Hello, gentle readers, and welcome to the RPG Reload, the regular feature where the real monster was us all along. This week, we're heading into the next chapter of our RPG Reload Glossary covering the history of action-RPGs. The genre remains somewhat difficult to nail down to this day, but the 1990s would prove to whittle down the general perception of the genre to two or three basic forms. Like with any other genre, this more solid form came about due to some very popular tentpole releases that set a template for others to follow. In the last installment, we saw how the more Japan-focused console side of the industry settled in on two basic templates for the genre. This time around, we're covering the second half of the 1990s, where the Western-focused PC market finally found its genre-maker.
Thanks to games like Ys, The Legend of Zelda, Xanadu, and Secret of Mana, console action-RPGs were now basically one of two forms. There were top-down action-RPGs that infused experience and leveling systems into Zelda-style adventures, and there were side-scrolling action games with heavy RPG elements that largely followed the beat set down by Falcom's Dragon Slayer games. By the end of the decade, one of these two styles would be more or less spun off into a new genre label, one that would eventually become almost as loose in its definition as the term 'action-RPG'. For the time being, however, most players simply appended 'top-down' or 'side-scrolling' to the term to keep them s...