5 ms·

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, D

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
    - dumpsterdiver 3y ago
      I'm very thankful that a basic statement from myself like, "N64 was surprisingly devoid of memorable RPGs" would be met with input by people who were actually there, and provide first hand accounts. You are the folks who make Hacker News an absolute treat.
gota 3y ago
Super Mario RPG! By Nintendo itself. How was that not ported/sequel'ed into the N64?!
- jamie_ca 3y ago
  Paper Mario released on N64, picking up the "Mario in an RPG" thread and starting a series proper.
- chrisco255 3y ago
  Super Mario RPG was a collab between Nintendo and Square. Square famously jumped ship after Nintendo ditched the CD format. As another mentioned, Paper Mario was supposed to be the spiritual successor to SMRPG. Even though Paper Mario was a modest success, I still consider it a miss on matching SMRPG's quality bar for an RPG.
  - johnzim 3y ago
    In addition, Square still held a bunch of specific legal rights around it, which is why Paper Mario was branded as being distinct, even if it had a lot of obvious commonalities.
- Keyframe 3y ago
  Great game (and sequels) but it wasn't released in Europe for example. Nintendo always did these strange business moves that made no sense yet they always prevailed. For example they had everything needed to connect DS and Wii - never did. Online shop? Dead for years, etc.
danbolt 3y ago
I'm convinced that if Falcom had reworked Popful Mail for the Nintendo 64 (with Working Design's 90's anime dub) it could have been a surprise hit with the preteens that only had Ocarina of Time and Ogre Battle on the system.
chrisco255 3y ago
Playstation became the RPG console back then. Square was the king of the genre, and they wanted to create cinematic experiences with pre-rendered graphics. Only the CD format was large enough to support that. The N64 also suffered from a margin problem. Game cartridges were sometimes $10-$20 wholesale for producers, while CDs were probably about 10-25 cents. And then they had to pay a hefty licensing fee to Nintendo on top of that. What's odd to me, is that almost no one on the N64 chose to simply recreate 2D graphics from the SNES era with improved quality. A quality JRPG built with SNES-like graphics would have still sold just fine, but I think the belief back then was that everything had to be 3D and cutting edge to sell.
- throwawaymobule 3y ago
  From a YouTube video I watched, the bigger advantage of disks was the manufacturing lead time. With carts, you had to know how many you needed weeks in advance, and were stuck with excess units if the game flopped. Whereas you could have a run of ps1 disks pressed and in your warehouse in two days.
- error503 3y ago
  > What's odd to me, is that almost no one on the N64 chose to simply recreate 2D graphics from the SNES era with improved quality. A quality JRPG built with SNES-like graphics would have still sold just fine, but I think the belief back then was that everything had to be 3D and cutting edge to sell. I'm pretty sure the hardware would have given developers a real run for their money to create a SNES-level JRPG experience with smooth, good quality sprite-based graphics. As far as I know it has no 2D acceleration like the SNES, and a very small texture buffer, which leaves slow software rendering directly to the framebuffer, or low quality texture-based sprites. The hardware was really not designed for this type of game, so few were made. Not providing any hardware to handle those types of games was a function of 3D being all the rage, and the hardware being very clearly targeted at that, but it also meant that creating 2D games was not just out of fashion, but impractical.
  - DropInIn 3y ago
    You could easily just treat it like Unity does, where the 3d ness is an illusion and everything is actually in 3d space.... Super easy, barely an inconvenience... The real impediment I believe was Nintendo themselves... Think about it for a moment. What was the process for publishing to N64? That's right, you had to work directly with Nintendo and effectively get thier stamp of approval (good luck getting enough carts otherwise). Nintendo didn't want 2d games on thier precious 3d focused console. That simple.
lizardking 3y ago
Japanese RPGs were largely transforming into interactive movies by that generation, which didn't lend itself well to the cartridge format.
bandrami 3y ago
Is Ocarina not an RPG? (Serious question; I'm not much of a gamer.)
- AdmiralAsshat 3y ago
  Historically, people have been reticent for some reason to call it an Action/RPG, preferring to call it Action/Adventure instead, and IIRC the crux of the argument was usually "Link does not gain experience points or level-up, ergo it's not a full RPG." It's a silly argument, IMO, but at the time "RPG" in everyone's minds meant either JRPG (Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest) or PC RPG (Baldur's Gate, etc).

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
  - dumpsterdiver 3y ago
    I'm very thankful that a basic statement from myself like, "N64 was surprisingly devoid of memorable RPGs" would be met with input by people who were actually there, and provide first hand accounts. You are the folks who make Hacker News an absolute treat.

gota 3y ago

Super Mario RPG! By Nintendo itself. How was that not ported/sequel'ed into the N64?!

jamie_ca 3y ago
Paper Mario released on N64, picking up the "Mario in an RPG" thread and starting a series proper.
chrisco255 3y ago
Super Mario RPG was a collab between Nintendo and Square. Square famously jumped ship after Nintendo ditched the CD format. As another mentioned, Paper Mario was supposed to be the spiritual successor to SMRPG. Even though Paper Mario was a modest success, I still consider it a miss on matching SMRPG's quality bar for an RPG.
- johnzim 3y ago
  In addition, Square still held a bunch of specific legal rights around it, which is why Paper Mario was branded as being distinct, even if it had a lot of obvious commonalities.
Keyframe 3y ago
Great game (and sequels) but it wasn't released in Europe for example. Nintendo always did these strange business moves that made no sense yet they always prevailed. For example they had everything needed to connect DS and Wii - never did. Online shop? Dead for years, etc.

danbolt 3y ago

I'm convinced that if Falcom had reworked Popful Mail for the Nintendo 64 (with Working Design's 90's anime dub) it could have been a surprise hit with the preteens that only had Ocarina of Time and Ogre Battle on the system.

chrisco255 3y ago

Playstation became the RPG console back then. Square was the king of the genre, and they wanted to create cinematic experiences with pre-rendered graphics. Only the CD format was large enough to support that. The N64 also suffered from a margin problem. Game cartridges were sometimes $10-$20 wholesale for producers, while CDs were probably about 10-25 cents. And then they had to pay a hefty licensing fee to Nintendo on top of that. What's odd to me, is that almost no one on the N64 chose to simply recreate 2D graphics from the SNES era with improved quality. A quality JRPG built with SNES-like graphics would have still sold just fine, but I think the belief back then was that everything had to be 3D and cutting edge to sell.

throwawaymobule 3y ago
From a YouTube video I watched, the bigger advantage of disks was the manufacturing lead time. With carts, you had to know how many you needed weeks in advance, and were stuck with excess units if the game flopped. Whereas you could have a run of ps1 disks pressed and in your warehouse in two days.
error503 3y ago
> What's odd to me, is that almost no one on the N64 chose to simply recreate 2D graphics from the SNES era with improved quality. A quality JRPG built with SNES-like graphics would have still sold just fine, but I think the belief back then was that everything had to be 3D and cutting edge to sell. I'm pretty sure the hardware would have given developers a real run for their money to create a SNES-level JRPG experience with smooth, good quality sprite-based graphics. As far as I know it has no 2D acceleration like the SNES, and a very small texture buffer, which leaves slow software rendering directly to the framebuffer, or low quality texture-based sprites. The hardware was really not designed for this type of game, so few were made. Not providing any hardware to handle those types of games was a function of 3D being all the rage, and the hardware being very clearly targeted at that, but it also meant that creating 2D games was not just out of fashion, but impractical.
- DropInIn 3y ago
  You could easily just treat it like Unity does, where the 3d ness is an illusion and everything is actually in 3d space.... Super easy, barely an inconvenience... The real impediment I believe was Nintendo themselves... Think about it for a moment. What was the process for publishing to N64? That's right, you had to work directly with Nintendo and effectively get thier stamp of approval (good luck getting enough carts otherwise). Nintendo didn't want 2d games on thier precious 3d focused console. That simple.

lizardking 3y ago

Japanese RPGs were largely transforming into interactive movies by that generation, which didn't lend itself well to the cartridge format.

bandrami 3y ago

Is Ocarina not an RPG? (Serious question; I'm not much of a gamer.)

AdmiralAsshat 3y ago
Historically, people have been reticent for some reason to call it an Action/RPG, preferring to call it Action/Adventure instead, and IIRC the crux of the argument was usually "Link does not gain experience points or level-up, ergo it's not a full RPG." It's a silly argument, IMO, but at the time "RPG" in everyone's minds meant either JRPG (Final Fantasy, Dragon Quest) or PC RPG (Baldur's Gate, etc).