1987’s Famicom Disk System, an add-on to their popular Famicom console (released in the US as the NES) was The Legend of Zelda, a swords and sorcery action RPG inspired by the popularity of western Dungeons & Dragons-inspired RPGs such as Wizardry and Ultima (early alpha screenshots of Zelda show a first person viewpoint) and the combination of fast paced combat, role-playing systems and puzzle solving seen in Nihon Falcom’s Dragon Slayer. The disk-based format allowed games to be saved and continued later, allowing players to explore its large, open-ended world and save their discoveries.
Where Wizardy and Dragon Slayer were obscure and punishing, Zelda was intuitive and accessible. It stripped away a lot of the complexity of Wizardry’s tabletop roots, such as party creation and experience points, and was able to deliver more fluid, flexible action than the brutally difficult, awkward to play Dragon Slayer. Falcom would do the same three months after Zelda with the release of Ys I, and even that benefited from ports to console hardware.
While Wizardry remained popular in Japan and received a number of Japan-only spinoffs and some of Dragon Slayer’s spinoffs still sees some distant cousins published (most notably the phenomenal The Legend of Heroes: Trails series, which inherits the subtitle of Dragon Slayer 6: The Legend of Heroes), Zelda and Ys are far more in the public consciousness today, and both series still receive regular new releases and those releases are still widely played and acclaimed. That combination of a complex, secret-filled world with fast paced and intuitive action captured and continue to capture the public imagination in a way the early Japanese PC RPGs that influenced them could not
In the same way that Zelda was a take on Dragon Slayer created for a general audience, Zelda 2 was a gentler, more intuitive take on Dragon Slayer 2: Xanadu. Xanadu, which translated the puzzle solving and role-playing to sidescrolling gameplay more typical of a platformer, was hugely popular but feels almost unplayable by modern standards. For example: the first dungeon can only be accessed by falling down a pit in the opening village, walking left until the first tile a new pit appears on the screen then walking to the right to find a shop, then back to the left to find the dungeon entrance. Xanadu traps the player in the pit until they stumble upon the rightcombination of arbitrary movements.
Zelda 2 also largely plays out as a side-scroller, albeit with an overhead world map and semi-random encounters, and also has a reputation as a difficult, obscure game, but consider the puzzle to unlock its first dungeon: a trip through a dark cave with a single enemy. Some players may turn back when they see the area is dark, especially because they’re expected to fight, but it’s one of the only areas accessible to the player other than the much longer, more dangerous south cave, which the townspeople claim cannot be traversed without the candle found in the first dungeon.
The puzzle provides some early friction but also gives the player the information needed to find their way, and once the player has plundered the first dungeon of its candle, both the North and South caves become much less intimidating, planting the idea that dungeon items allow the player to progress on the world map. It’s a level of careful design and a dedication to a smooth player experience we hadn’t seen from the games it is imitating.
The next Zelda game, 1993's A Link to the Past, would define the series' gameplay for the next few decades but I think the sort of imitation we see in the first two games, which keeps the essence of its inspirations but transcends them, defines some of the most notable Zelda games even today. Take the newest game in the series, Breath of the Wild, which is in broad strokes an Elder Scrolls inspired action RPG with heavy inspiration from Ubisoft's open world games, but it takes that sort of map design and series of interlocking systems and makes something more intuitive and flexible with them.
I think that's the legacy of Nintendo's first few console generations, bringing console gaming out of the shadow of more powerful arcade games by synthesizing and smoothing out genres meant for PCs. The Famicom is where saw Dragon Quest bring RPGs to a mass audience by stripping the genre down to its essentials, and where the Japanese-style console adventure game took hold with The Portopia Serial Murder Case and Famicom Detective Club. To trace the inspirations of the early Zelda games is to trace the birth of the complex but accessible that defines modern video game design. What those games did new is not nearly as important as how they did what was old.