40 Years Ago, Enix Released the Most Important RPG of All Time

Many people think of Final Fantasy when they pick the most famous RPG franchise in history out of a crowd. But fame doesn't always equate to innovation or novelty. Square Enix's most popular franchise actually owes a large debt to its secondary series, one that made role-playing adventures relevant in Japan.

Dragon Quest turns 40 today. The original game came out on the Nintendo Entertainment System on May 27, 1986, and the Japanese RPG took off. Role-playing games were only really popular in the West before Dragon Quest. Tabletop games, Dungeons & Dragons, and the like were associated with the Americas during the 1980s. Japanese game developers and fans weren't into RPGs in the first part of the decade. That all changed when Dragon Quest was released by Enix (one half of the company that became Square Enix).

The game didn't invent the basic RPG tropes we think of today, but it certainly normalized them and packaged them in a way that was attractive to a market unfamiliar with them. There are certain beats to a JRPG adventure that we're all pretty familiar with now in the gaming community.

Big, beastly bosses, a strong hero at the center of the story, and lots of fantastical and magical items to use to defeat the evil at hand. These are the defining features of a pioneering series that are often forgotten decades later. Dragon Quest made a lot of this stuff more popular back in the 1980s, and Final Fantasy obviously made the genre even more popular in the years after, and it remains Square Enix's main franchise in 2026, but Dragon Quest is the little brother with even more story to tell.

Funny enough, Dragon Quest didn't even come out in America until 1989, and it was renamed Dragon Warrior when it was localized here. The series is still popular in the United States today, recently releasing Dragon Quest VII Reimagined. In many ways, the series' legacy remains the lifeblood of JRPGs.

This story was originally published by Men's Journal on May 27, 2026, where it first appeared in the News section. Add Men's Journal as a Preferred Source by clicking here.

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This story was originally published May 27, 2026 at 3:00 AM.