Originally posted July 25th 2015 on the Seafoam Gaming Forums

If you saw our Dragon Fantasy review here (currently not migrated over), you’ll know that I really liked the game quite a bit! On the launch day for the game, I decided to say hi to the designer of this game, Adam Rippon in response to a post regarding his inital inspirations for designing the game!

 

My response was if the beloved Lufia franchise inspired some aspects of the game. This was our little conversation, so I hope you find it interesting how a lovely RPG from Taito inspired someone to become a game designer way back in the 90’s!

As mentioned above, a very early version of Dragon Fantasy was proposed to Natsume for the GBC at E3 1999, which is a very interesting thing to learn, since two years later they would publish a Lufia Sequel for the GBC, known as Lufia: The Legend Returns. While the Dragon Fantasy GBC game obviously didn’t get published by them at the time, it’s still great that Natsume was a friendly company to all kinds of people even back in the late 90’s, and that their friendship seems to carry on to this day.

While it was a short talk, it was still fun learning what could have been, if Natsume decided to actually go into full production with Dragon Fantasy on GBC, and if Adam Rippon’s game could have seen success in the retail market. Just remember, if you push hard and have dreams of game development, you can eventually do it, as evidenced by the recent digital release of Dragon Fantasy on multiple platforms.

Author’s note: The mention of Lufia II not being allowed for the Wii U VC is in reference from when a few months ago as of this writing, Natsume stated they couldn’t get any of their non-Wii VC SNES titles on the Wii U Virtual Console due to Nintendo not accepting them anymore, with Lufia II and Pocky and Rocky being the SNES games in question, with Nintendo focusing on GBA, N64 and DS games as of this article. Hopefully if you read this in the future, justice will be done and Nintendo will allow Lufia II for the SNES on the Virtual Console, whether it’s on Wii U, 3DS, or Codename NX.