Combining city building with an RPG isn't necessarily the most obvious choice when super gluing two genres together, and calling it a game, yet it has worked on several occasions. The Dark Cloud games would be an excellent example of relatively recent games to accomplish this. However, there were games that came along much earlier and took a stab at this sort of thing. One of the earliest that I ever played was Actraiser on the SNES. This combined a city building element with an action game. It was something that I'd never seen before, but my curiosity was peaked. So, when a new action RPG came along a few years later that combined rebuilding cities with, well, an action RPG, I decided that it was something that I'd like to try.
