is a text-based adventure

video game A video game or computer game is an electronic game that involves interaction with a user interface or input device (such as a joystick, game controller, controller, computer keyboard, keyboard, or motion sensing device) to generate visual fe ...

developed and published by

Square In geometry, a square is a regular polygon, regular quadrilateral. It has four straight sides of equal length and four equal angles. Squares are special cases of rectangles, which have four equal angles, and of rhombuses, which have four equal si ...

for the

Family Computer Disk System The commonly shortened to the Famicom Disk System, is a peripheral for Nintendo's Nintendo Entertainment System, Family Computer (Famicom) home video game console, released in Japan on February 21, 1986. The system uses proprietary floppy disk ...

in Japan in 1986.

Gameplay

The game plays as a command-style adventure game. The game's interface resembles that of a

point-and-click Point and click are one of the actions of a computer user moving a pointer to a certain location on a screen (''pointing'') and then pressing a button on a mouse or other pointing device (''click''). An example of point and click is in hypermedi ...

graphic adventure An adventure game is a video game genre in which the player assumes the role of a protagonist in an Interactive storytelling, interactive story, driven by exploration and/or Puzzle video game, puzzle-solving. The Video game genres, genre's focus ...

interface for a console. The game made use of visual icons rather than text-based ones to represent various actions, and it featured a cursor that could be moved around the screen using the

D-pad The D-pad (short for directional pad) is a compact input method developed for video games, designed to translate thumb movement into directional control through a flat, cross-shaped surface that rests on four internal switches. Each switch corres ...

to click on the icons and examine parts of the scenery.

Plot

The game is set in a

science fiction Science fiction (often shortened to sci-fi or abbreviated SF) is a genre of speculative fiction that deals with imaginative and futuristic concepts. These concepts may include information technology and robotics, biological manipulations, space ...

setting, where the main character, Hugh, and his girlfriend Cynthia are traveling in space, but are attacked by a crystal dragon: Hugh escapes with the help of a mysterious woman, but Cynthia is kidnapped. Hugh must find the dragon and save his girlfriend.

Development

Many of the game's scenes involve animation, which was a specialty of Square, at the time, and ''Suishō no Dragon'' features a variety of drawings, particularly those of girls. Anime artist Gen Sato served as the character designer and illustrator on the staff, and Nippon Sunrise (currently

Bandai Namco Filmworks is a Japanese entertainment company owned by Bandai Namco Holdings with its business focused on production, planning, and management of anime. It was founded in September 1972 by former Mushi Production staff as the animation studio branch o ...

) contributed to the animated parts of the game and also provided animated footage for the games commercial. The year the game came out, 1986, saw the release of Famicom Disk System with cartridges three times the capacity of a ROM cassette and a storage equaling 1 megabyte, which many software developers including Square waited for and then took advantage of, causing the game to come out at the end of the year.

Reception

The fake scene, detailed below, reportedly caused a spike in sales for the game.

Legacy

The most iconic scene in the game is the frame where one of the heroines, Cynthia, is depicted standing with her arms spread outwards. This drawing inspired a famous fake game scene created by ''Family Computer Magazine'' (''Famimaga''); a prominent video game magazine published by

Tokuma Shoten is a publisher in Japan, headquartered in Shinagawa, Tokyo. The company was established in 1954 by Yasuyoshi Tokuma in Minato, Tokyo. The company's product portfolio includes music publishing, video game publishing, movies, anime, magazines, man ...

. The magazine explained that it was possible to start a game of with Cynthia using a cheat, though this is not actually possible in the game. An altered screenshot showing the heroine losing her clothes was included alongside the article. This was not done to fool readers, but to test whether the magazine's content was being copied by other game magazines. This fake scene developed popularity on its own, and many users were made aware of this scene even if they had never played the game before. This phenomenon is described in

Kouta Hirano is a Japanese manga artist born in Adachi, Tokyo, Japan, most famous for his manga ''Hellsing'' and ''Drifters''. Career Hirano said he learned how to be a manga artist from reading Akira Toriyama and Akira Sakuma's '' Hetappi Manga Kenkyūj ...

's gag manga, , which was serialized in the ''

Famitsu , formerly , is a line of Japanese Video game journalism, video game magazines published by Kadokawa Game Linkage (previously known as Gzbrain), a subsidiary of Kadokawa Corporation, Kadokawa. ''Famitsu'' is published in both weekly and monthly f ...

'' game magazine. The game's fake sequence was also referenced in the credits of ''Hyperdimension Neptunia V''. ''Suishō no Dragon'' was adapted into a manga titled , published in the

Gamest was a Japanese video game magazine that specialized in covering arcade games. ''Gamest'' originated from the bi-monthly fanzine ''VG2 Newsletter'' from the early 1980s. Following the bankruptcy of publisher Shinseisha, many editors would move to A ...

Comics collection from April 1999, and drawn by Kouta Hirano.

References

External links

Official website (Square Enix)

''Suishō no Dragon''s television commercial
* {{DEFAULTSORT:Suisho no Dragon 1986 video games Famicom Disk System games Famicom Disk System-only games Japan-exclusive video games Point-and-click adventure games Science fiction video games Single-player video games Space opera video games Square (video game company) games Sunrise (company) Video games about dragons Video games developed in Japan Video games featuring female protagonists Video games scored by Nobuo Uematsu