That said, this Emerald Dragon is still a neat RPG when taken on its own merits. The streamlined narrative leaves the important details intact, the character conversations are amusing, and the combat’s still fast and not too frequent. A "Dragon Change" mechanic allows Atrushan more opportunities to switch forms, and the battle sprites are larger and more animated than jn the PC Engine version. And at this writing, the Super Famicom treatment is the only Emerald Dragon to be fully translated by fans. 

How would Emerald Dragon have fared outside of Japan decades ago, anyway? North American fans of RPGs often complained about how seldom they were localized, but at least they had most of the heavy hitters in some form: Final Fantasy, Lunar, Ys, Phantasy Star, Dragon Quest, and even Lufia were all represented, however sporadically. In such a climate Emerald Dragon might have joined that crowd, particularly through its PC Engine edition. The TurboGrafx-16 and TurboDuo (Western versions of the PC Engine and its CD evolution) never had a proper top-tier RPG localized: the Ys games were action-oriented, and Cosmic Fantasy 2, amusing as it was, wasn’t quite an A-lister. Emerald Dragon could have been to the TurboDuo what Lunar: The Silver Star was to the Sega CD: an engrossing, anime-styled quest that stood among the best games on the system.

 

It’s a shame that Emerald Dragon is now among those unfortunate and unappreciated games without any modern reissues. It’s possible that the legal rights are a mess, considering all of the companies involved in its various ports; neither Glodia nor Right Stuff survived the 1990s, and their catalogs seem largely off-limits. Fortunately, that didn’t stop Akihiro Kimura from continuing Emerald Dragon in doujinshi form. His comic series After the End follows Atrushan, Tamryn, and the other characters’ further adventures, and it’s all well-drawn and entertaining for fans of the series. Kimura went further with Elemental Dragoon, a crowdfunded audio drama and RPG with undeniable stylistic ties to Emerald Dragon and Right Stuff’s Alnam series. Meanwhile, Atsushi Ii directed Natural Doctrine, a divisively difficult RPG that I’ll one day have to search for possible Emerald Dragon callbacks. 

If you’ll pardon yet another cliché from me, Emerald Dragon has that certain something. Dissected and analyzed it seems formulaic among Japan’s unlocalized 16-bit RPGs, never as uniquely absurd as Tengai Makyo, as bizarre as Linda3, or as memorably ghoulish as Last Armageddon. Yet there’s a vitality to its characters, a crisp style in the graphics, and brisk enjoyment even within its limited battles. It’s an RPG of the purest romantic incarnation, and there’s always a place for that. And there’s always a reason to lament that it never got a real chance at the entire world. 

(*At the very least, I’d like an official English version to lay down the proper spellings of the characters' names. I’m going along with the fan translation of the Super Famicom version here, but the official books favor various spellings like Atorshan, Thamrin, Husrum, Falna, and so forth.)