Are you talking about the chibi models vs. more realistic models? I think that was an artifact of an FF trope left over from the NES era where the world sprites were limited to one tile due to NES hardware limitations while the battle sprites were more detailed 1x2 tiles, and this was kept all the way up to FF6 where they finally used the same sprite for world and battles.
I have no clue why they went back to using different/less detailed models for world exploration in FF7 (if I had to guess they were unfamiliar with the PSX hardware and the chibi models used fewer polygons), but that go a long way to explain why the FMVs sometimes used different models–IIRC, the FMVs with chibi models played directly from the field, and the ones with more detailed models had some kind of scene transition into them, or otherwise were used for major plot beats. It’s good they abandoned this entirely with FF8 onwards, though.
God, yes, I tried to get into the game twice and both times I bounced off right around the part where you go from Hell on Earth to a fucking high fantasy castle on some random planet. I’ll just replay Doom 2016 if I want to shoot some demons.
Funny, I thought of mentioning Crash Bandicoot, but when I put myself into the shoes of 12-year-old me, the single game that came to mind when I thought PlayStation was Final Fantasy 7 more than anything else.
I’m no game designer or coder so I’m just going off what I read on Wikipedia, but… Apparently the Saturn was a mostly 2D focused system, so it had a processor that could do warping and manipulation of sprites. So when it drew a “polygon” it was really drawing together a bunch of sprites and manipulating them.
Nobody wanted to develop for it because it had an insanely complex architecture (3x 32-bit processors and dual CPUs that shared a bus and couldn’t access RAM at the same time), and developers in the 90s were unaccustomed to multi-core programming. It also used quadrilaterals for the baseline polygon instead of triangles. All this was made worse by poor development tools around launch, leaving most coders stuck using raw assembly language until Sega wrote custom libraries.
Sega also never really had a killer app for it like Mario 64 was for the N64, or FF7 was for the PlayStation. They were developing a game called Sonic XTreme, but it wound up getting canceled.
I’m going to go a little against the grain and recommend Fuga: Melodies of Steel and its sequel. It’s not exactly what you described, but the game is very adept on forcing extremely difficult and impactful choices on you naturally through its gameplay.
Yeah, I feel like having someone who can cast Magic Missile is almost mandatory for that fight, simply because the illusions have 1 HP, are very spread out, and Magic Missile can target multiple enemies and is guaranteed to hit. It’s perfect for killing almost all of the illusions in a single turn.
I think it’s sorta okay that the enemies don’t get too much stronger, especially since (at least for casters) a lot of the added power comes in the form of gaining access to stupidly OP spells like Hypnotic Pattern. I don’t think it would be very fun if enemies started using tactics that amounted to “Hahaha, I rolled higher initiative so now you don’t get to play for the next three rounds while I can do whatever I want.”
This is admittedly REALLY pedantic, but there were some non-game cartridges released for the NES and SNES, such as Taboo: The Sixth Sense (a tarot card reading program), Miracle Piano (a program for teaching how to play the piano), Mario Paint (a basic music composition and drawing program), and a modem add-on for the Famicom that supported banking, stock trading, and horse race betting.
It’s very user friendly in terms of tooltips, and if you don’t make deliberately bad choices during level up (e.g. taking a feat that gives you a cantrip from the Wizard class… that scales off your INT score… while playing a Barbarian with 8 intelligence that can’t cast spells while raging) it’s fairly difficult to make an unplayably bad character.
There’s a few cases where some general knowledge of D&D is helpful, such as knowing to never take True Strike because it’s literally worse than just attacking twice and having some knowledge of good builds is useful, since it helps guide what you take when you level up. That said, there’s also entire categories of actions in BG3 that don’t really have an equivalent rule in TTRPG 5e, such as weapon proficiency attacks, so online cookie cutter builds don’t capture the full extent of what you can do.