Deep Dungeon

Deep Dungeon, originally published by Square in the mid-'80s, offers first-person dungeon exploration through maze-like corridors, turn-based combat against fantastical creatures, and management of a limited inventory, in line with early Western dungeon crawlers but with a Japanese sensibility. The MSX version is part of that first wave of Japanese role-playing games still feeling out the terrain before the genre found its own identity. It's interesting mostly as a precursor: long before becoming synonymous with Final Fantasy, Square explored these first-person dungeons as part of its learning process in role-playing, a little-remembered chapter of its early history.