Is it just generally accepted that you were meant to use guides to get all the extra shit in older JRPGs?

Is it just generally accepted that you were meant to use guides to get all the extra shit in older JRPGs?

It's a genre that I was never into as a kid so I don't know how I would've fared back then, but as an adult playing FFVII for the second time with a guide (first playthrough was done blind a couple years ago) I have no idea how someone would ever get the ultimate weapons, final limits, and some of the more obscure other items without guidefagging. Hell, the first playthrough I didn't have any idea that Vincent even existed.

I guess if you spent hundreds of hours going back and talking to every NPC and shopowner and interacting with every minute pixel in every area after every single story event you might get everything, but chances are you'd still miss shit.

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>Is it just generally accepted that you were meant to use guides to get all the extra shit in older JRPGs?
>Black boxes in chrono trigger
>Golden chocobo in FFVII
>True ending in Valkyrie Profile
>Everything in FFX
Yes

Nope.
As an old fag from that time and before it mostly came down to your friends. No one bought the guides(unless they were a fag, the same kind who bought the Cheat code books), you relied on your own playing and friends who had done the same.
Some stuff certainly took multiple playthroughs, and would lead to some shit talking(never forgave a friend who let Shadow die in FF6/didn't wait for him) but before the internet and this culture of "games are too hard, gib me achievements please" we used to actually play games. A lot.

People loved obscure stuff. Think about it, talking about games, if you knew something from Nintendo power or something it was in to spread the info

Why would they make games on railroads back then. No one like super Mario bros 1

This.
Plus kids these days seem to totally lack imagination and will to explore, seeing how they're constantly surprised how much some of us old-fags figured out on our own at the age of 10, with no internet access or fancy guides.

I guess the very "disposable" style of modern games is kinda to be blamed these days; in ye olde times, people did stick to a single game for long period of time, even replaying them 100+ hour behemoths several times.

These games so went over my head growing up. Granted I was 9 when FF7 came out.

mostly you just talked with other people about it. If you were lucky you heard about gamefaqs but internet accesability was still in its infancy when that was released. I remember begging my dad to get AOL and he hated me using it because it tied up our phone line.

You relied on magazines and word of mouth in late '80s/early '90s, then strategy guides became a popular thing in the late '90s, and finally the Internet.

>Is it just generally accepted that you were meant to use guides to get all the extra shit in older JRPGs?

yes.

>then strategy guides became a popular thing in the late '90s

Strategy guides were incredibly popular during SNES era.

JRPGs like OP is talking about were specifically designed to sell strategy guides, this isn't news, devs have stated it before

>we used to PLAY our games!!
congrats on obsessing over jrpgs when cool kids were playing SF2 and MK2 and shit I guess

GET OFF MY LID STICKER

You see this copy of Suikoden II that fell into my yard? Well it’s mine now! I KEEP THIS!

Yeah, if you rented a game, that was a commitment. You would sink your whole time into it...and often rent it again later.
And if your parents bought you a game, then you DEFINITELY played the hell out of it. Because likely you werent getting another one for a while.
This is where the talking to friends/borrowing games and renting came in.
Individually we all had a handful of games, but together you had yourself a library.

>when cool kids were playing SF2 and MK2 and shit I guess
you mean NHL ?

I know it's a completely different genre, but I played and nearly beat Zelda II without a guide a couple years ago. It could've been a lot easier but I didn't know that there was a shield spell until after I was already at the final area of the game but I still love what I played of it. Guidefagging is pretty gay, it's acceptable if the games collectibles or stuff is completely obscure bullshit or super cryptic stuff that'd be impossible to figure out otherwise.

>Yeah, if you rented a game, that was a commitment.
We didn't have renting services at all.
We got one or two games a year, and we HAD TO make do with them. Though it didn't feel like a restriction, but a brand new experience - a chance to widen your perspective.

But, in my old childhood neighborhood, playing friends' games did help explore new grounds. I was a Nintenkid (quite many were), but one guy could have a Playstation, another a Windows 95 PC... etc.

yes if you had no friends/internet.

maybe if you live in chicago or something i guess

hockey doesnt really exist to the south. then we got a team here in NC and they won the stanley cup, which I guess several long time franchises haven't done? that musta hurt some peoples feelings.

Back in the day we basically played squaresoft RPGs with the official guide that came out on release day. Stuff like the Weapons in FF7 and Lucretia's quest were not meant to be found naturally

Having an older brother helped. I would watch him and then get perpetually stuck for hours til he got home from work to help me to the next rooms

ITT: Poorfags reminiscing when their parents were poor.

No. Kids back in the day were more eager to explore every nook and cranny. "Find the flag" wasn't even a problem because we did that shit automatically.
If you refuse to believe that, then consider that games were meant to last back in the day. Games cost about the same number they do now, but that number meant a lot, lot more. 60 bucks was THE thing you did that month. You didn't go buy a game when it came out, you would save up for a few weeks, and in that time do research. Ask the people you know what was good. When you finally got a game, you were going to make that 50 bucks count for every drop it was going to. It's akin to kids these days buying a jar of peanut butter, eating 5-6 spoonfuls, then throwing the rest away. We licked that fucking jar clean, because whether or not we did, that was our food for the month.

What's more, there wasn't just you. You had an entire community of, say, 5 like minded individuals, some of whom may have had attachment to another group, and so on to move information. One guy figured out about that key, but didn't know what to do with it. One of his three buddies figured out that it went to this box in a cave he found when his friend said he saw an unmarked island, but didn't have the boat yet, but he didn't have a key for it when he found it.

This is also where the awesome rumors of older games came from. The more famous ones, like with Pokemon, could not happen today because none of your information comes from a guy who knows a guy.

not sure what about that post would make you think I was poor

having brand new squaresoft games + the strategy guide day 1 in the early 90s doesnt exactly scream poor

>maybe if you live in chicago or something i guess
Nope. Europe.
The absolute "cool kids" didn't play vidya; they spent their money on cigs and alcohol they bribed drunk hobos to buy them.

>european hockey

you guys arent even good though

>tfw got NES + 30 or so games by the end of 1980s
>tfw still got 16-bit SEGA, SNES, N64, PS1, GBC, PS2, GC, GBA..., etc, during my yuth
Especially in hindsight, games were a huge money-sink.

>le Yurop's a single country may may
My country's on par with Canada at very least, and many of my countrymen have been hired by NHL teams throughout the decades.

>another a Windows 95 PC
I remember a friend of mine had a PC and he had games like the old Encarta Mindmaze, Heretic, Jazz Jackrabbit, and The Incredible Toon Machine. He was the only one on my block I knew who had one while me and this other guy were the Genesis kids.

all of your countries aren't good, i wasn't conflating them, they are each seperately not good

>tfw that one kid with a mod-chipped PS1 + hundred or so burned games on CDs

>tfw was that kid

thanks PoPD

What about the kid who had the Famicom game adaptor and the "X00-in-one" game cartridges which were really just the same couple dozen of games but with trainer cheats?

that was me, but with Euro-NES and imports.

>it mostly came down to your friends
Who read about it in magazines or guide books.

Or were that one rich kid at school who had the internet.

Back in my day i played the shit out of everything.
Hell, i remember when i got the ps1 for the first time, and my first game was FF7. I had no memory card, and played a lot, i got stuck many times (Reno, that vehicle at the end of midgar, Dyne) and everytime i had to replay the game till that point. The point is, i dont know how the fuck i did it, but i literally, fucking literally played ff7 from the beginning till Dyne, every day. And always discovering something new everytime i played it.
The funny thing is, when i finally beat Dyne, mom bought me a memory card. I was so happy ;_;

I've heard of so many people throughout the years playing games like FF7 with no memory card. I remember a guy here who said he beat FF8 without a memory card, including dying several times and having to restart the entire game

>FF7. I had no memory card, and played a lot, i got stuck many times
This was me and my friend. We spent many sleepless nights as kids, trying to get somewhere in FF7. The streets and sewers of Midgar really became our home for a while.

It didn't help that we had no idea what Phoenix Downs did at the time.

If you leave the game on forever you don't need a memory card, I beat GTA3 that way

that ps2 died not long after though

you still gotta not die once if its FF which is sort of hard, though I guess after a couple repetitions youd probably start overleveling if you were smart

God you're a faggot lmbo go to bed gramps

if you overlevel and read a guide to see what bullshit is coming up you're fine

ff7 you could get through the whole game without ever dying if you didn't try to take on the weapons

thinking about playing VII for the first time on PSX
What should I know before I start? Don't have any friends to chat with this shit about.

I got stuck with reno because i didnt know i could destroy the pyramids.
The second time i tried using items, and apparently "deadly waste" was an item i had to farm in the fifth reactor to kill the pyramids.

It was my first RPG. Ever. Thats why is so special to me. I still can remember when i got out from midgar from the first time and discovered the world map.
youtube.com/watch?v=6UARM4q7hHU

>Golden chocobo in FFVII

Chocobo Sage instructs you throughout that. What is truly obscure is how to get all the Enemy Skills, such as Chocobuckle.

>Hey did you know you can get infinite one-ups using a shell on the stairs?
>Doing this code gives you thirty lives!
>I know a level skip code!
And of course you thought it was total bullshit because it sounds too good to be true, but then he shows it to you and it works. You're then left wondering how the fuck he figured that shit out. Nowadays, you can just look up a Youtube video. At least nowadays, we have videos that show hidden shit in the coding, but it still doesn't feel quite the same as finding about "up up down down left right left right B A" and trying it out yourself on a whole bunch of games.

>The second time i tried using items, and apparently "deadly waste" was an item i had to farm in the fifth reactor to kill the pyramids.
uh, nope?
You just ATTACK the pyramids.

i had a friend that told me i could transform super mario world into "earth mario" by going the special stages and winning.
Glorious days.

You didnt get it.
When i was a kid that was my reasoning. Didn't know you could just attack the pyramids. I just used items and eventually deadly waste killed one, so i thought that was the only way.

if you didnt have a memory card you probably ditn have a guide

He wasn't lying tho'.
Still proud I got that shit done all on my own as a kid.

Pretty much yeah. Most of the extra crap in RPGs isn't really worth replaying a game to get unless you -really- enjoyed the game to begin with. So the only way to get most of that stuff was through guides or a LOT of experimentation.

Yeah, it was true
i just thought it was funny how we called it.
"Earth mario".
Made sense though since everyturned kinda turned into a desert or something.

Codes being some obscure or often retarded bullshit involved in many NES and SNES games to get some items is why kids back in the 90's were so ready to believe shit like "Use Strength on the truck to get Mew!".

>that kid at school who said you could get sonic in like, every single game

Don't forget that some old magazines would put fake tips during April Fools, like the time when EGM said there was a hidden boss named "Sheng Long" who'd show up and defeat Bison if you did a bunch of convoluted stuff.

And nowadays everything is datamined the day of release, so there are no secrets, or codes can't exist because those autistic fucks need hurr durr achievements in their games to beat their dicks over.

There's this thing called "social" where people don't do anymore.
Back then, we find out secrets in game accidentally and then we trade info with others.
This is how THAT KID appear and tell you how to catch mew in a fucking retarded van as well.
This is why gaming back then is more fun than modern shitgaming

>This is how THAT KID appear and tell you how to catch mew in a fucking retarded van as well.
"I know this because my dad works at Nintendo!"

YES

AS FAR BACK MEGAMAN 2 THEY PURPOSEFULLY PUT IN THE BIRD CODE AND PRE CODED PASSWORDS TO MAKE MAGAZINES AND CHEAT GUIDES PRINT ABOUT IT AND LIKELY EVEN MORE BEFORE THEN

IT IS NOT A NEW IDEA AND VIRAL SOCIAL MARKETING IN MANY FORMS CONTINUE THIS TODAY

MY CAPS LOCK IS BROKEN

I have no idea why are kids so stupid to believe in everything
And there's always retarded assholes that want to lie to others, but can easily get caught for telling lies that are too silly and have no proof to back it up.
When i'm 11, i'm too stupid to believe my friend to have an actual Pikachu in his home.

Depends, JRPG are supposed to be games where you go around talking to everyone because you enjoy doing it, but shit like Knights of the Round and the enemies' skills was kinda cryptic.
Now FFX shit, that's cryptic.

>tfw telling my friends you could get Cloud as a party member in Final Fantasy Tactics, but he wasn't that good because you couldn't use his limit breaks
>mfw one of the friends I told came to school a few weeks later and told us all you could unlock his skills by getting a special sword on top of a volcano that you could only pick up if you had move-find item
>mfw it was actually true

As shitty as today's microtransactions, Season Passes, on disk DLC, and other scummy industry practices are, people never seen to remember how the Golden Age of gaming made money through making games so cryptic that you would basically need to buy strategy guides and gaming magazines or even rack up your phone bill calling those tip hotlines. That and the obvious arcade games that were built to make you feed quarters in the machine just to see the ending

>Is it just generally accepted that you were meant to use guides to get all the extra shit in older JRPGs?

Yes.

You wrote so much about something you don't know what you're talking about. How does it feel to be such a blow hard?

Anyone who was serious about games read video game magazines and browsed the strategy guide sections of Wal-Mart and K-mart while their parents shopped.

>tfw begging your dad for quarters when he dropped you off at the local pizza place for your elementary school's soccer team's end-of-season party because it had an arcade with Metalslug.

>seeing YOU ARE A SUPER PLAYER at around 10 years old
that's when gaming was beautiful, you had to earn that shit