Comment by cubefox | Hacker News Reader

Comment by cubefox | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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.

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.

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