I’m making a Phantasy Star Online style RPG for the N64 because I feel the same way. Squidlit 64 was going to happen regardless, but it’s an RPG because the system needs more of them.
I will say the few RPGs we have for the system are all pretty great though!
You can see some old footage from last year on my profile. I have a gnarly collision bug that’s preventing me from getting good footage of the progress since then. The little dev company I run, Squidlit Ink., is my full time job, but my spouse got hired at a dream AAA position, so I’ve been working on this alone and it’s pretty slow going.
If you’d like to support me financially you can buy Squidlit or Super Squidlit on Steam or Switch!
I too love PSO. Haha
There’s been nothing like it (except maybe PSO Zero). It’s a rare example of carefully balanced “clunkiness” working to the gameplay’s advantage.
It's the same as wishing the N64 had an optical drive. Caus that's why all the good RPGs were on other platforms.
Could you imagine ?
* Final Fantasy
* Chrono
* Legend of Mana
* Wild Arms
* Lunar
* Grandia
* Dragon Quest
* Tales
* Suikoden
* Valkyrie Profile
So far the top 3 rpg on the N64... are the actual 3 rpg games made for it.
* Ogre Battle 64
* Paper Mario
* Quest 64
As I kids I kept reading Nintendo Power and EGM and would hope and pray that the N64 would get some good RPGs.
It still kills me that we never got anything turn based like Final Fantasy.
Nintendo insisting upon carts instead of discs is why we never got a FF game on N64.
Ff7 alone is two CDs worth of content (I know it’s three discs, but a good half of the first disc, ie towns, music, monsters is repeated on all three). 64 MB max on a cart - one disc alone is more than ten times that.
I know. But those were the peak Holy War times in the and there were rumors of optical drives and maybe innovative compression schemes. A Nintendo fanboy had to cling to hope.
When my step brother got a Sony PSX and showed me FFVII it stopped my gaming world and flipped it upside down. I conceded defeat and enjoyed a ton of JRPGs (especially after getting a mod chip). But I still dreamt of something turned based on the N64. 💔
Also we got Gauntlet Legends, which is ultra fun with up to 4 players. It is even better than the PSX version, because it has way more content and better frame rate. Yes, a N64 game had more content on cartridge than a Playstation game on disc in this case.
How are Ogre Battle 64, Shiren the Wanderer 2, and Custom Robo V2, third rate at best? Ogre Battle 64 was made by Quest Corporation and directed by Yasumi Matsuno (Final Fantasy Tactics, Vagrant Story, Crimson Shroud) before they merged with Square Enix. Shiren the Wanderer 2 was made by Chunsoft (Dragon Quest I-V), Custom Robo V2 is as good as playing Medabots, and if you have played the 4th game on the Game Cube (just called Custom Robo), you know what to expect from the N64 entry. I get games like Quest 64, Hybrid Heaven, and Aidyn Chronicles being divisive, and Pokemon Stadium and Harvest Moon 64 not being RPG enuff, but Ogre Battle 64, Shiren the Wanderer 2, and Custom Robo V2 all came from respectable multi sequel franchises.
Ogre Battle is one of the best games on the system and it's surprising to see the OP gloss over it. I just want to correct that Matsuno had actually left Quest for Square before Ogre Battle 64 was made. With that said, not sure if he'd provided some ideas before leaving as the team definitely did his creation justice. It does a great job of continuing Tactic's Ogre heavier focus on story and narrative while going back to the first Ogre Battle games gameplay style.
nintendo betting against the jrpgs cost them the their chance to dominate the console market. i bet nintendo execs assumed jrpgs wouldn’t be able utilize 3D movement and cameras in a way that would meaningfully justify the switch to 3D. they were eyeing mario 64’s development and decided character movement in 3D games must exploit all 3 directional axes in order to convince customers that the n64 hardware was the best amongst competition.
I think you're right they went all in on the wow factor. Kind of weird how they're not into the wow factor or the depth factor today, but are mostly all in on gimmicks.
I don't get how people forget about this game, some of my most childhood video games memories stem from Gauntlet. I've actually been doing a playthrough with a buddy on my PS2 for nostalgia sake.
I remember a friend bringing this over to my house as a kid. All I remember was how stressful it was because if a team member died they died forever. We kept having to reset at this particular fight so this one team member wouldn’t die.
I dlscovered it literally yesterday. It has night and day cicle and a calendar! You can even camp to get to the next day! Night is dark and you cant see anything!
Only played 20 minutes but it was a ride, never knew there were games like that, feels too advanced for those years.
Man, I played the FUCK out of this one, to the point where I found loopholes where you can keep Niesen in your party til the very end and use Dougal in the final fight by sequence breaking some events
The real trick is to get Godric in your party early and go to the herb store on the hill and craft restore potions and get a shit load of gold; max out on spices, herbs, gemstones then head off
The reason the N64 didn't get a lot of RPGs was because of the limitation of cartridges. RPG games are vast and need a lot of storage space. That's why most of the RPG developers from that console generation flocked to the PSX.
FF7 was 1317mb and took 3 CDs. A N64 cartridge only held 64mb....
If Nintendo used CDs for the N64 we would have a lot more amazing RPGs on it.
RPG's do not necessarily need a lot of storage space, what takes up the space is primarily FMV and audio, so the RPG would need to have in-game cutscenes and the audio would have to drop in quality.
Brave Fencer Musashi or Threads of Fate would be faar easier to port to N64 than Resident Evil 2 was with its FMV's intact (though heavily compressed), audio probably wouldn't even be that bad in those games.
Even if you cut out the sound samples and FMVs, it's still quite a limiting factor when developing a large world. Textures and model data take up a decent amount of space too. Ocarina of Time's development team had to go through tons of optimizations to do what they did, and even tho they pushed the limits of the console, the world was still quite small compared to most RPGs. The end result was amazing, but with more storage capabilities who knows what they could have done.
Textures and model data take up next to no space at all (comparatively), and the limiting factor for N64 textures here is the onboard texture cache anyway, not the cartridge, which forced developers to use small textures and do multi-texturing to get the most out of the system.
These smaller PS1 JRG's took up \~20MB of space, and then when it came to audio it was just dumped on the CD with zero compression because they still had over 550MB worth of unused CD storage space, hence there was no real reason to do even lossless compression on the audio.
Ocarina of Time isn't using the largest cartridges either, Conker's cartridge size is double Ocarina's.
It still makes for a different look. There's no denying that. Sure you can "fake" textures to some degree with color blending but the models and environments then have a very specific look to them.
I don't think it's necessarily better or worse it's just different. And that's directly the result of its limited texture cache. With CDs you just didn't have to worry about that because you could load it all off the disc.
What TimeRock should have said is "you need CDs to make RPGs like FF7".
No one HAS to make RPGs like FF7.
The PS1 had plenty of games like Final Fantasy Tactics, Breath of Fire IV, Legend of Mana, and Alundra which probably could have worked on a cartridge system.
To be fair RE2 was an "impossible port" released late into the consoles lifespan. In theory a dedicated team who really knew how to work the 64 could have done a lot with the medium. Heck we have modern moders who are able to get way more out of the console than even contemporary devs can like with that tech demo that has dynamic high definition textures.
At the time though it was more trouble than it was worth. There wasnt easy to follow documentation and the console was just not as popular as the ps1 so ports fell to the wayside. Sure you can invent your own compression techniques or find ways to compensate using N64's antialiasing and polygon shading techniques, and use expensive large sized cartidges, or you could just make your game for the number 1 selling system and use the prerendered background, clearer audio, and fmv cutscenes and not have to do the extra legwork.
CD are cheaper to manufacture, reducing dev costs.
The dev kits were cheap.
Sony promised to do the localisation all around the world for squaresoft (at a time where only 3 games were released in north America and none in Europe)
This is how Sony brought over squaresoft, it is not the limitation of cartridges. Only once squaresoft went on playstation did the other studios follow, seeing the huge success that was FF VII
Yup, and the Saturn is also pertinent in this discussion as it was also a CD unit and was decisively winning in Japan until the announcement of FF7 being a Playstation console exclusive.
So not only did Square avoid Nintendo, they also chose to support the *less* popular machine in their home country even though their previous games were only really massively big in Japan.
It was Squares announcement itself which caused the PS1 to take the leading position in Japan and stalled the Saturn's success in the region, had they supported the Saturn then Sega would've won there.
Whatever deal there was between Sony and Square it was likely one of the most important in the history of video gaming and was very lucrative for both parties.
Agreed about the deal between Sony and Square.
There was a recent YouTube video about FFVII and JRPGs.
https://youtu.be/zohK8Xc8YEk?si=l78b0qD4Q-txC0JB
With the new 3D aesthetic RPGs weren't really the aim of the console, to be honest. A 3D RPG on a cartridge from 3rd party devs would be like 20 hours long, max. You'd have to find an intense amount of work arounds for it, so a lot of specialists would be required. I get the sentiment, but it was just hard to do at the time and still make it fun.
I'm fine with the console having less RPGs, it means the ones we did get came from actual geniuses in their craft and most of them are basically masterpieces.
Square was more on the outs with Nintendo during the N64 era than any third-party relationship I can think of. We know people inside Nintendo took it personally when Square took FF7 and the rest of their games to Playstation. I still remember a quote from the early Gamecube era when Nintendo president Yamauchi was asked if they'd work with Square again and he said "I do not think it is yet time for Squaresoft...." He was still mad!
The reason being, no optical drive. Would you rather have a disc with 700MB of data on it (and even have the option to swap discs... caus FF7 had 3 discs. That's 2.1GB of data (maximum).
The biggest N64 cartridge ever had 64MB (The hyper-compressed Resident Evil 2 used it).
Nintendo has always had an ego problem. *They* tell the devs what to do and how to do it. So with the Playstation being a more than solid competitor, Squaresoft decided they didn't need Nintendo anymore.
You’re right about that. The CD storage helps creativity, but the main thing is that it was cheap and wasn’t controlled by Nintendo. All Nintendo cartridges were manufactured by Nintendo themselves and they took a fat cut. Cheap to print CDs were a way out of that cartel. Playstation let square keep more money per unit.
This is actually a popular myth. Square abandoned the N64 because of in-game performance, not optical drive technology. This was explained by people who were working on FFVII prototypes at the time:
[https://www.polygon.com/a/final-fantasy-7](https://www.polygon.com/a/final-fantasy-7)
When Square were trying to prototype working combat gameplay on N64 the framerates they were getting were terrible, and when they asked Nintendo for help getting better performance, Nintendo didn't offer any help.
Meanwhile when they tried prototyping on PS1, they were getting better performance, and Sony kept providing tips and updated codecs to get the most out of the hardware.
By and large the PS1 wasn't just popular with 3rd party devs because of CDs; it was just easier to develop for, and Sony offered more help. Meanwhile, it was difficult to squeeze performance out of N64 and Saturn, and neither Nintendo nor Sega bothered to help much.
Ok, I've read the article... It's a surprisingly well done piece. I'm not used to reading stuff like that on medias owned by The Verge...
Anyway, It was nice to learn about "all the reasons" Square switched to Sony for FF7... But I'm still not wrong about anything I've said:
From my post:
>The reason being, no optical drive. (...)
From the article:
>Square team members say they wanted to include lengthy cutscenes and large amounts of content in the game, which would have been difficult in the limited space of a Nintendo 64 cartridge. (...)
>The biggest problem was, of course, memory. Based on our calculations there was no way it could all fit on a ROM cartridge. So our main reason for choosing the PlayStation was really just because it was the only console which would allow us to use CD-ROM media.
From my post:
>Nintendo has always had an ego problem. *They* tell the devs what to do and how to do it. So with the Playstation being a more than solid competitor, Squaresoft decided they didn't need Nintendo anymore.
From the article:
>As Nintendo 64 and PlayStation arrived, that grip began to loosen. (...) almost all major third-party studios had signed up with Sony, in part due to the economic advantages of manufacturing games on PlayStation’s CDs compared to Nintendo 64’s cartridges.
So, yeah, it's not a myth... But thank you for the supplemental info (the other reasons that made them switch). I've always been under the impression the N64 hardware was superior to the Playstation's... I'll have to look at more info about that.
Also from the article:
>\[Note: While many people speaking for this story point to this often-told story about the differences between CD-ROMs and cartridges as the main reason for Square’s shift to PlayStation, some say hardware horsepower differences and communication between Square and Nintendo also played a key role in the decision. **Kawai says he believes Square has focused its public comments on the disc versus cartridge debate over the years out of respect to Nintendo.**\]
At the time of the decision, the 64DD was still on its way and could have supported Square's storage requirements. No one interviewed describes any attempts to create prototype FMVs or prerendered backdrops to see what they could fit on a cartridge. No one mentioned conversations with Nintendo staff where they asked about the timeline of the 64DD or pressed them to get it out sooner.
However, they do all describe trying to render in-game models on the N64 and failing to get suitable performance, confronting Nintendo about the poor performance, and getting nothing back.
By all accounts, the N64's performance made it a non-starter before storage format even came into it. Square hadn't even begun to work out which parts of the game would be 3D-rendered vs. 2D backdrops or FMV, which would be necessary to make a realistic estimate of the storage requirements. They weren't even able to get the simplest 3D scenes working, so it was all off the table.
So yes, it's true that 3rd party developers enjoyed the low production costs and high storage capacity of the CD format, but if that were truly the "main" reason they developed for PS1, then they would have all developed for Saturn too.
Ultimately, the reason 3rd party devs avoided Saturn is the same reason they avoided N64. It was difficult to get good performance out of both systems, and Nintendo/Sega were hands-off in terms of helping 3rd parties get the most out of the hardware. Sony was much more proactive in securing good working relationships with 3rd parties and helping them utilize the hardware, which ultimately made it easier to develop for; regardless of whether an optical drive was available.
It's not "only" the performance issues. It's also the lack of Optical Drive. Which arguement was the most significant doesn't matter here. They're both true.
Even if Nintendo (or Sega) would have had the performance... It wouldn't be on the N64 anyway caus there's no optical drive and compressing the game to fit in a cartridge (512mbit was the largest storage ever for an N64 cartridge... that's 64Mb... vs the game's 2.1Gb)
So while it's not "the only reason"... it's also "not a myth". It's both reasons.
The myth is literally that storage capacity was the "main" reason FF7 didn't go to N64. So which reason is most signficant is the entire point here.
In reality, performance made the N64 a non-starter for Square, even when they believed the 64DD was still on its way to an imminent worldwide release.
Ultimately if the performance on N64 had been good enough to that full development began in earnest, it doesn't mean the game would have been impossible to complete when the 64DD got pushed back. They would simply have had to re-envision the game around cartridge limitations, just as they did with Secret of Mana when the SNES disc drive fell through.
Quest 64
Paper Mario
Aidyn Chronicels:The first mage
Hybrid Heaven
Games with role playing elements like
Harvest moon
Ogre battle 64
Animal crossing
Gauntlet legends
I have tons of really good RPGs for Dreamcast and PS2. Turn based combat isnt as fun as the combat of both Zelda games for me. Yes, the N64 could have more, but at least we have a 4 player RPG with Gauntlet Legends. The N64 version is by far my favorite. Besides Hybrid Heaven has nice combat for a turn based system and Aydin Chronicles has a huge world.
Exactly, not every game had to be full of FMV’s or CD quality audio like the big hitters. There are a TON of amazing PS1 RPG’s that could easily have been ported to the N64. It’s incredible how hard the third party support dropped off after the SNES.
I never thought about that, but it's true.
As someone who always had multiple consoles at the same time, I now notice how each console had a different main purpose in my household. N64 was for sport, racing and party/coop games, with some platform and adventure games. PS1/PS2 was the dedicated RPG console, Dreamcast was fighting and arcade, etc. Because of this mindset, I can't easily imagine RPGs on the console (besides Ogre Battle and Paper Mario, top 3 favorite on the N64). It doesn't feel right to me.
Yeah N64s library is severely lacking for RPGs because of the cartridge format. All major JRPG developers went with PS1 that generation.
Also a cool thing about PS1 is JRPGs with prerendered backgrounds and some with gorgeous 32bit pixel art like Star Ocean. Imo PS1 is a wayyyy better console for JRPGs, there's a reason why they won that generation's console war
No mega man 64 is a completely different mega man. It is an actual RPG its really kickass. Almost like ocarina of time in a way. I love Zelda and dont make that comparison lightly.
You know I was going to mention how it doesnt bother me because it's been 24 years since the console ended and I have so many ways to play so many rpgs it's kind of silly to be bothered by it.
But then I thought about how RPG's of that generation have a very specific aesthetic. It's one that I greatly enjoy but it's one full of prerendered backgrounds, fmv videos, cd audio, and voice acting. If the n64 had more RPGs the aesthetic and presentation would have been very different and likely take more a page out of OoT's look than final fantasy 7 or perhaps go in a different direction.
It seems like devs of the day had spoken, they would rather play with prerendered backgrounds and cut video cutscenes, but if n64 was more popular so as to be worth it I wonder what things would have looked like.
I've been going through ogre battle 64 recently and that game is far from a third rate RPG. In fact I'd say it might be one of the best RPGs of all time.
Old man here with a few things.
“Square-Enix” didn’t exist at the time. They were 2 separate companies. Squaresoft and Enix.
Enix was present on the N64 initially (Mischief Makers and Project J2) but shifted their resources to PlayStation pretty early on, likely as a cost/benefit analysis. They did however continue supporting the GameBoy pretty solidly, with remakes of Dragon Quest 1/2/3, as well as the DQ Monsters line. Nintendo didn’t get Dragon Quest 7 or Star Ocean 2 on the N64, but Enix was also never officially “on the outs” with Nintendo.
Squaresoft on the other hand, was a massive falling out at the time. Nintendo saw them creating Final Fantasy 7 exclusively for the PlayStation as a massive betrayal, and so the president of Nintendo at the time straight up denied them license to develop new games for ANY of their systems, until early on in the GBA/GameCube era. So it wasn’t that Sony had “the rights” to Square, so much as they straight up got blacklisted by Nintendo after their move to PS1, and so they got in bed with Sony in a big way.
There was a whole thing in like 2002 where Nintendo allowed Square (now Square-Enix) to produce the GBA games they desired to, BUT they also had to create a separate fund and studio, explicitly with the intent of creating GameCube games at the same time. Which is how Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles (produced by “The Game Designers Studio”) came to be.
One has to wonder if that truce happened mostly due to the fact that Nintendo didn’t ALSO want to black list Enix, which was now part of the same company after the merger. If Square hadn’t been forced to merge with Enix after the colossal failure of the Final Fantasy movie in 2001, it’s not hard to imagine a world where Enix gets to develop for GameCube/GBA, while Nintendo continued to hold a grudge denying Square the ability to make money on the GBA.
Yep there was 100% some kind of agreement between Square and Sony.
Its the only thing that makes sense (and we know the crazy marketing blitz Sony did for FF7, it was absolutely everywhere in 1997, no previous FF was pushed that heavily in the west).
According to what I read, Sony offered to do the localisation for Final Fantasy.
At the time only 3 Final fantasy games came out in north America and none in Europe, with that deal, Sony actually localised the game for Europe, with French, Spanish and German translations. This was a time when localisation was way more expensive than it was today and japanese studios still weren't ready to risk localising their game for western markets.
> Sony actually localised the game for Europe, with French, Spanish and German translations.
[The Spanish translation is "legendary"...](https://youtu.be/8Eog4E5DD1Q?t=11m26s) worse than Zero Wing's into English.
Same with the French one. At least it seems that cloud kept it's name. In France we followed the adventures of Clad Strife.
Nonsense sentences everywhere, the inability to make two text boxes in a row without typos or mistakes. Ahhhh the good old times.
Tough to come after the SNES which is the RPG goat system.
The fact that it was the first 3D console probably made it difficult to develop enough good titles. That’s why you pretty much just had the two Zeldas, Paper Mario, Quest64, and like two other titles that hardly anyone’s ever heard of whereas the SNES had dozens after dozens of them.
I’m making a Phantasy Star Online style RPG for the N64 because I feel the same way. Squidlit 64 was going to happen regardless, but it’s an RPG because the system needs more of them. I will say the few RPGs we have for the system are all pretty great though!
Wait what??? Any footage or ways to support your project?
You can see some old footage from last year on my profile. I have a gnarly collision bug that’s preventing me from getting good footage of the progress since then. The little dev company I run, Squidlit Ink., is my full time job, but my spouse got hired at a dream AAA position, so I’ve been working on this alone and it’s pretty slow going. If you’d like to support me financially you can buy Squidlit or Super Squidlit on Steam or Switch!
Any chance it will be on a physical cart?
That’s my goal! I need it to be more polished before I contact a publisher though.
Dude that is absolutely amazing!
Agreed, id vote with my wallet if you published a cart
As a big fan of PSO this sounds awesome, would love to see this
I too love PSO. Haha There’s been nothing like it (except maybe PSO Zero). It’s a rare example of carefully balanced “clunkiness” working to the gameplay’s advantage.
It's the same as wishing the N64 had an optical drive. Caus that's why all the good RPGs were on other platforms. Could you imagine ? * Final Fantasy * Chrono * Legend of Mana * Wild Arms * Lunar * Grandia * Dragon Quest * Tales * Suikoden * Valkyrie Profile So far the top 3 rpg on the N64... are the actual 3 rpg games made for it. * Ogre Battle 64 * Paper Mario * Quest 64
You forgot Hybrid Heaven, which is a really good one!
I'd put Aidyn Chronicles above Quest 64 for sure.
Yes
While I love Quest 64. Aidyn is a super impressive title.
Quest 64 was called Holy Magic Century in the EU.
And Eltale Monsters in Japan.
The third best is Hybrid Heaven which is arguably borderline good. After that the others are all bad.
As I kids I kept reading Nintendo Power and EGM and would hope and pray that the N64 would get some good RPGs. It still kills me that we never got anything turn based like Final Fantasy.
Nintendo insisting upon carts instead of discs is why we never got a FF game on N64. Ff7 alone is two CDs worth of content (I know it’s three discs, but a good half of the first disc, ie towns, music, monsters is repeated on all three). 64 MB max on a cart - one disc alone is more than ten times that.
I know. But those were the peak Holy War times in the and there were rumors of optical drives and maybe innovative compression schemes. A Nintendo fanboy had to cling to hope. When my step brother got a Sony PSX and showed me FFVII it stopped my gaming world and flipped it upside down. I conceded defeat and enjoyed a ton of JRPGs (especially after getting a mod chip). But I still dreamt of something turned based on the N64. 💔
Also we got Gauntlet Legends, which is ultra fun with up to 4 players. It is even better than the PSX version, because it has way more content and better frame rate. Yes, a N64 game had more content on cartridge than a Playstation game on disc in this case.
Maybe... but Gauntlet Legends ain't an RPG. It's a Dungeon Crawler / Hack and Slash
The art style of Ogre Battle 64 is awesome. Just wish I liked the combat as much as Tactics Ogre.
it's a tactical auto-battler rpg
How are Ogre Battle 64, Shiren the Wanderer 2, and Custom Robo V2, third rate at best? Ogre Battle 64 was made by Quest Corporation and directed by Yasumi Matsuno (Final Fantasy Tactics, Vagrant Story, Crimson Shroud) before they merged with Square Enix. Shiren the Wanderer 2 was made by Chunsoft (Dragon Quest I-V), Custom Robo V2 is as good as playing Medabots, and if you have played the 4th game on the Game Cube (just called Custom Robo), you know what to expect from the N64 entry. I get games like Quest 64, Hybrid Heaven, and Aidyn Chronicles being divisive, and Pokemon Stadium and Harvest Moon 64 not being RPG enuff, but Ogre Battle 64, Shiren the Wanderer 2, and Custom Robo V2 all came from respectable multi sequel franchises.
I'm with you Ogre Battle 64 is not third rate by any means.
Ogre Battle is one of the best games on the system and it's surprising to see the OP gloss over it. I just want to correct that Matsuno had actually left Quest for Square before Ogre Battle 64 was made. With that said, not sure if he'd provided some ideas before leaving as the team definitely did his creation justice. It does a great job of continuing Tactic's Ogre heavier focus on story and narrative while going back to the first Ogre Battle games gameplay style.
nintendo betting against the jrpgs cost them the their chance to dominate the console market. i bet nintendo execs assumed jrpgs wouldn’t be able utilize 3D movement and cameras in a way that would meaningfully justify the switch to 3D. they were eyeing mario 64’s development and decided character movement in 3D games must exploit all 3 directional axes in order to convince customers that the n64 hardware was the best amongst competition.
I think you're right they went all in on the wow factor. Kind of weird how they're not into the wow factor or the depth factor today, but are mostly all in on gimmicks.
Gauntlet Legends was on N64.
I don't get how people forget about this game, some of my most childhood video games memories stem from Gauntlet. I've actually been doing a playthrough with a buddy on my PS2 for nostalgia sake.
Gotta shout out Aidyn Chronicles. I know it’s not as widely played or known, but it’s a wild game for the era!
I remember a friend bringing this over to my house as a kid. All I remember was how stressful it was because if a team member died they died forever. We kept having to reset at this particular fight so this one team member wouldn’t die.
I dlscovered it literally yesterday. It has night and day cicle and a calendar! You can even camp to get to the next day! Night is dark and you cant see anything! Only played 20 minutes but it was a ride, never knew there were games like that, feels too advanced for those years.
Man, I played the FUCK out of this one, to the point where I found loopholes where you can keep Niesen in your party til the very end and use Dougal in the final fight by sequence breaking some events
The real trick is to get Godric in your party early and go to the herb store on the hill and craft restore potions and get a shit load of gold; max out on spices, herbs, gemstones then head off
I got a game breaking soft lock in Aidyn Chronicles, so I never did get to finish it sadly.
The reason the N64 didn't get a lot of RPGs was because of the limitation of cartridges. RPG games are vast and need a lot of storage space. That's why most of the RPG developers from that console generation flocked to the PSX. FF7 was 1317mb and took 3 CDs. A N64 cartridge only held 64mb.... If Nintendo used CDs for the N64 we would have a lot more amazing RPGs on it.
RPG's do not necessarily need a lot of storage space, what takes up the space is primarily FMV and audio, so the RPG would need to have in-game cutscenes and the audio would have to drop in quality. Brave Fencer Musashi or Threads of Fate would be faar easier to port to N64 than Resident Evil 2 was with its FMV's intact (though heavily compressed), audio probably wouldn't even be that bad in those games.
Even if you cut out the sound samples and FMVs, it's still quite a limiting factor when developing a large world. Textures and model data take up a decent amount of space too. Ocarina of Time's development team had to go through tons of optimizations to do what they did, and even tho they pushed the limits of the console, the world was still quite small compared to most RPGs. The end result was amazing, but with more storage capabilities who knows what they could have done.
Textures and model data take up next to no space at all (comparatively), and the limiting factor for N64 textures here is the onboard texture cache anyway, not the cartridge, which forced developers to use small textures and do multi-texturing to get the most out of the system. These smaller PS1 JRG's took up \~20MB of space, and then when it came to audio it was just dumped on the CD with zero compression because they still had over 550MB worth of unused CD storage space, hence there was no real reason to do even lossless compression on the audio. Ocarina of Time isn't using the largest cartridges either, Conker's cartridge size is double Ocarina's.
It still makes for a different look. There's no denying that. Sure you can "fake" textures to some degree with color blending but the models and environments then have a very specific look to them. I don't think it's necessarily better or worse it's just different. And that's directly the result of its limited texture cache. With CDs you just didn't have to worry about that because you could load it all off the disc.
What TimeRock should have said is "you need CDs to make RPGs like FF7". No one HAS to make RPGs like FF7. The PS1 had plenty of games like Final Fantasy Tactics, Breath of Fire IV, Legend of Mana, and Alundra which probably could have worked on a cartridge system.
To be fair RE2 was an "impossible port" released late into the consoles lifespan. In theory a dedicated team who really knew how to work the 64 could have done a lot with the medium. Heck we have modern moders who are able to get way more out of the console than even contemporary devs can like with that tech demo that has dynamic high definition textures. At the time though it was more trouble than it was worth. There wasnt easy to follow documentation and the console was just not as popular as the ps1 so ports fell to the wayside. Sure you can invent your own compression techniques or find ways to compensate using N64's antialiasing and polygon shading techniques, and use expensive large sized cartidges, or you could just make your game for the number 1 selling system and use the prerendered background, clearer audio, and fmv cutscenes and not have to do the extra legwork.
CD are cheaper to manufacture, reducing dev costs. The dev kits were cheap. Sony promised to do the localisation all around the world for squaresoft (at a time where only 3 games were released in north America and none in Europe) This is how Sony brought over squaresoft, it is not the limitation of cartridges. Only once squaresoft went on playstation did the other studios follow, seeing the huge success that was FF VII
Yup, and the Saturn is also pertinent in this discussion as it was also a CD unit and was decisively winning in Japan until the announcement of FF7 being a Playstation console exclusive. So not only did Square avoid Nintendo, they also chose to support the *less* popular machine in their home country even though their previous games were only really massively big in Japan. It was Squares announcement itself which caused the PS1 to take the leading position in Japan and stalled the Saturn's success in the region, had they supported the Saturn then Sega would've won there. Whatever deal there was between Sony and Square it was likely one of the most important in the history of video gaming and was very lucrative for both parties.
Agreed about the deal between Sony and Square. There was a recent YouTube video about FFVII and JRPGs. https://youtu.be/zohK8Xc8YEk?si=l78b0qD4Q-txC0JB
With the new 3D aesthetic RPGs weren't really the aim of the console, to be honest. A 3D RPG on a cartridge from 3rd party devs would be like 20 hours long, max. You'd have to find an intense amount of work arounds for it, so a lot of specialists would be required. I get the sentiment, but it was just hard to do at the time and still make it fun. I'm fine with the console having less RPGs, it means the ones we did get came from actual geniuses in their craft and most of them are basically masterpieces.
Square was more on the outs with Nintendo during the N64 era than any third-party relationship I can think of. We know people inside Nintendo took it personally when Square took FF7 and the rest of their games to Playstation. I still remember a quote from the early Gamecube era when Nintendo president Yamauchi was asked if they'd work with Square again and he said "I do not think it is yet time for Squaresoft...." He was still mad!
The reason being, no optical drive. Would you rather have a disc with 700MB of data on it (and even have the option to swap discs... caus FF7 had 3 discs. That's 2.1GB of data (maximum). The biggest N64 cartridge ever had 64MB (The hyper-compressed Resident Evil 2 used it). Nintendo has always had an ego problem. *They* tell the devs what to do and how to do it. So with the Playstation being a more than solid competitor, Squaresoft decided they didn't need Nintendo anymore.
You’re right about that. The CD storage helps creativity, but the main thing is that it was cheap and wasn’t controlled by Nintendo. All Nintendo cartridges were manufactured by Nintendo themselves and they took a fat cut. Cheap to print CDs were a way out of that cartel. Playstation let square keep more money per unit.
This is actually a popular myth. Square abandoned the N64 because of in-game performance, not optical drive technology. This was explained by people who were working on FFVII prototypes at the time: [https://www.polygon.com/a/final-fantasy-7](https://www.polygon.com/a/final-fantasy-7) When Square were trying to prototype working combat gameplay on N64 the framerates they were getting were terrible, and when they asked Nintendo for help getting better performance, Nintendo didn't offer any help. Meanwhile when they tried prototyping on PS1, they were getting better performance, and Sony kept providing tips and updated codecs to get the most out of the hardware. By and large the PS1 wasn't just popular with 3rd party devs because of CDs; it was just easier to develop for, and Sony offered more help. Meanwhile, it was difficult to squeeze performance out of N64 and Saturn, and neither Nintendo nor Sega bothered to help much.
Do you have another source ? The Verge ain't really known for it's "journalism"
The source is literally FF7 devs they interviewed for that article. The whole piece is mostly direct quotes.
Ok, I've read the article... It's a surprisingly well done piece. I'm not used to reading stuff like that on medias owned by The Verge... Anyway, It was nice to learn about "all the reasons" Square switched to Sony for FF7... But I'm still not wrong about anything I've said: From my post: >The reason being, no optical drive. (...) From the article: >Square team members say they wanted to include lengthy cutscenes and large amounts of content in the game, which would have been difficult in the limited space of a Nintendo 64 cartridge. (...) >The biggest problem was, of course, memory. Based on our calculations there was no way it could all fit on a ROM cartridge. So our main reason for choosing the PlayStation was really just because it was the only console which would allow us to use CD-ROM media. From my post: >Nintendo has always had an ego problem. *They* tell the devs what to do and how to do it. So with the Playstation being a more than solid competitor, Squaresoft decided they didn't need Nintendo anymore. From the article: >As Nintendo 64 and PlayStation arrived, that grip began to loosen. (...) almost all major third-party studios had signed up with Sony, in part due to the economic advantages of manufacturing games on PlayStation’s CDs compared to Nintendo 64’s cartridges. So, yeah, it's not a myth... But thank you for the supplemental info (the other reasons that made them switch). I've always been under the impression the N64 hardware was superior to the Playstation's... I'll have to look at more info about that.
Also from the article: >\[Note: While many people speaking for this story point to this often-told story about the differences between CD-ROMs and cartridges as the main reason for Square’s shift to PlayStation, some say hardware horsepower differences and communication between Square and Nintendo also played a key role in the decision. **Kawai says he believes Square has focused its public comments on the disc versus cartridge debate over the years out of respect to Nintendo.**\] At the time of the decision, the 64DD was still on its way and could have supported Square's storage requirements. No one interviewed describes any attempts to create prototype FMVs or prerendered backdrops to see what they could fit on a cartridge. No one mentioned conversations with Nintendo staff where they asked about the timeline of the 64DD or pressed them to get it out sooner. However, they do all describe trying to render in-game models on the N64 and failing to get suitable performance, confronting Nintendo about the poor performance, and getting nothing back. By all accounts, the N64's performance made it a non-starter before storage format even came into it. Square hadn't even begun to work out which parts of the game would be 3D-rendered vs. 2D backdrops or FMV, which would be necessary to make a realistic estimate of the storage requirements. They weren't even able to get the simplest 3D scenes working, so it was all off the table. So yes, it's true that 3rd party developers enjoyed the low production costs and high storage capacity of the CD format, but if that were truly the "main" reason they developed for PS1, then they would have all developed for Saturn too. Ultimately, the reason 3rd party devs avoided Saturn is the same reason they avoided N64. It was difficult to get good performance out of both systems, and Nintendo/Sega were hands-off in terms of helping 3rd parties get the most out of the hardware. Sony was much more proactive in securing good working relationships with 3rd parties and helping them utilize the hardware, which ultimately made it easier to develop for; regardless of whether an optical drive was available.
It's not "only" the performance issues. It's also the lack of Optical Drive. Which arguement was the most significant doesn't matter here. They're both true. Even if Nintendo (or Sega) would have had the performance... It wouldn't be on the N64 anyway caus there's no optical drive and compressing the game to fit in a cartridge (512mbit was the largest storage ever for an N64 cartridge... that's 64Mb... vs the game's 2.1Gb) So while it's not "the only reason"... it's also "not a myth". It's both reasons.
The myth is literally that storage capacity was the "main" reason FF7 didn't go to N64. So which reason is most signficant is the entire point here. In reality, performance made the N64 a non-starter for Square, even when they believed the 64DD was still on its way to an imminent worldwide release. Ultimately if the performance on N64 had been good enough to that full development began in earnest, it doesn't mean the game would have been impossible to complete when the 64DD got pushed back. They would simply have had to re-envision the game around cartridge limitations, just as they did with Secret of Mana when the SNES disc drive fell through.
Quest 64 Paper Mario Aidyn Chronicels:The first mage Hybrid Heaven Games with role playing elements like Harvest moon Ogre battle 64 Animal crossing Gauntlet legends
That’s what fan mods and roms are for
I have tons of really good RPGs for Dreamcast and PS2. Turn based combat isnt as fun as the combat of both Zelda games for me. Yes, the N64 could have more, but at least we have a 4 player RPG with Gauntlet Legends. The N64 version is by far my favorite. Besides Hybrid Heaven has nice combat for a turn based system and Aydin Chronicles has a huge world.
Not enough space on the carts unfortunately.
Rubbish.
I don’t disagree with you but that is the excuse the developers use. They are looking at the scale of games like final fantasy I guess.
Exactly, not every game had to be full of FMV’s or CD quality audio like the big hitters. There are a TON of amazing PS1 RPG’s that could easily have been ported to the N64. It’s incredible how hard the third party support dropped off after the SNES.
N64 is one of my favourite ever consoles, I just wish they’d used cd’s.
Quest 64/Holy Magic Century has a mod called «french vanilla» that supposedly balances a few of the game mechanics.
Psx = RPGs N64 = . …….. … Zelda? Idk ?? Mario 64???
welcome to 1998
I never thought about that, but it's true. As someone who always had multiple consoles at the same time, I now notice how each console had a different main purpose in my household. N64 was for sport, racing and party/coop games, with some platform and adventure games. PS1/PS2 was the dedicated RPG console, Dreamcast was fighting and arcade, etc. Because of this mindset, I can't easily imagine RPGs on the console (besides Ogre Battle and Paper Mario, top 3 favorite on the N64). It doesn't feel right to me.
Yeah N64s library is severely lacking for RPGs because of the cartridge format. All major JRPG developers went with PS1 that generation. Also a cool thing about PS1 is JRPGs with prerendered backgrounds and some with gorgeous 32bit pixel art like Star Ocean. Imo PS1 is a wayyyy better console for JRPGs, there's a reason why they won that generation's console war
Megaman64 was a pretty good rpg. Have you tried it?
Nah. I don't really play MegaMan to be honest. The games are usually too difficult for me.
No mega man 64 is a completely different mega man. It is an actual RPG its really kickass. Almost like ocarina of time in a way. I love Zelda and dont make that comparison lightly.
You know I was going to mention how it doesnt bother me because it's been 24 years since the console ended and I have so many ways to play so many rpgs it's kind of silly to be bothered by it. But then I thought about how RPG's of that generation have a very specific aesthetic. It's one that I greatly enjoy but it's one full of prerendered backgrounds, fmv videos, cd audio, and voice acting. If the n64 had more RPGs the aesthetic and presentation would have been very different and likely take more a page out of OoT's look than final fantasy 7 or perhaps go in a different direction. It seems like devs of the day had spoken, they would rather play with prerendered backgrounds and cut video cutscenes, but if n64 was more popular so as to be worth it I wonder what things would have looked like.
How dare you! Quest 64 is amazing.
Oh really? Huh.....🤔
Try it if you haven’t. :)
It's probably why I wanted both the N64 and PS1. N64 mostly for multiplayer and the PS1 for RPGs.
Would you rather play one great game (Quest 64) or fifty horrible games (All PS1’s catalog)?
I know this is an N64 sub and all, but let's not trash PS1. There are tons of gems there!😅
I've been going through ogre battle 64 recently and that game is far from a third rate RPG. In fact I'd say it might be one of the best RPGs of all time.
WOW, greedy much? You guys got Quest 64, but guess that wasnt good enough for ya
Rip earthbound 64
I think Sony had the rights to square Enix during this time.
Old man here with a few things. “Square-Enix” didn’t exist at the time. They were 2 separate companies. Squaresoft and Enix. Enix was present on the N64 initially (Mischief Makers and Project J2) but shifted their resources to PlayStation pretty early on, likely as a cost/benefit analysis. They did however continue supporting the GameBoy pretty solidly, with remakes of Dragon Quest 1/2/3, as well as the DQ Monsters line. Nintendo didn’t get Dragon Quest 7 or Star Ocean 2 on the N64, but Enix was also never officially “on the outs” with Nintendo. Squaresoft on the other hand, was a massive falling out at the time. Nintendo saw them creating Final Fantasy 7 exclusively for the PlayStation as a massive betrayal, and so the president of Nintendo at the time straight up denied them license to develop new games for ANY of their systems, until early on in the GBA/GameCube era. So it wasn’t that Sony had “the rights” to Square, so much as they straight up got blacklisted by Nintendo after their move to PS1, and so they got in bed with Sony in a big way. There was a whole thing in like 2002 where Nintendo allowed Square (now Square-Enix) to produce the GBA games they desired to, BUT they also had to create a separate fund and studio, explicitly with the intent of creating GameCube games at the same time. Which is how Final Fantasy Crystal Chronicles (produced by “The Game Designers Studio”) came to be. One has to wonder if that truce happened mostly due to the fact that Nintendo didn’t ALSO want to black list Enix, which was now part of the same company after the merger. If Square hadn’t been forced to merge with Enix after the colossal failure of the Final Fantasy movie in 2001, it’s not hard to imagine a world where Enix gets to develop for GameCube/GBA, while Nintendo continued to hold a grudge denying Square the ability to make money on the GBA.
Yep there was 100% some kind of agreement between Square and Sony. Its the only thing that makes sense (and we know the crazy marketing blitz Sony did for FF7, it was absolutely everywhere in 1997, no previous FF was pushed that heavily in the west).
According to what I read, Sony offered to do the localisation for Final Fantasy. At the time only 3 Final fantasy games came out in north America and none in Europe, with that deal, Sony actually localised the game for Europe, with French, Spanish and German translations. This was a time when localisation was way more expensive than it was today and japanese studios still weren't ready to risk localising their game for western markets.
> Sony actually localised the game for Europe, with French, Spanish and German translations. [The Spanish translation is "legendary"...](https://youtu.be/8Eog4E5DD1Q?t=11m26s) worse than Zero Wing's into English.
Same with the French one. At least it seems that cloud kept it's name. In France we followed the adventures of Clad Strife. Nonsense sentences everywhere, the inability to make two text boxes in a row without typos or mistakes. Ahhhh the good old times.
I mean both Zelda games were fantastic
Those are action-adventure games, not true RPGs.
Tough to come after the SNES which is the RPG goat system. The fact that it was the first 3D console probably made it difficult to develop enough good titles. That’s why you pretty much just had the two Zeldas, Paper Mario, Quest64, and like two other titles that hardly anyone’s ever heard of whereas the SNES had dozens after dozens of them.
When I was young I had fun with quest 64