RedFreedom
Banned
I've been playing the English fan translation of Phantasy Star 1's remake using a PS2 emulator (a quad core i7 with onboard video is sufficient for this, FYI), and I got to thinking "Holy shit. So in 1987 there was a JRPG with fleshed-out characters, smooth-scrolling 3D dungeons (this was before the dawn of the FPS), and animated monsters that was made for a mass-market consumer electronic device from the mid-1980s. Moreover, this game came out in North America, Europe, and some other non-Japanese markets before either Final Fantasy 1 or Dragon Quest 1" and was like "Whoa, why didn't these guys do better?"
So what kind of POD would allow the Master System and the NES to achieve similar levels success? Marketing? Stronger partnerships with established North American and European toy and electronic firms? Distribution? Including the high-end FM audio chip on versions released outside of Japan? Turning Alis Landale into an iconic, genre-agnostic heroine for the company? An emphasis on the company's origins as one that had been founded by American servicemen?
As for the 16-bit era, I think that the wave of games that came out around 1994ish, while giving the Genesis/Megadrive some magnificent titles, ultimately handed the momentum to Nintendo, as the SNES had an incredible run of critical and commercial successes at the 1st, 2nd, 3rd party levels. One interesting aspect of a successful pre-Sonic Master System is that Sonic the Hedgehog, either as a game or as a character, never comes into existence, which in turn causes a lot of the 16-bit mascot platformer trend to get butterflied away and so it ends up being less commercially important, potentially resulting in strong Mario and Alex Kid franchises and fewer games in the genre as a whole. Maybe Sega ends up being the JRPG and adventure champ of the 16-bit era because of a Landale-driven Master System.
On a similar question about JRPGs and SRPGs in the 32-bit era, what if the incredible critical and commercial success of FF7 and FF Tactics in non-Japanese markets had encouraged Sega to push Shining Force 3 for aggressively, to released a next-generation traditional JRPG in the Phantasy Star universe, and develop and push other new and existing IPs in what were commercial "it" genres in the late-1990s? How does this happen? Do we have to keep Bernie Stolar and his anti-RPG stupidity at Sony for a couple of more years, thus encouraging Square to form a partnership with Sega in the wake of their fallout with Nintendo over the cartridge thing and Nintendo's shit treatment of 3rd party publishers? If this had happened and Sonic Xtreme had not been a monumental cock-up from the moment development started, what kind of position would Sega be in today?
So what kind of POD would allow the Master System and the NES to achieve similar levels success? Marketing? Stronger partnerships with established North American and European toy and electronic firms? Distribution? Including the high-end FM audio chip on versions released outside of Japan? Turning Alis Landale into an iconic, genre-agnostic heroine for the company? An emphasis on the company's origins as one that had been founded by American servicemen?
As for the 16-bit era, I think that the wave of games that came out around 1994ish, while giving the Genesis/Megadrive some magnificent titles, ultimately handed the momentum to Nintendo, as the SNES had an incredible run of critical and commercial successes at the 1st, 2nd, 3rd party levels. One interesting aspect of a successful pre-Sonic Master System is that Sonic the Hedgehog, either as a game or as a character, never comes into existence, which in turn causes a lot of the 16-bit mascot platformer trend to get butterflied away and so it ends up being less commercially important, potentially resulting in strong Mario and Alex Kid franchises and fewer games in the genre as a whole. Maybe Sega ends up being the JRPG and adventure champ of the 16-bit era because of a Landale-driven Master System.
On a similar question about JRPGs and SRPGs in the 32-bit era, what if the incredible critical and commercial success of FF7 and FF Tactics in non-Japanese markets had encouraged Sega to push Shining Force 3 for aggressively, to released a next-generation traditional JRPG in the Phantasy Star universe, and develop and push other new and existing IPs in what were commercial "it" genres in the late-1990s? How does this happen? Do we have to keep Bernie Stolar and his anti-RPG stupidity at Sony for a couple of more years, thus encouraging Square to form a partnership with Sega in the wake of their fallout with Nintendo over the cartridge thing and Nintendo's shit treatment of 3rd party publishers? If this had happened and Sonic Xtreme had not been a monumental cock-up from the moment development started, what kind of position would Sega be in today?