20 ms·

JRPG games like FF VI are far more accessible than the Ultima games. The Avatar trilogy (Ultimas IV, V, and VI) are essentially unplayable without having all t

by aidenn0 11mo ago

JRPG games like FF VI are far more accessible than the Ultima games. The Avatar trilogy (Ultimas IV, V, and VI) are essentially unplayable without having all the manuals and taking detailed notes[1]. Even doing that, they are quite hard. Nearly every single Final Fantasy game is easy to beat just by taking a bit of time to grind levels whenever you get stuck. There is a blogger who teaches a class on old games (I can't remember who) and Ultima IV was one that his students bounced off of immediately because they didn't read the manual cover-to-cover, which is a prerequisite for not being totally lost. 1: Or using a walkthrough, I guess, but IMO the main point of the Ultima games of this era was the sense of discovery.

cubefox 11mo ago
I guess back in the day, PC RPGs like Ultima were more targeted toward high-IQ nerds, while JRPGs were targeted toward kids or more average adults. Nowadays RPGs are pretty much always as accessible as the JRPGs of old. Or more accessible, as even random encounters and turn-based combat are increasingly perceived as not streamlined enough. The question is whether the hand-holding approach makes certain types of games impossible now. For example, if an old RPG derived its appeal from executing successful note-taking, the game can't be made approachable by taking out the note-taking requirement (e.g. with automatic quest logs, quest markers, in-game hints etc) without removing the core of the gameplay. Though I'm sure there are many other clunky aspects that could be streamlined today without loss.
- staticman2 11mo ago
  Some of the earlier JRPGS were pretty unintuitive. Probably because the developers didn't really know what they were doing yet. Mother 1 doesn't give you any plot guidance on what to do and is insanely overly difficult due to poor balancing. I believe Phantasy Star 1 was designed to be played while using grap paper to map the dungeon. A modern re-release has the game do this for you automatically. Even in Playstation era games like Suikoden there's this problem where if you put the game aside for a week and return to it and forget where to go next there's often no way to re-show the dialogue telling you where to go and no quest log. Suikoden 2 makes you collect 108 characters for the good ending. You definetly would need to take notes to try to do this without a guide. But it's poorly designed because you can miss one of them due to RNG during a mandatory fight scene with no way to know this.
- aidenn0 11mo ago
  Many of the JRPGs that made it to the US were targeted for kids (or sometimes made easier when translated). A major influence on RPGs in Japan was Wizardry, which was probably even more popular in Japan than in the US. Influences from it can be seen in many early JRPGs. Dragon Quest was intentionally made simpler than Wizardry both to reach a wider audience and to be easily playable on the Famicom; it's probably the easiest of the first 3 DQ games still has some "hunt for the right square" puzzles.
jdwithit 11mo ago
The "ancillary" materials like manuals and maps were crucial for old games. Even simple ones. The other day I was going through some of the old SNES games in the Switch online catalog. I found F-Zero, a racing game I played the heck out of as a kid. I started telling my son some info about the different cars and drivers and he was like how the heck do you know that? At no point is that info presented in game. You just pick a car and start driving. There's no tutorial or opening cinematic. If you want to know what's going on, RTFM as they say. Except you can't because it's 2025, nothing comes with paper manuals anymore. Not saying one style is good or bad. But it's definitely changed since the 80s and 90s, when every game came with a printed 50 page manual full of crucial information. Which often doubled as copy protection. I remember firing up King's Quest 6 and having it challenge me to type the 15th word in the second paragraph on page 26 or whatever.
- thaumasiotes 11mo ago
  > If you want to know what's going on, RTFM as they say. Except you can't because it's 2025, nothing comes with paper manuals anymore. The SNES classic comes with no paper manuals, but it includes copies of every manual in the software. You're free to read them all. (And you may have to, if for example you want to know what the controls are.) GOG also provides the manuals for games as "extra" content.
- int_19h 11mo ago
  They were crucial in more than one way! Quite a few games used manuals as a simple form of copy protection: you had to answer some question at start that required the manual to answer. Sometimes explicitly so, like asking for the first word on some page. Sometimes it was more creative. E.g. people who remember F-19 / F-117 flight sims might also remember how on startup you had to pass an "aircraft identification exam" - given an image, guess what it is. And if you got that wrong, you could only fly training missions. Of course, this one didn't strictly require the manual - you could learn from playing the game itself, or you could get that info elsewhere. I wonder how many people still remember that kind of arcane knowledge just because that was the game they played a lot as a kid and eventually just memorized all the answers.

by aidenn0 11mo ago

cubefox 11mo ago

I guess back in the day, PC RPGs like Ultima were more targeted toward high-IQ nerds, while JRPGs were targeted toward kids or more average adults. Nowadays RPGs are pretty much always as accessible as the JRPGs of old. Or more accessible, as even random encounters and turn-based combat are increasingly perceived as not streamlined enough. The question is whether the hand-holding approach makes certain types of games impossible now. For example, if an old RPG derived its appeal from executing successful note-taking, the game can't be made approachable by taking out the note-taking requirement (e.g. with automatic quest logs, quest markers, in-game hints etc) without removing the core of the gameplay. Though I'm sure there are many other clunky aspects that could be streamlined today without loss.

staticman2 11mo ago
Some of the earlier JRPGS were pretty unintuitive. Probably because the developers didn't really know what they were doing yet. Mother 1 doesn't give you any plot guidance on what to do and is insanely overly difficult due to poor balancing. I believe Phantasy Star 1 was designed to be played while using grap paper to map the dungeon. A modern re-release has the game do this for you automatically. Even in Playstation era games like Suikoden there's this problem where if you put the game aside for a week and return to it and forget where to go next there's often no way to re-show the dialogue telling you where to go and no quest log. Suikoden 2 makes you collect 108 characters for the good ending. You definetly would need to take notes to try to do this without a guide. But it's poorly designed because you can miss one of them due to RNG during a mandatory fight scene with no way to know this.
aidenn0 11mo ago
Many of the JRPGs that made it to the US were targeted for kids (or sometimes made easier when translated). A major influence on RPGs in Japan was Wizardry, which was probably even more popular in Japan than in the US. Influences from it can be seen in many early JRPGs. Dragon Quest was intentionally made simpler than Wizardry both to reach a wider audience and to be easily playable on the Famicom; it's probably the easiest of the first 3 DQ games still has some "hunt for the right square" puzzles.

jdwithit 11mo ago

The "ancillary" materials like manuals and maps were crucial for old games. Even simple ones. The other day I was going through some of the old SNES games in the Switch online catalog. I found F-Zero, a racing game I played the heck out of as a kid. I started telling my son some info about the different cars and drivers and he was like how the heck do you know that? At no point is that info presented in game. You just pick a car and start driving. There's no tutorial or opening cinematic. If you want to know what's going on, RTFM as they say. Except you can't because it's 2025, nothing comes with paper manuals anymore. Not saying one style is good or bad. But it's definitely changed since the 80s and 90s, when every game came with a printed 50 page manual full of crucial information. Which often doubled as copy protection. I remember firing up King's Quest 6 and having it challenge me to type the 15th word in the second paragraph on page 26 or whatever.

thaumasiotes 11mo ago
> If you want to know what's going on, RTFM as they say. Except you can't because it's 2025, nothing comes with paper manuals anymore. The SNES classic comes with no paper manuals, but it includes copies of every manual in the software. You're free to read them all. (And you may have to, if for example you want to know what the controls are.) GOG also provides the manuals for games as "extra" content.
int_19h 11mo ago
They were crucial in more than one way! Quite a few games used manuals as a simple form of copy protection: you had to answer some question at start that required the manual to answer. Sometimes explicitly so, like asking for the first word on some page. Sometimes it was more creative. E.g. people who remember F-19 / F-117 flight sims might also remember how on startup you had to pass an "aircraft identification exam" - given an image, guess what it is. And if you got that wrong, you could only fly training missions. Of course, this one didn't strictly require the manual - you could learn from playing the game itself, or you could get that info elsewhere. I wonder how many people still remember that kind of arcane knowledge just because that was the game they played a lot as a kid and eventually just memorized all the answers.