This…shines a totally new light on a bunch of decisions that originally made me fairly upset and caused me to quit playing the game.
I played the game with nearly every free moment I had between the time I bought it in 2012 and the 1.2 release in October of 2013. Multiple worlds. Multiplayer sessions with players in several countries possibly requiring port forwarding and VPN tunnels if I remember correctly, and all of it stopped dead for me when I had to quit focusing on creating and exploring and was instead spending most of my time struggling to survive.
There were enemies before, and you could find one of the three bosses and just… Not go there, but 1.2 really made combat the forefront of the game and killed it for me entirely.
In the intervening 12 years. I’d be surprised if had more than a couple of hours into the game.
Viewing it through the lens of a metroidvania where you craft your own progression is not something I’d considered before.
I might actually go back to the game on the rare occasion I’m in the mood for something like that.
Thank you for the insight, while it probably sounds silly, it gives me some perspective into something that was so jarring it still causes me to panic when a game announces combat where combat was not previously the focus (I’m looking at you, Dyson Sphere Program 😄) and I really appreciate that.
I thought quest64 happened because square told nintendo to go pound sand, released FF7 on the PS and left previously-leader-of-the-jrpg-pack nintendo with fuck all?
like, snes had TONS of good rpg’s, and the 64 had nothing, despite people clamoring for the things.
I seem to recall it was intended to fill a gap and was instead used to prove “see? Nobody likes these games!”.