17 ms·

It's the games. It always was the games. I got the NES for Super Mario Bros. I got the Playstation for Tekken. Many others got it for Final Fantasy VII. If

by snarfy 3y ago

It's the games. It always was the games. I got the NES for Super Mario Bros. I got the Playstation for Tekken. Many others got it for Final Fantasy VII. If the only game the Playstation had was Tekken I still would have bought it. Sega just never had a hit game that I wanted. Marketing and the hardware didn't matter to me. It was the games.

pipes 3y ago
Tastes vary, but power stone and soul calibur are great (and still look great today). Though you are right in a way, it didn't really have a recognisable brand game like gran turismo or Tekken. (Or goldeneye)
AdmiralAsshat 3y ago
Sega had plenty of great games. In fact, despite being a Nintendo household growing up, I'm actually quite impressed in hindsight by the degree to which Sega as a 1st party made games to scratch every conceivable itch you might have as a gamer. 32/64-bit Nintendo really didn't make games of every genre. They made the games they wanted to make, and if you wanted a Sports game, or a Fighter, or a JRPG, they expected third parties to fill in that gap. It didn't always work (the N64, had, what? Like 4 RPGs across the entire console lifespan?). In contrast, if you had a Sega Saturn, you had nearly every genre covered by a direct 1st-party game. There's something commendable about that--that you can feel like Sega would take care of you if you bought the system. I can see why it generated a certain level of passion among Sega fans while we in the Nintendo households were resigned to, "Yeah, if we want more RPGs other than Paper Mario or Ogre Battle 64, we're gonna buy a PlayStation.'
- slothtrop 3y ago
  > Sega had plenty of great games. Not the ones kids wanted most.
  - db48x 3y ago
    Which means it was really just advertising, not games.
    - slothtrop 3y ago
      Optics, price point, word of mouth. Coming from the SNES as a kid, I only wanted the N64 and that's what I got. Very quickly the PSX got popular and games were stocked everywhere. No one talked about the Saturn. I did get to play it when it was new (the Saturn), and the catalog I encountered was shitty FMV games and a shmup. I was not enamored. The Dreamcast though, I remember being very attractive. The demos of Sonic Adventure looked absolutely astounding to me. I was late hopping on to that gen of consoles (parents strapped for cash), and still given the choice I went for the PS2, because it had the more attractive catalog and a DVD player. Years went by and I borrowed a GC to play Prime, an XBOX to play Ninja Gaiden and Halo, but I was not that motivated to try the DC.
      - 1980phipsi 3y ago
        I played Soul Caliber on a friend's DC. There was also a great tennis game.
    - paulcole 3y ago
      Not to be flippant, but so what? I'd rather be the creator of the worst thing that people want to buy than the best thing that nobody's ever heard of.
      - deaddodo 3y ago
        Very few autuers agree with you. They make blockbuster movies to finance the goodwill and pocketbooks of the films they want to make. This is why the critically "best" movies every year always go under the radar with relatively few ticket sales. This is all to say, your opinion clearly isn't the universal one.
      - db48x 3y ago
        That’s not really what I was getting at (although it is generally true, and it is the original meaning of the phrase “the customer is always right”). My point was that advertising steers people’s opinions all the time. Better advertising would have ensured that the kids wanted the games that Sega would actually have. Although I will also say that they must have known that a lot of kids would already want another Sonic game, so not having one at launch was a mistake. No need to steer people’s opinions if they are already in a convenient place.
  - mathgeek 3y ago
    As a lifelong fan of turn-based JRPG titles, this rings true. The Saturn (and the SegaCD before it) had some great titles there, but the PS1 had a while lot more to choose from, while the N64 was very light. By the time the PS2 and DC rolled around, “what the kids want” was clearly moving away from what I wanted. Every indie or retro title in the genre was and is a gift since.
    - nsxwolf 3y ago
      If you were into the 2D fighting games from the late 90s arcade scene, the Saturn was your system.
      - mathgeek 3y ago
        Very true! I was more into the early-to-mid 90s fighters (MK, SF2) but the Saturn had a solid lineup there as well.
    - deaddodo 3y ago
      While the turn-based aspect had definitely become more niche by the time of the PS2, JRPGs were still abounding on it and (lesser so, but still) the DreamCast. It wasn't until PS3 that they started to wane; and now they're all but dead (outside of Japan).
  - hparadiz 3y ago
    The first two years for PS1 was insane. A true outlier. Tekken, Rayman, Road Rash, Twisted Metal Even random racing games were for the first time rendered in 3D so it was really mind blowing going from sprites to that. The opening line up is god tier by modern standards https://www.giantbomb.com/playstation/3045-22/forums/all-ps1-games-in-order-1995-round-up-1907206/ https://www.giantbomb.com/playstation/3045-22/forums/all-ps1...
    - micromacrofoot 3y ago
      Yeah I don't think a console has come close since, and this always makes launches feel very lackluster to me.
      - Cthulhu_ 3y ago
        The PS5 is a good example, it was announced over a year before it came out and I'm confident first-party developers could already work on games for the platform, but... exclusives were lackluster at best, and for the first year or two it was pretty much all cross-platform titles. Probably for the best since production couldn't keep up with demand, so the PS5 was a slow burner that didn't yet need exclusives to sell the console. But a better launch lineup would've been nice.
        hbn 3y ago
        PS4 wasn't too different. Many people held off on getting one until Bloodborne came out 16 months later. I think Microsoft is the one in a really weird position ever since they started releasing PC versions of basically all their platform exclusives. Not that I'm complaining, but they've pretty much made it so there's zero reason for PC gamers to buy an Xbox, whereas there's still reasons to buy a Switch or PlayStation for the exclusives.
        lukas099 3y ago
        I wonder if Microsoft does this because gaming has been one of the biggest differentiators for their OS. That's an advantage that is rapidly fading and they want to hold onto it as long as possible.
  - Tiktaalik 3y ago
    lol why is this being downvoted? This is the truth. Like I have a Saturn and love it, but I bought it in Japan to play shmups, which are not a popular genre or sales darling. Was the mainstream market interested in shmups or JRPGs (neither of which Sega of America brought over?) no. The kids wanted Mario 64, Mario Kart and [insert your favourite big 3D tentpole game from the Playstation side]. Sega had the misfortune of 1) being excellent at making a sort of arcade style game that was waning in popularity and 2) making a type of hardware that was excellent for 2D games that were becoming less popular. The result is that they had a system that had lots of good games on paper, but which weren't the trendy rising stars the market was looking for. If they'd made a 3D Sonic game near launch to keep the pace up after folks were done with Virtua Fighter maybe things would have been different, but that didn't happen.
    - slothtrop 3y ago
      That's how I remember it. When I tried someone's console, they had on hand: FMV games (which were terrible), and shmups. I was not sold.
    - baanlox 3y ago
      I was a gamer from Atari 2600 to Saturn. My experience was exactly that once I was bored with Virtua Fighter it felt like nothing good was coming out for it. Even Virtua Fighter while fun didn't stay that fun for very long. I know I had just got it at New Years 1995/96. It was $399, $790 adjusted for inflation. It is really one of the worst purchases of my life in terms of the excitement of coming home with it to not playing it a few months after. I had no other games but Virtua Fighter for it and it pretty much ruined my interest in gaming.
    - deaddodo 3y ago
      > Was the mainstream market interested in shmups or JRPGs (neither of which Sega of America brought over?) no. One of the best selling games of that generation was a JRPG (FF7), and it was most definitely a popular genre. Interest in it didn't begin waning until the next generation. > The kids wanted Mario 64, Mario Kart and [insert your favourite big 3D tentpole game from the Playstation side]. There were hundreds of "tent-pole 3D" games released for the N64 and PS1; yet people only remember a dozen or so. By your previous logic on JRPGs (which, again, were very popular in the "32-bit era"), this is not a mainstream..."genre". Your memory of the whole era feels super anachronistic. The Saturn didn't fail because of it's games, it failed because it didn't have enough of them (by chasing third party developers away) and (as you touched on), the majority of the best ones never left Japan.
  - GuB-42 3y ago
    Why the downvotes? It definitely was a huge reason. The Dreamcast had great games, most people agree with that. Most notoriously arcade games. But they were all somewhat niche, and Sega struggled to get the big licences necessary to achieve popular success. In particular: no EA, no Square-Enix, and way behind Nintendo when it comes to first party titles.
- dumpsterdiver 3y ago
  Yeah, N64 was weirdly devoid of memorable RPGs. Surprising considering that both before and after that generation the RPGs rained from the sky. Final Fantasy, Dragon Warrior, Chronotrigger... the greats.
  - AdmiralAsshat 3y ago
    Square and Enix (before they became one) both jumped ship to PlayStation because they deemed the N64 cartridge's memory capacity far too small for the kind of games they wanted to make. And to that extent, they're probably right--Final Fantasy VII took three CDs as it was. A game across three cartridges would've cost a fortune, and that's assuming you somehow got a 1:1 rate between them. The RE2 N64 port is the only game that got close, and that was with a ton of clever compression and massive downsizing of audio and video. More likely it would've taken 5-10 carts.
    - Macha 3y ago
      A game across three cartridges would've cost a fortune, and that's assuming you somehow got a 1:1 rate between them The problem is worse than that: 1. The largest NES cartridge is 64MB, a PS1 CD is 10x that, so imagine 30 carts 2. A lot of the data across the 3 discs is actually the same data. Think character models and attack animations for your party members, locations you can revisit at any time, the base world map, common soundtracks, etc. The disk to disk differences were mostly things like FMVs and event soundtracks as a result. So the minimum data for the game to run would exceed 1 cartridge. So not only would you have to swap discs at certain points in the story, you'd have to swap them at other points, e.g. because you were backtracking. Trying to gather a spell from a starter dungeon for Beta? Please remove Vincent from your party and insert cartridge 2.
      - Macha 3y ago
        Minor correction I missed before the edit window expired: > The largest N64 cartridge is 64MB Hopefully it was clear I meant N64, not NES from context and the PS1 comparison
- codexb 3y ago
  Eh, they had great games on the genesis, not much after that. When Dreamcast released it was mostly hit-or-miss arcade ports.
tenebrisalietum 3y ago
It's also the price. Saturn was $399 on release, Playstation was $299. Without Sony's big name and 3D graphics, $299 would have spelled doom ($199 was the standard price before).
- Grazester 3y ago
  E3 95 when Sony came on stage and announced the price of the PlayStation and then just mic dropped because they knew they just beat Sega. Yeah....
spaceprison 3y ago
From what I recall the marketing for the saturn tried to make the knights game 'the new sonic' and it looked dumb. I also remember wanting to know what a 'panzer dragoon' was but a lot of the commercials made it seem like you should already be aware and they may have just misspelled dragon. Virtua fighter was a fine game in the arcade but none of my friends were going to buy a saturn for one game they could play at the arcade or some weird flying sonic game. When playstation came out, battle arena toshinden felt fast and the characters looked cooler. Ridge Racer felt Way faster than Daytona the music was great and the textures blew my mind. So even though saturn had a earlier launch the Playstation came to the party with more to offer.
- vikingerik 3y ago
  It took me a while to understand what you meant - it's not "knights", the title is Nights Into Dreams. But yeah, having that as a launch title was a big mistake. The gameplay is a weird and unapproachable genre, and the characters flopped as mascots. It was actually made to show off the then-new analog 360º control stick (the "3d control pad"), but nobody cared about that. The Saturn needed Sonic and didn't have it, and everything else from there was deck chairs on the Titanic.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- missblit 3y ago
  Nights into dreams was my favorite game as a kid. The graphics were just mind-blowingly pretty at the time to the point where I had dreams about visiting dreamland. Though the whimsical fantasy setting of Spyro the Dragon on Playstation was up there too. And I do agree that the Saturn was missing a killer Sonic game. Sonic 3D Blast was a bit too quirky, not 3D enough, and not exclusive enough to be a system seller. Also I'm a die-hard Sega super fan so totally biased.
nemo44x 3y ago
> Many others got it for Final Fantasy VII. Sometimes I think about how weird it was that a JRPG was somehow the most important game launch of its era in America. Everyone bought that game and I'm not sure why. It's a fine game if you're a JRPG fan, and they did a great job moving it away from the usual themes, but it's so weird that it caught on with so many people that had never even heard of the genre or wouldn't have wanted to play a JRPG before. Was it the FMVs during summons? Why was that particular FF game so culturally relevant unlike any before or after? It was so successful that there was a bubble of JRPGs put into the mainstream for awhile there in the late 90's.
- stuckinhell 3y ago
  Because FF7 looked like a cool american game. You had a blonde hero with a giant sword, a cool black guy (Mr. T knockoff) with a gun arm, and beautiful women in a cyberpunk dystopia. It really nailed the zeitgeist at the time.
  - intotheabyss 3y ago
    And also the storyline, where big corps destroy the planet for profit.
  - munificent 3y ago
    That's weird. I always had the exact opposite impression. Early JRPGs felt comfortably Western to me because they just lifted the Tolkien-esque medieval fantasy vibe whole cloth. But FF7 felt like a totally random pastiche of genres that were jammed together in such an unusual combination that I could only imagine someone from another culture thinking to combine them. Like making an apple pie with hotdogs in it. Yes, nominally it would be super American, but no American would ever think to put those together in that way.
    - stuckinhell 3y ago
      Certainly once you played it passed a certain point, but by that point you bought the game.
hoofedear 3y ago
I’m experiencing this feeling right now, I’ve been considering a PS5 just for Final Fantasy XVI. But the smart move would be to wait until it’s no longer exclusive to that console
TheBigSalad 3y ago
Dreamcast famously had great games but nobody bought it. Most people think N64 had better games than PS1, but it was outsold 3 to 1.
- ecshafer 3y ago
  The n64 having better games I do not think was a most people. There are some circles and bubbles, namely Nintendo fans that might think that. But outside of a few stand outs like Mario 64, Zelda, starfox and party games PlayStation crushed them in pure quantity. Psx has dozens of Jrpgs still worth playing today. Then you include games like metal gear solid, twisted metal, tony hawk. There were probably more great games on psx than there were n64 games.
atentaten 3y ago
I always thought Sega had the better games and hardware. I had all of these consoles. Playstation always felt like an imposter back then, but I was a Sega fan and Nintendo secondarily.

by snarfy 3y ago

pipes 3y ago

Tastes vary, but power stone and soul calibur are great (and still look great today). Though you are right in a way, it didn't really have a recognisable brand game like gran turismo or Tekken. (Or goldeneye)

AdmiralAsshat 3y ago

Sega had plenty of great games. In fact, despite being a Nintendo household growing up, I'm actually quite impressed in hindsight by the degree to which Sega as a 1st party made games to scratch every conceivable itch you might have as a gamer. 32/64-bit Nintendo really didn't make games of every genre. They made the games they wanted to make, and if you wanted a Sports game, or a Fighter, or a JRPG, they expected third parties to fill in that gap. It didn't always work (the N64, had, what? Like 4 RPGs across the entire console lifespan?). In contrast, if you had a Sega Saturn, you had nearly every genre covered by a direct 1st-party game. There's something commendable about that--that you can feel like Sega would take care of you if you bought the system. I can see why it generated a certain level of passion among Sega fans while we in the Nintendo households were resigned to, "Yeah, if we want more RPGs other than Paper Mario or Ogre Battle 64, we're gonna buy a PlayStation.'

slothtrop 3y ago
> Sega had plenty of great games. Not the ones kids wanted most.
- db48x 3y ago
  Which means it was really just advertising, not games.
  - slothtrop 3y ago
    Optics, price point, word of mouth. Coming from the SNES as a kid, I only wanted the N64 and that's what I got. Very quickly the PSX got popular and games were stocked everywhere. No one talked about the Saturn. I did get to play it when it was new (the Saturn), and the catalog I encountered was shitty FMV games and a shmup. I was not enamored. The Dreamcast though, I remember being very attractive. The demos of Sonic Adventure looked absolutely astounding to me. I was late hopping on to that gen of consoles (parents strapped for cash), and still given the choice I went for the PS2, because it had the more attractive catalog and a DVD player. Years went by and I borrowed a GC to play Prime, an XBOX to play Ninja Gaiden and Halo, but I was not that motivated to try the DC.
    - 1980phipsi 3y ago
      I played Soul Caliber on a friend's DC. There was also a great tennis game.
  - paulcole 3y ago
    Not to be flippant, but so what? I'd rather be the creator of the worst thing that people want to buy than the best thing that nobody's ever heard of.
    - deaddodo 3y ago
      Very few autuers agree with you. They make blockbuster movies to finance the goodwill and pocketbooks of the films they want to make. This is why the critically "best" movies every year always go under the radar with relatively few ticket sales. This is all to say, your opinion clearly isn't the universal one.
    - db48x 3y ago
      That’s not really what I was getting at (although it is generally true, and it is the original meaning of the phrase “the customer is always right”). My point was that advertising steers people’s opinions all the time. Better advertising would have ensured that the kids wanted the games that Sega would actually have. Although I will also say that they must have known that a lot of kids would already want another Sonic game, so not having one at launch was a mistake. No need to steer people’s opinions if they are already in a convenient place.
- mathgeek 3y ago
  As a lifelong fan of turn-based JRPG titles, this rings true. The Saturn (and the SegaCD before it) had some great titles there, but the PS1 had a while lot more to choose from, while the N64 was very light. By the time the PS2 and DC rolled around, “what the kids want” was clearly moving away from what I wanted. Every indie or retro title in the genre was and is a gift since.
  - nsxwolf 3y ago
    If you were into the 2D fighting games from the late 90s arcade scene, the Saturn was your system.
    - mathgeek 3y ago
      Very true! I was more into the early-to-mid 90s fighters (MK, SF2) but the Saturn had a solid lineup there as well.
  - deaddodo 3y ago
    While the turn-based aspect had definitely become more niche by the time of the PS2, JRPGs were still abounding on it and (lesser so, but still) the DreamCast. It wasn't until PS3 that they started to wane; and now they're all but dead (outside of Japan).
- hparadiz 3y ago
  The first two years for PS1 was insane. A true outlier. Tekken, Rayman, Road Rash, Twisted Metal Even random racing games were for the first time rendered in 3D so it was really mind blowing going from sprites to that. The opening line up is god tier by modern standards https://www.giantbomb.com/playstation/3045-22/forums/all-ps1-games-in-order-1995-round-up-1907206/ https://www.giantbomb.com/playstation/3045-22/forums/all-ps1...
  - micromacrofoot 3y ago
    Yeah I don't think a console has come close since, and this always makes launches feel very lackluster to me.
    - Cthulhu_ 3y ago
      The PS5 is a good example, it was announced over a year before it came out and I'm confident first-party developers could already work on games for the platform, but... exclusives were lackluster at best, and for the first year or two it was pretty much all cross-platform titles. Probably for the best since production couldn't keep up with demand, so the PS5 was a slow burner that didn't yet need exclusives to sell the console. But a better launch lineup would've been nice.
      - hbn 3y ago
        PS4 wasn't too different. Many people held off on getting one until Bloodborne came out 16 months later. I think Microsoft is the one in a really weird position ever since they started releasing PC versions of basically all their platform exclusives. Not that I'm complaining, but they've pretty much made it so there's zero reason for PC gamers to buy an Xbox, whereas there's still reasons to buy a Switch or PlayStation for the exclusives.
        lukas099 3y ago
        I wonder if Microsoft does this because gaming has been one of the biggest differentiators for their OS. That's an advantage that is rapidly fading and they want to hold onto it as long as possible.
- Tiktaalik 3y ago
  lol why is this being downvoted? This is the truth. Like I have a Saturn and love it, but I bought it in Japan to play shmups, which are not a popular genre or sales darling. Was the mainstream market interested in shmups or JRPGs (neither of which Sega of America brought over?) no. The kids wanted Mario 64, Mario Kart and [insert your favourite big 3D tentpole game from the Playstation side]. Sega had the misfortune of 1) being excellent at making a sort of arcade style game that was waning in popularity and 2) making a type of hardware that was excellent for 2D games that were becoming less popular. The result is that they had a system that had lots of good games on paper, but which weren't the trendy rising stars the market was looking for. If they'd made a 3D Sonic game near launch to keep the pace up after folks were done with Virtua Fighter maybe things would have been different, but that didn't happen.
  - slothtrop 3y ago
    That's how I remember it. When I tried someone's console, they had on hand: FMV games (which were terrible), and shmups. I was not sold.
  - baanlox 3y ago
    I was a gamer from Atari 2600 to Saturn. My experience was exactly that once I was bored with Virtua Fighter it felt like nothing good was coming out for it. Even Virtua Fighter while fun didn't stay that fun for very long. I know I had just got it at New Years 1995/96. It was $399, $790 adjusted for inflation. It is really one of the worst purchases of my life in terms of the excitement of coming home with it to not playing it a few months after. I had no other games but Virtua Fighter for it and it pretty much ruined my interest in gaming.
  - deaddodo 3y ago
    > Was the mainstream market interested in shmups or JRPGs (neither of which Sega of America brought over?) no. One of the best selling games of that generation was a JRPG (FF7), and it was most definitely a popular genre. Interest in it didn't begin waning until the next generation. > The kids wanted Mario 64, Mario Kart and [insert your favourite big 3D tentpole game from the Playstation side]. There were hundreds of "tent-pole 3D" games released for the N64 and PS1; yet people only remember a dozen or so. By your previous logic on JRPGs (which, again, were very popular in the "32-bit era"), this is not a mainstream..."genre". Your memory of the whole era feels super anachronistic. The Saturn didn't fail because of it's games, it failed because it didn't have enough of them (by chasing third party developers away) and (as you touched on), the majority of the best ones never left Japan.
- GuB-42 3y ago
  Why the downvotes? It definitely was a huge reason. The Dreamcast had great games, most people agree with that. Most notoriously arcade games. But they were all somewhat niche, and Sega struggled to get the big licences necessary to achieve popular success. In particular: no EA, no Square-Enix, and way behind Nintendo when it comes to first party titles.
dumpsterdiver 3y ago
Yeah, N64 was weirdly devoid of memorable RPGs. Surprising considering that both before and after that generation the RPGs rained from the sky. Final Fantasy, Dragon Warrior, Chronotrigger... the greats.
- AdmiralAsshat 3y ago
  Square and Enix (before they became one) both jumped ship to PlayStation because they deemed the N64 cartridge's memory capacity far too small for the kind of games they wanted to make. And to that extent, they're probably right--Final Fantasy VII took three CDs as it was. A game across three cartridges would've cost a fortune, and that's assuming you somehow got a 1:1 rate between them. The RE2 N64 port is the only game that got close, and that was with a ton of clever compression and massive downsizing of audio and video. More likely it would've taken 5-10 carts.
  - Macha 3y ago
    A game across three cartridges would've cost a fortune, and that's assuming you somehow got a 1:1 rate between them The problem is worse than that: 1. The largest NES cartridge is 64MB, a PS1 CD is 10x that, so imagine 30 carts 2. A lot of the data across the 3 discs is actually the same data. Think character models and attack animations for your party members, locations you can revisit at any time, the base world map, common soundtracks, etc. The disk to disk differences were mostly things like FMVs and event soundtracks as a result. So the minimum data for the game to run would exceed 1 cartridge. So not only would you have to swap discs at certain points in the story, you'd have to swap them at other points, e.g. because you were backtracking. Trying to gather a spell from a starter dungeon for Beta? Please remove Vincent from your party and insert cartridge 2.
    - Macha 3y ago
      Minor correction I missed before the edit window expired: > The largest N64 cartridge is 64MB Hopefully it was clear I meant N64, not NES from context and the PS1 comparison
codexb 3y ago
Eh, they had great games on the genesis, not much after that. When Dreamcast released it was mostly hit-or-miss arcade ports.

tenebrisalietum 3y ago

It's also the price. Saturn was $399 on release, Playstation was $299. Without Sony's big name and 3D graphics, $299 would have spelled doom ($199 was the standard price before).

Grazester 3y ago
E3 95 when Sony came on stage and announced the price of the PlayStation and then just mic dropped because they knew they just beat Sega. Yeah....

spaceprison 3y ago

From what I recall the marketing for the saturn tried to make the knights game 'the new sonic' and it looked dumb. I also remember wanting to know what a 'panzer dragoon' was but a lot of the commercials made it seem like you should already be aware and they may have just misspelled dragon. Virtua fighter was a fine game in the arcade but none of my friends were going to buy a saturn for one game they could play at the arcade or some weird flying sonic game. When playstation came out, battle arena toshinden felt fast and the characters looked cooler. Ridge Racer felt Way faster than Daytona the music was great and the textures blew my mind. So even though saturn had a earlier launch the Playstation came to the party with more to offer.

vikingerik 3y ago
It took me a while to understand what you meant - it's not "knights", the title is Nights Into Dreams. But yeah, having that as a launch title was a big mistake. The gameplay is a weird and unapproachable genre, and the characters flopped as mascots. It was actually made to show off the then-new analog 360º control stick (the "3d control pad"), but nobody cared about that. The Saturn needed Sonic and didn't have it, and everything else from there was deck chairs on the Titanic.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
missblit 3y ago
Nights into dreams was my favorite game as a kid. The graphics were just mind-blowingly pretty at the time to the point where I had dreams about visiting dreamland. Though the whimsical fantasy setting of Spyro the Dragon on Playstation was up there too. And I do agree that the Saturn was missing a killer Sonic game. Sonic 3D Blast was a bit too quirky, not 3D enough, and not exclusive enough to be a system seller. Also I'm a die-hard Sega super fan so totally biased.

nemo44x 3y ago

> Many others got it for Final Fantasy VII. Sometimes I think about how weird it was that a JRPG was somehow the most important game launch of its era in America. Everyone bought that game and I'm not sure why. It's a fine game if you're a JRPG fan, and they did a great job moving it away from the usual themes, but it's so weird that it caught on with so many people that had never even heard of the genre or wouldn't have wanted to play a JRPG before. Was it the FMVs during summons? Why was that particular FF game so culturally relevant unlike any before or after? It was so successful that there was a bubble of JRPGs put into the mainstream for awhile there in the late 90's.

stuckinhell 3y ago
Because FF7 looked like a cool american game. You had a blonde hero with a giant sword, a cool black guy (Mr. T knockoff) with a gun arm, and beautiful women in a cyberpunk dystopia. It really nailed the zeitgeist at the time.
- intotheabyss 3y ago
  And also the storyline, where big corps destroy the planet for profit.
- munificent 3y ago
  That's weird. I always had the exact opposite impression. Early JRPGs felt comfortably Western to me because they just lifted the Tolkien-esque medieval fantasy vibe whole cloth. But FF7 felt like a totally random pastiche of genres that were jammed together in such an unusual combination that I could only imagine someone from another culture thinking to combine them. Like making an apple pie with hotdogs in it. Yes, nominally it would be super American, but no American would ever think to put those together in that way.
  - stuckinhell 3y ago
    Certainly once you played it passed a certain point, but by that point you bought the game.

hoofedear 3y ago

I’m experiencing this feeling right now, I’ve been considering a PS5 just for Final Fantasy XVI. But the smart move would be to wait until it’s no longer exclusive to that console

TheBigSalad 3y ago

Dreamcast famously had great games but nobody bought it. Most people think N64 had better games than PS1, but it was outsold 3 to 1.

ecshafer 3y ago
The n64 having better games I do not think was a most people. There are some circles and bubbles, namely Nintendo fans that might think that. But outside of a few stand outs like Mario 64, Zelda, starfox and party games PlayStation crushed them in pure quantity. Psx has dozens of Jrpgs still worth playing today. Then you include games like metal gear solid, twisted metal, tony hawk. There were probably more great games on psx than there were n64 games.

atentaten 3y ago

I always thought Sega had the better games and hardware. I had all of these consoles. Playstation always felt like an imposter back then, but I was a Sega fan and Nintendo secondarily.