Considering how much the JRPG genre contributed to SONY's success, and how little Nintendo did to cultivate the genre during the NES and SNES era (and especially Nintendo's own CEO having negative opinions on RPGs at the time), was the N64's lack of JRPGs truly to blame on cartridges?
Let's remove the cartridge from the equation, because the SNES proved you can make great JRPGs with cartridges. Is it more likely that companies just didn't want to put up with Nintendo's bullshit because they knew what the company was like when it came to RPGs?
Imagine creating a JRPG for the N64 and getting absolutely NO coverage from Nintendo. That would be absolutely dire.
One has to remember rentals were still big back then, though. I rented a lot of great RPGs I never personally owned and I know a lot of people did the same at the time.
Zachary Butler
>In May 2000, Vagrant Story was the fifth best-selling PlayStation title of the month
>one of the best-selling games on the console
John Parker
Final Fantasy literally started on the NES and had one if it's most popular entries on the SNES. Zelda 2 had an RPG style leveling system. Super Mario RPG was on the SNES, as well as Chrono Trigger, aka the best JRPG ever made.
Isaiah Hill
>Final Fantasy literally started on the NES and had one if it's most popular entries on the SNES. Final Fantasy literally had it's most popular and best selling game on the PS1.
Sebastian Stewart
jesus are you fucking retarded, squaresoft did all those games (except zelda 2) nintendo didn't have shit to do with it other than allowing square to make those fucking games
Brayden Bennett
they went party games route to push 4 controllers.
John Howard
I don't know if you can separate the cartridge issue. It was a huge part of the reason why so many third parties jumped ship. Sony offering lower platform royalty fees was a big enough hurdle, add $10+ cartridges that third parties had to buy and it's not a hard decision.
Didn't Square directly ask Nintendo to use CDs?
Juan Fisher
What anti-RPG policy? Square wanted FF on the PS1 because it allowed them to have cinematics with CDs, while cartridges were way more limited in storage space (on top of being more expensive than discs).
Once they hit it big without Nintendo, they stopped caring about Nintendo consoles.
John Brooks
But nobody else tried to put JRPGs on the N64
There were a lot more companies than Square you know
Lincoln Reed
Square expected the 64DD to be a thing. Since it never did they went with PS1.
Charles Brooks
Snes cartridges allowed for expansion chips while n64 didnt. Also it's called a psx fag. They tried ff on n64 and it couldn't handle it hence why all the characters are blocky outside of battle in ff7
Adrian Howard
How many JRPG studios/publishers were well-heeled enough to commit to the extra cost involved on making games for a system with such a low install base [especially in Japan]?
Jeremiah Peterson
Playstation is the ghost of Nintendo after going full JUST after the SNES.
>Virtual Boy >N64 using carts in the age of CD >Gamecube ignoring internet >Wii/DS/3DS/Wii U...
Aiden Mitchell
If you're gonna say that, why did anybody put third party games on the N64?
Andrew Roberts
nintendo always sucked, they were just running alone in the NES era the only company more retarded than nintendo was sega, which explains the SNES success too
Oliver Edwards
there were no third party games at all for the n64 actually, it was all nintendo themselves or second parties like rare
Xavier Carter
Zelda 2 bombed and was as badly broken as castlevania2. Only underage millenials talk about them because of Internet faqs. Dq was way more influential
Robert Lee
The focus on mature games helped too.
Joseph Taylor
>Snes cartridges allowed for expansion chips while n64 didnt
Not a single JRPG uses the expansion chips on SNES except for Mario RPG.
>They tried ff on n64 and it couldn't handle it hence why all the characters are blocky outside of battle in ff7
Put this meme to rest. FFVII was never in development for N64. That FFVI in 3D demo wasn't done on N64 hardware but Silicon Graphics workstations.
Michael Peterson
>Zelda 2 bombed
I would hate to be this stupid
Dominic Jenkins
A lot of third parties didn't put their games on N64. Howard Lincoln had to have high level meeting with EA to make sure that Madden was going to be on it.
Even still, the system did not sell well at all in Japan. Of the ~32 million systems they sold, 20 million of them were in the United States where Western games like Goldeneye, Perfect Dark, Turok, dominated.
Eli Carter
>being the underage millennial you described
Robert Wilson
this just goes to show how nintentoddlers have always swallowed up everything they're thrown
I haven't met a single person who enjoyed that game, except the avgn which is were you probably found that this game existed
Christian Cook
Cause you're an underage piece of shit and so are your friends.
In reader polls people kept voting Zelda II into the top 20 NES games for years after.
Jace Long
Are you fucking serious? How young can you be? I didn't even play rpgs then but I can name Alundra and Breath of fires
Isaac Perry
>I didn't even play rpgs then but I can name Alundra and Breath of fires
Alundra sold about 250k outside of Japan and the best selling Breath of Fire game couldn't crack 500k outside of Japan.
Not terrible by any means but hardly "hugely successful".
Alexander Sanders
Except Zelda II has always been one of the best Nintendo titles, and 90% of the dissenters came later in the form of 6th gen kiddies who weren't inherently indoctrinated to sidescrollers and found it too difficult