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It is disappointing that the N64 had so little RPG's.
- Thread starter Inglorious Man
- Start date
It had Quest64!! haha
I remember that because of this reason I almost bought Quest64 at that time. I was young, was getting into RPGs and saw that one.
I never bought it because my brother talked me out of it and I am happy he did. Not sure I bought a game that day, but I do recall similar reasoning led me to buy the Goemon game and Mischief Makers, without someone stopping me, and those were really nice games.
I adored the Goemon game as a kid
I remember that because of this reason I almost bought Quest64 at that time. I was young, was getting into RPGs and saw that one.
I never bought it because my brother talked me out of it and I am happy he did. Not sure I bought a game that day, but I do recall similar reasoning led me to buy the Goemon game and Mischief Makers, without someone stopping me, and those were really nice games.
I adored the Goemon game as a kid
curious do we have any information on what DD discs would have cost to produce? That would have been an interesting wrinkle.
Yeah! I've been playing that recently via the translation patch. Was the first JP N64 game I ever bought.
I still maintain the N64 should have had both a cartridge slot and a standard CD-ROM drive (built into the system, not that 64DD add-on which still did not provide the same capacity as a CD-ROM).
The reason for this was that Nintendo was the only manufacturer of cartridges for their systems, and made a phenomenal amount of money charging third parties to make them. They got a huge amount of money up front for a guaranteed number of carts, whether or not those carts sold at retail.
Going to CD meant a big chunk of their bottom line straight up disappeared. Not only did Nintendo not own any CD fabrication facilities and would have to contract this out, AND would have to pay royalties to the creators of the CD, but the CDs themselves cost only a few cents to press. No real margin there.
Adding a CD drive would have lost them a ton of money, and it wasn't something 90s Nintendo was willing to do. Just sticking with Carts and hoping Mario was enough of a draw to make up for third party losses was the plan, but I don't think they expected Sony to be as successful with the PS1 as they were.
wasn't this also the underlying reason behind the big fallout between Nintendo and Sony's PlayStation partnership? Nintendo wanted higher royalties per CD even though Sony would be the manufacturer?
i think the only n64 MP that got a lot of mileage for my group of friends was Mario Kart 64's battle mode. we gave Bomberman 64 a shot for a bit, but went back to Saturn Bomberman/Mega Bomberman or Bomberman 93. My friends also had PCs, so we just played Quake in lieu of Goldeneye. All of my friends were really into fighting games and... you know how that went on N64.... interesting how localized and regional game experiences are for people prior to the ubiquity of online gaming.
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Huh?
Final Fantasy games were sold entirely on the elaborate FMVs they offered, and was a massive step up in how video games are presented
Compare the Ballroom scene from Final Fantasy VIII with the scene where Zelda escapes Hyrule Castle from Ocarina of Time
Final Fantasy VIII looks significantly better because you are allowed to communicate a lot more emotions than "Link and Zelda get scared"
It was something along those lines. Sony would be the sole licensor of CD based titles on the proposed system, which meant not just higher royalties, but Sony would be the arbiter of what titles got printed, when they got printed, and how many.
Remember, Nintendo didn't have CD fabrication facilities. Only Sony did.
Nintendo got cold feet at this arrangement, backed out of it without telling Sony and partnered up with Phillips, who held the joint patent on the CD along with Sony.
Ogre Battle 64 is legit my favorite RPG though, so at least the N64 provided me with that! (I just beat it again a few months ago. One of the few games I play again and again every couple years)
Preach!!
I mean, sure, but the spec is that way because they decided to make it that way. Games were designed with the fast memory access of a cartridge in mind, just as PS1 games were designed with the larger capacities in mind. If Nintendo went with discs, Super Mario 64 wouldn't have existed in the same form, but they still would've made something resembling it (or maybe not; they put multiple stars in each area partly to get around the file limitations).
The N64 had more RAM too even before the expansion pak that doubled it, so it really had the PS1 beat on fast memory access. To demonstrate how this can still lead to capacity issues (in a sense) for the PS1, there's an Iwata Asks for OoT 3D with the original developers in which Koizumi details his struggles animating Link back when the game was being developed as an exclusive for the 64DD. He ended up having so many animations that he couldn't fit them into the memory space he was allotted; the switch to the cartridge format allowed him to keep his animations intact, as they could be streamed in real-time off the cartridge. Despite having less overall storage, the cartridge allowed him to have more data.
In the end, the libraries of both systems reflect their hardware rather well, I'd say.
I wonder how things would have ended up if the N64DD had ended up getting "Pocket Monsters 64" as a mainline RPG title.
I wonder how things would have ended up if the N64DD had ended up getting "Pocket Monsters 64" as a mainline RPG title.
i've always wondered if a lot of the stuff related to Itoi's Cabbage ended up being the basis for animal crossing. I seem to remember the concept of a card reader used to import clothes/accessories into the game.
I do think a lot of what went wrong with the n64 had to do with the huge amount of internal attention spent trying to get the n64dd up and going, which obviously failed. We mostly just write that off as a curiosity at this point, but it was supposed to be a huge part of their strategy!
It's funny, because in 1995 and early 1996 (before the FF7 announcement), my first choice for a next-gen system was a Saturn - Magic Knight Rayearth, the Lunar remakes, Mystaria, Shining Wisdom (this game actually sucks, but from the screenshots it looked up my alley), Blue Seed, Devil Summoner... lots of gorgeous-looking 2D RPGs coupled with SEGA's arcade hits, fighting games, and original properties like Panzer Dragoon and Astal, won me over
On the PS1 side, Arc the Lad and Beyond the Beyond (I know I know...) seemed interesting, but you had Bernie Stolar working over at SCEA, putting the kibosh on anything 2D and/or RPG, so the platform wasn't even on my radar.
N64 I assumed would continue the SNES RPG legacy (i.e. Square's SGI demo), so that would be my #2 and I'd pick it up 1 or 2 years after Saturn... In hindsight, I should've realized when Nintendo announced the N64 "Dream Team" and it was all these obscure and/or junk developers like Ocean, Spectrum Holobyte, Mindscape, Acclaim, and Paradigm Solutions and not... Konami, Square, Capcom, Namco, Enix.
Of course, Square's announcement changed everything for me, and Christmas 1996 I got a PS1. Saturn I'd pick up used in 2001, a few years after its demise.
Come on, you know that's not true. More texture storage, better audio, higher quality pre-rendered backgrounds, etc. The list is long for technical reasons to go with CD and this doesn't touch the business reasons...
...And these are a few of the business reasons.
Nintendo really had no reason to believe they were in danger of losing support, coming from the NES, SNES, GB etc, in their mind Sony were just another in the line of random companies at the time coming along with a random console of their own that wouldn't make much impact then fade away.
They thought all the 3rd parties would fall in line and just put up with whatever because what else would they do? Not support Nintendo?? lolz good luck with that.
Didn't go to plan but you can see why they had the hubris at least.
I wonder if there was no Playstation do you think Squaresoft or Enix would have jumped ship to Sega or something instead?
They thought all the 3rd parties would fall in line and just put up with whatever because what else would they do? Not support Nintendo?? lolz good luck with that.
Didn't go to plan but you can see why they had the hubris at least.
I wonder if there was no Playstation do you think Squaresoft or Enix would have jumped ship to Sega or something instead?
I still think about this game occasionally, I had so much fun with it as a kid. It felt so refreshing and unique at the time. I actually was reminded of it yesterday while watching the Yakuza: Like a Dragon trailer. I wonder if it has any similarities or if my mind just wanted to make the connection
Idk if it's that simple, because Nintendo actively ignored what third parties wanted at the time: CDs to lower publishing costs, amongst other things.
To me, it seems like Nintendo did their best to shoot their feet to death.
N64 was my go to for couch co-op and Nintendo first party titles but everything else was bought on other consoles. I'm honesty having a hard time remembering any third party titles.
WWF/WCW games?
WWF/WCW games?
Yes, but you were kids, and that was Nintendo's bread and butter. PlayStation's variety of titles appealed to a much wider audience, and broke video games out of the larger population's stigma of being "for children". A stigma that Sega had just started to crack with teens and the marketing push behind the Genesis.
It's really difficult to express how Sony mainstreamed gaming with adults.
Quest 64 was a fun little game as long as you didn't go in legitimately expecting to play a FF7-killer. It was definitely more like the beta/concept version of a final game, but it wasn't the crime against humanity that many people treat it as.
There's an amazing interview with Andy Gavin over at Ars Technica regarding how optical media streaming tech made Crash Bandicoot mathematically more visually diverse than pretty much any other console game on the market. Great stuff:
CDs had just gotten fast enough to low for some crazy stuff in ~1996. The bandwidth limitations were finally obstacles you could work around (or with!) and produce things you weren't going to get elsewhere.
CDs had just gotten fast enough to low for some crazy stuff in ~1996. The bandwidth limitations were finally obstacles you could work around (or with!) and produce things you weren't going to get elsewhere.
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I wonder how things would have ended up if the N64DD had ended up getting "Pocket Monsters 64" as a mainline RPG title.
Game Freak was adamant that Pokémon remained a handheld-only series. The whole reason for the game was to encourage socialization.
Looking back today, FMVs were trendy but I think it's really a matter of preference.
There are games from that era that did a fine job of telling a good story entirely using real-time 3D graphics, they just had to work according to the tools they had, like you have to in any medium. FMVs let you have more detailed graphics but lack interactivity and clash with the actual gameplay scene.
Nintendo felt like they COULD ignore developers' wishes because they'd been in such a position of power during the NES and SNES years. They simply weren't prepared for an actual competitor like Sony who would not only bring in CD-ROMs, but also work hard to forge relationships with third party companies who were glad to find an alternative to Nintendo.
Konami made at least one exclusive N64 game: Hybrid Heaven.
They could still produce cartridges and even on the CD issue, if they didn't like the margins on CDs they could simply have added a "Nintendo tax" there and still have sold CDs to developers for less than a cartridge while taking home the same/maybe even more money since a CD only costs 5 cents to print.
They could've done:
CD physical manufacturing cost: 5 cents/unit
Nintendo "you're using a CD instead of a cartridge tax": $10 upfront for every game pressed
Standard royalty fee: $8
And it still would've worked out as a better deal for developers while giving Nintendo a fat slice
If things like Mario 64 and Zelda: Oot could only run on cartridge, sure keep the cartridge slot and let any developer that wants to make cart-only games make those.
By '96 the cost of CD drives had dropped dramatically, the N64 would never have gone from $200 to $600 just because of a CD drive even if they had by a miracle made 1995 launch, which every game media member was (rightfully so) extremely skeptical of. They were never gonna make a '95 launch, never. They barely were able to have two playable games to show total for Shoshinkai November 1995.
Which is kinda my point, Nintendo thinking that had that game in their back pocket for 64DD hurt them. The 64DD in general hurt them badly because it gave them a false sense of security over the N64's format problems.
It would have been better if Enix just straight up told them at the same time as Squaresoft bailed out "look we need the CD format" ... I think that would've finally woken Nintendo up and they would have compromised.
And no mention of the brilliant F Zero X? Or Wave Race, Star Wars racing game, Extreme G, Excite Bike 64, San Francisco Rush series, World Driver Championship (the graphics), F1 games etc.
A bunch of N64 racing games:
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Yeah N64 not having racing games is a weird take. If anything racing games really dominated the library, also things like Beetle Adventure Racing, even got a port of WipeOut.
This was the price to pay to insist on using cartridges.
Their storage abilities were simply too limited for long fantasy stories requiring a lot of data space.
Their storage abilities were simply too limited for long fantasy stories requiring a lot of data space.
At least there's this which I hear is amazing:
Ogre Battle 64
I still plan to play it someday.
I absolutely loved how this game played, but to this day I'm not aware of any game that does anything similar, aside from the SNES game. Have I been missing something or was Ogre Battle completely unique in its gameplay?
The only RPG on the N64 that I really like is Paper Mario. Which, to be fair, is one of my all-time favorite games. But still. The lack of JRPGS (RPGs in general I guess) is absolutely one of the weakest aspects of the N64 and a huge part of why the PS1's library is much better for my tastes.
There's the NGPC installment of the series which I think has similar gameplay? It's Japanese only, but there may be a fan translation out there?
edit: here's a video
OP
OP
I agree with you. I will say that the GameCube was much improved over the N64 in terms of rpg's like Skies of Arcadia Legends, Tales of Symphonia, Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles, Fire Emblem: Path of Radiance, and Batan Kaitos. Even From Software developed the two Lost Kingdoms games for the GameCube.
Imo, even cartridge costs and limitations can't completely justify the huge drop in 3rd party support. Not every game was a Final Fantasy behemoth of a spectacle. Surely there were much more games than what we eventually got that could have been ported relatively easily and turn some additional profit.
Nintendo's decision and all that it entailed was the straw that broke the camel's back for most 3rd parties. To the point that it led up to a gentlemen's agreement for the industry not only to coalesce and prop up ps1 but also actively ignore N64, a status quo that they've been trying to reverse ever since.
Nintendo's decision and all that it entailed was the straw that broke the camel's back for most 3rd parties. To the point that it led up to a gentlemen's agreement for the industry not only to coalesce and prop up ps1 but also actively ignore N64, a status quo that they've been trying to reverse ever since.
Ogre Battle 64 was really good, but I was super let down with Paper Mario at the time. It was worse than Super Mario RPG in everyway to my 10 year old brain... I have grown to like Paper Mario a lot more as an adult, but thank god my aunt got me a PS1 and Wild Arms for Christmas that year.
Except who was going to work with Nintendo on a CD-ROM drive after they very publicly fucked-over both Sony and Philips, the co-inventors of the format?
I still remember going from 1x to 2 CD-Rom drives on PC. Anyone who ever played anything on the original Neo-Geo CD with its 1x Drive...KOF was lol
As disappointing as it was when I found out, that was nothing more than a tech demo running on an SGI workstation. Square's initial research into how to work with 3D, basically.
I would say the N64 was the least kid-oriented console Nintendo has ever produced, but yes, I can understand that older teens and adults may have been more drawn to the diverse offerings on PS1, specifically RPGs, arcade ports and games like Metal Gear Solid and GT.
Remember that arcade-style games just weren't as popular with my gen (it was near the tail-end of the arcade days) as people born about 5-10 years earlier, and we were out in the rural region - the closest good arcade was 50-60 miles away.
Most in my rural area got their RPG fix through the GameBoy, which was plenty good.
Also, having all your friends over was a very big thing back then, at least in my rural town, and nothing could come close to the four-player simultaneous games the N64 had on offer.
It was during the big WCW/WWF boom of the mid-late 90s, so of course us middle schoolers adored those types of games.
Really awesome memories of that system.
I agree to a point but Nintendo themselves were still developing 2D games like Yoshi's Story, publishing sprite based games like Killer Instict Gold and other devs were making things like Mischief Makers and Ogre Battle 64. Not every game had to be some big, 3D showcase.
I think the latter point (the lack of Japanese support) was the bigger issue.
Of course there are exception, and Nintendo themselves don't have much of a choice when it comes to platform. Back when every game was an exclusive I think there was a lot of emphasis on "fitting" the platform whenever a Japanese development house for whatever reason decided to support a more niche console, hence why you got your anime games on PC Engine, shooters on Mega Drive, your Metal Wolf Chaos and Bomberman Act Zeroes on Xbox. But maybe I'm that's just something I imagined.
Either way, the N64 had distinct strengths (it was a 3D powerhouse) and weaknesses (expensive low-capacity storage media) which seem almost diametrically opposed to the RPG genre where the act of navigating and manipulating space isn't that important.
That said, Nintendo did consider the Zelda games to be Action RPG, which is honestly fair.
They still had a deal with Philips as far as I know, but by 95/96 CD-ROM was quite ubiquitous, there were dozens of manufacturers. Matsushita/Panasonic could have been another option as they did eventually work with them a few years later on GameCube's proprietary DVD format.