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Thing about Mystara is, you don't need massive lore dumps because of the way the setting is presented. That's why it was the perfect setting for an arcade game.

Slayers was not based on D&D but a TTRPG that was made in Japan in reaction to D&D. Though it has a very similar feel to D&D anyways. Lodoss totally was Ryo Mizuno's campaign that he ran for friends. Fun Fact: Ghim only dies because the player who was playing him had to leave the game due to his work schedule, he got a promotion apparently so they let him die off distracting a dragon for his last session so he would be remembered in an epic fashion.

I didn't know Lodoss war was based on real DND sessions.

One of the interesting facts regarding Sword World and its popularity deals with the dice. The polyhedral dice we're used to in the US for different TTRPG weren't easy to find in Japan so Sword World was created as an alternative using a d66 system as d6 were just about everywhere. Because of this, when "Record of Lodoss War" completed and the second half, "Chronicles of the Heroic Knight" started, it was based off of Sword World instead. There's also a sequel to Lodoss War ("Legend of Crystanna") and "Rune Caster Louie," that takes place in the same setting, just on the mainland, thus expanding the universe even more. Thank you for reading my tangent.

Going edgelord for the spellcaster characters seems pretty true to the D&D experience

The best part of Chronicles of Mystara is getting to make an attack before your mages proceed to lock you out of movement for the next 2 hours 🙃

The Devs didn't dream up the Elf as a Fighter/Magic User combination.  That was part of Basic D&D.  Only Humans had classes, all other races were classes.  Dwarves were Fighter with extra features. Elves were Fighter/Mages.  Hobbits... Halflings were thieves with extra features.  Only humans could be clerics, or straight class wizards.  And there was no multi-class options, other than what was built into the Elf race/class.

George Kamitani who was the lead designer of the chronicles of mystara went on to found vanillaware and made the spiritual successor which was Dragons Crown. George took many devs an sprite employees and the other half of the developers/employees stayed at capcom to work on dragons dogma.

I’m glad Itsuno used Dragon’s Dogma as a way to send a love letter to these games.

looking forward to DD2, and Itsuno having more creative freedom and budget to work with.

The Elf is a class in basic which is what they had the right to. It is a fighter /magic user.

I remember playing this on an emulator in the early 2000s, then snapping up the collection as soon as it released.  It is definitely a comfort food type of game for me, and it's good to know the story behind it is so heartwarming as well.

These games were so fun to play in the arcades. I remember using the name glitch in Shadow Over Mystara. A shame that Capcom left it out of their Beat ‘em Up Bundle.

It's crazy to think how much Wizardry and Ultima influenced game dev and console RPGs/JRPGs in 80s/90s, with most not knowing about Dungeons and Dragons.

I never knew this about Record of Lodoss War. As a huge DnD nerd this is so neat to me!

Funny, this game is kind of legendary among fans of Capcom and/or classic arcade games, so it's always talked about within the context of 90s brawlers. (And how these are quite possibly the greatest ever made.)  So it was interesting hearing someone analyze it from the perspective of being a D&D game instead. Nice!

This game was one of my first exposures to D&D.  I remember being like 10, walking into an arcade in the mall in Sacramento and staring in absolute awe at the attract screen.  I still remember the mist on the stone floor, the detail of the animation when the skeletons rise up out of the ground.  The Deedlit clone Elf casts lightning bolt and electricity courses through the mist for several seconds after its cast.  I was ASTOUNDED!

Side-scolling beat 'em up games, player vs player fighting games, role playing games; Capcom was just KING of the arcade.

There is a bit of an answer to "What would a 3rd D&D arcade game be like?"
One of the directors of the first game, George Kamitani, left the company and would eventually form the company Vanillaware. After making games like Odin Sphere and Grim Grimoire under Vanillaware, he went to Capcom in the late 2000s with a request - "Let me make a new D&D action game." Capcom promptly laughed him out of the room. He eventually decided to make his own -Dragon's Crown. Dragon's Crown wears it's 70s/Early 80s TTRPG influence on its sleeve - characters look like if Boris Vallejo drew through a warped manga kaleidoscope, the story is told through a constant narrator who provides all voices to the NPCs, and there's even Monty Python references. And it plays exactly like an evolved version of the D&D arcade titles. When it released in 2013, it was a huge hit in Japan. So much so, Capcom decided to ride its coat tails by finally releasing the D&D arcade collection. So right now, the closest thing we have to a spiritual sequel is Dragon's Crown/Dragon's Crown Pro.
Keep up the great work!

Those early days of RPGs in Japan are fascinating.  Especially when you hit the early 90s when RPGs on consoles had a proven audience and a lot of people tried to figure out how to make tabletop games.  The person who translated D&D to Japanese, Masayuki Onuki, and was the public face of RPGs died tragically young in 1993 and his own system, Double Moon Densetsu has a strange history that was stopped by his passing.