The History of Langrisser

Born on the Mega Drive in 1991, carried by one small team for a decade, and revived by a phone game.

Langrisser is a series of fantasy tactical role-playing games created by Masaya Games, the games label of Nippon Computer Systems, and built by one development team across its whole classic life: Team Career, which became the independent studio Career Soft in June 1996. The artist was Satoshi Urushihara, the composer Noriyuki Iwadare, and the setting the continent of El Sallia, where two gods, Lushiris of light and Chaos of darkness, fight a proxy war through two swords and the champions who carry them.

The series was a Sega story first: two Mega Drive games, then three Saturn games, with ports reaching the PC Engine, Super Famicom, PC-FX, and PlayStation. America saw exactly one of them, renamed Warsong, for a quarter of a century. The rest of this page is how it rose, split, slept, and came back.

BEFORE LANGRISSER

The Elthlead years, 1987 to 1990

Elthlead · 1987

Team Career’s strategy game for the NEC PC-8801 tells of Sieghart’s wars against the dark prince Böser. It is the backstory of everything that follows.

Gaia no Monshō · 1988

The Crest of Gaia, for the PC Engine: the sequel, and Böser’s second defeat. The Langrisser series article records the storyline link directly.

Guyframe · 1990

The trilogy’s third game, set in the far future. Its ancient mech, the Guyframe, marches back into the story in Langrisser IV.

THE FIVE GAMES

1991 to 1998

Langrisser · 1991

Mega Drive, April 26, 1991. Commanders hire armies and fight scenario by scenario for the sword Langrisser. America received it as Warsong.

Langrisser II · 1994

Mega Drive, August 26, 1994. Its Super Famicom remake, Der Langrisser (1995), added the series’ signature: four branching story paths and more than 75 scenarios.

Langrisser III · 1996

Saturn. A prequel about the forging of the sword, with a new platoon battle engine and a relationship system. The first 32-bit entry.

Langrisser IV · 1997

Saturn, August 1, 1997. Two hundred years after II, on the western continent of Yeless, with three story paths of its own.

Langrisser V · 1998

Saturn. The End of Legend, the direct sequel to IV and Career Soft’s farewell to the series it had created.

The ports

The first two games were remade and compiled repeatedly: PC Engine CD (1993), PlayStation (1997), Saturn Dramatic Edition (1998), Windows (1998), and the five-game Tribute box (1998).

THE SPLIT

After The End of Legend

Career Soft walks

Career Soft, independent since June 1996, parted from Masaya after Langrisser V and built the Growlanser series for Atlus, the unofficial successor, with Urushihara still drawing. Atlus acquired the studio in 2001.

Masaya continues alone

Masaya produced Langrisser Millennium (1999, Dreamcast) with a different team, Santa Entertainment, and a WonderSwan sequel in 2000. Neither carries the classic team’s signature systems in full.

The rights move

Publishing passed from Nippon Computer Systems to Extreme in 2014. Every modern Langrisser, the mobile game and the remake, is licensed from Extreme.

THE RETURN

2012 to today

The quiet years

A Korean PC game, Langrisser Tri-Swords (2012), a cancelled MMO, Langrisser Schwarz, and a 3DS revival, Re:Incarnation Tensei (2015), which Aksys localized in 2016, the first new English Langrisser in decades.

The phone revival

Zlongame’s licensed Langrisser Mobile launched in China in August 2018 and worldwide on January 22, 2019, and simply never stopped: heroes from every game, the classic systems intact.

The remake

Chara-Ani’s Langrisser I & II (Japan, April 18, 2019; the West, March 2020) rebuilt the first two games with new art, full voice, and new routes. The census of everything is on the count page.

The History of Langrisser

BEFORE LANGRISSER

THE FIVE GAMES

THE SPLIT

THE RETURN

THE FIRST WORD