Honest question. How did you guys cope with shit like this back

Don't force yourself to play games that you don't like. No matter what approach I take to explain why I enjoyed this aspect of such and such game, you'll definitely still shake your head and call me an idiot.

>>4184273
You give me far too little credit. I'm open to discussion and I'd like to hear your vies. I do enjoy the game, just not necessarily these parts of it. Its making progression a slog at times, and Now I feel overleveled because I spent the past 6 hours searching for the stupid thing.

NPCs give you hints for everything, just talk to everyone and write down what they say somewhere. I only had to look up a guide for one thing in DQ2, and I later ran into a NPC that had a hint for even that.

>>4184280
I did and the only hint for the sun seal was "In a shrine at the sea" Nowhere in there does it even remotely hint about the tree, or that I could even leave the map far enough to even check that tree. It looks like its past the barrier that would boot me back to the overworld.

Video games as a whole were still developing, as creators figured out design conventions essentially through trial and error. And players accepted these things because it was not always obvious to them what should be considered unacceptable. Everyone had a very limited frame of reference at the time. That doesn't mean that people accepted literally every stupid thing, but it can be surprising to a modern player how certain things simply weren't widely questioned or criticized. You can try looking up contemporary impressions of games over the years if you want to see how people's thoughts and feelings developed.

>>4184270
I play as far as I can, then I'll decide that I need a guide to progress and then I may or may not get around to reading a guide and might just drop the game...I never beat ALttP or FF7 due to being too lazy to find a guide for what I needed and I just played other games instead and forgot about it.

>>4184270
>"Hint" telling you to go 40 paces north and 70 west, which is NOWHERE near the location it actually is, in fact its clear across the opposite direction.
Yes, it's 40 paces south and 70 east from the castle.

>>4184319
>I never beat ALttP

I'm sorry but what part of ALTTP did you get stuck on? I seriously can't think of a single moment in that game that isn't literally fed to you on a silver platter without a guide. It gives you a clear goal and several clues on how to reach it and even the map shows the pendant locations right off the bat.

>>4184321
And who the hell is just going to honestly think "Hmm, well if north and west didn't work, I'll try two other arbitrary directions that will take me 10 minutes worth of navigating on the map.

>>4184316

Essentially, this. To me, DQ2 was fun because it really did feel like an adventure. I was bad at JRPGs back then, so just getting from one place to another felt like a great struggle and seeing a new town was its own reward. There were parts to it that, I'll admit, were complete bullshit. The Sun Crest more or less required a guide. But for me, the adventure feeling the game gave me far outweighed the nonsensical bullshit.

All that having been said, the game is probably one of my less favorite in the series. Have you played the other ones?

>>4184328
Working on it. I started from 1. Going on to 3 after.

>>4184326
>And who the hell is just going to honestly think "Hmm, well if north and west didn't work, I'll try two other arbitrary directions that will take me 10 minutes worth of navigating on the map.
Somebody who realized he didn't understand the hint and read it again.

>>4184334
>Somebody who realized he didn't understand the hint and read it again.

How does reading it twice magically cvhange the meaning? It still said 40N 7W. Even if you pulled some bullshit logic that W could be E, theres no way N translates to S

>>4184331
Not to hype 3 up too much, but it really is an absolutely fantastic game, and I'm really glad you're playing through the series in order because while it is a game that stands on its own, your enjoyment of it will be greatly enhanced by at least being familiar with 1 and 2. Anyway, with these older JRPGs, they can be very unclear, so don't feel self conscious about looking up guides if you're stuck too long.

>>4184337
Because it's 40N, 70E to the castle, not from it.

>>4184283
It's been a while since I've played DQ2, but don't you have an item that detects when there's a crest nearby?

>>4184339
.....Fucking hell. Okay fine. I concede.

>>4184283
The fact that it doesn't boot you back to the overworld is a hint in itself. Also, echoing flute.

Oddly, though I played the game on the original NES and didn't have any guide or hotline help, the sun crest wasn't what I had trouble finding. I could never remember where the place where you get the charm of rubiss was when I got all the crests, and had to sail all over the place until I randomly encountered it.

>>4184270
This is my favorite part of rpgs. I always wanted to get behind shit and search.

>>4184436
This, to anyone who'd played a few RPGs of the era a bush behind a building where you can walk to is like a bright red SEARCH ME sign

>>4184270
I think it's trash design but then again I don't have patience for jrpgs anymore so whatever.

>>4184339
>>4184350
I am amused just by this discussion of it. Awkward translation strikes again.

>>4184270
I also fell for this. This was about the only place where I didn't play the flute. I gained about ten levels while looking for the crest, so at least I wasn't underleveled for Rhone. The NPC directions in the GBC version are misleading, as
>>4184283 says.

>>4184270
Right now, I literally have more games to play than I have completed. Back in that era it was a long long time before you'd get a new rpg. Expectations were very different and you messed around with games people do speed runs on for a long time.

>>4184270
Back in the day you looked EVERYWHERE whenever you entered a new area.

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>>4184792
and that habit is what makes us so keenly aware of how limited the worlds of so many modern games are - or the opposite, so endless and empty that it's not even worth it.

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Well I just finished. Fuck those random maze segments

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>>4184803
shut the fuck up gramps

>>4184853
Go away frogposter

>>4184270
The game tells you exactly where the Loto Seal is in Dragon Quest I and in Dragon Quest II you have the Echoing Flute to find all the Crests.

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This is the bullshit thing that stuck out in my mind. Check the video at the 3 minute mark if you want to see the solution.
https://youtu.be/l9Tyj67JWyA?t=3m1s

>>4184270
Only thing I can really say for dealing with this sort of stuff is to build up your knowledge. If you keep playing these games you will gain a mental checklist of typical video game developer tricks and bullshit ways they do things.

It will soon become second nature to start humping walls, shooting at conspicuous blank spaces in the air or in your case trying to break out of the obvious borders in grid based RPG`s.

>>4184326
Not him but I was stuck in LttP for a long fucking time because of that statue in Kakariko. I had no idea you could just pull the bars off of it. Literally the only object of its kind in the whole game, and not something that looks like you could just pull it. With all the locked doors everywhere in the game you'd think there's some kind of mechanism to opening it. But no, you walk up to the gated passageway and just pull the fucking thing off. Obviously!

To be honest I'm surprised it isn't as infamous as the Maridia tube. It gave me difficulty for the same reasons the tube did for people, except I would argue that this is even more vague since you can see a destroyed tube in another room of super metroid. As far as I know in LttP there is no indication this is what you're supposed to do.

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>>4184829
congrats
I just played it for the first time myself last year
I always hear the NES versions require grinding, but the GBC versions were pretty smooth

>>4184270
Ancient hominids had better brains that were only rotted by a few TV channels.

>>4184270
as the wise ones once wrote: git gud

>>4184582
How did the different versions translate it?

>>4185037
>video
well that's some horseshit.

>>4185037
See. its exactly shit like this that astounds me. Things like this would be considered unfair and glitched in todays society, yet it was completely accepted and encouraged back then. I mean hell a dev could make a game longer than 8 hours just by adding a bunch of arbitrary blocked off hidden walls like this because people would spend days trying to find the solution alone.

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>>4184582
>Awkward translation strikes again.

>>4185421
Oh my god that part was the bane of my existence as a 12 year old. I believe I wasted 8 hours of game play trying to figure out what to do until I finally figured it out

finding the water dam was the worst part. The game does say "to the north" but that is not a great clue at all.

>>4184270
>I get you had community forums, nintendo help hotlines, and tips n tricks books, but come on.

Hint stuff from Nintendo Power, from the games' own packaging, and occasionally from friends and other sources smoothed over ALL these puzzles for me. I don't think I ever once solved a problem like the sun crest one all by myself as a kid. I dunno I guess I probably did and I'm forgetting. But it wasn't the norm for me.

I didn't care about spoilers then and I'd read anything related to video games that was put in front of me. Today I want to be able to erase my memory of the solutions to these puzzles and try them again without help, but of course I can't. Back then it was just never an issue.

When I did play games (as a kid) that were super obtuse in this way (Milon's Secret Castle and Legacy of the Wizard, for instance), I would just mess around in them without ever getting close to a solution or even very seriously trying to find one, lose interest after a while, and give up. We never actually owned any games of that sort; we only rented them. For the ones like Dragon Warrior 2 that we did own, we also had printed hint materials.

It just wasn't an issue. I can't even identify with the problem you describe even though I loved some of these games, because I just automatically cheated at this type of puzzle when the opportunity arose, and it often did arise.

(I can't even understand it now; how could you want to make an easy game even easier? And if a particular puzzle really is too hard, then you should at least work on it alone for a while before you get outside help. But I was a kid then and my brain was different.)

>>4184270

It was very much like DLC. If you wanted to finish the complete game, you had to call the 900 number hotline or buy a gamer magazine that had the answer in it. In most instances it was possible to find the completely out of the way solution, but you had to overturn every rock to find it.

>>4185057
You had to pull on a handle on several occasions by the time you get to the entrance of the fourth dungeon. You also had to lift up rocks several times in the second dungeon. It's not as if pulling on the statue's bars is that much different from earlier tasks you had to do to progress in LttP.

>>4185057
>>4185784
I admit, I was stuck on the turtle for way too much time because I believed only the rods would be able to deal damage.

the only thing that ever really got me is the fact that you can walk through some walls in second quest in Z1. introducing a whole new mechanic in a reshuffle of the game seemed very unexpected to me. found it when i gave up and just happened to press down

>>4184270
Back then we tried everything on everything, always. Sometimes it was frustrating, but frustration was a natural part of games honestly didn't get to us as much as it seems to get to the current generation. Also we had much more patience without dopamine addicted brains rotted by instant gratification shit games.

>>4186185
The worst part is that you have to PUSH against the wall for a second, you can't just walk right through it. It's a lot less likely to do it by accident because of that.

>>4186213
but the joy when i finally figured it out. i was ecstatic. kids these days will never experience that

>>4186217
Speak for yourself. I would have felt pissed off

>>4186252
Who let /v/ out of his cage again?

>>4184270
It wasn't like today where you have these online libraries full of games where anything you wanted was at your finger tips. A lot of times you really just took what you got back then. Since I was a kid I couldn't just buy new games either whenever I wanted so I might be stuck with the same game for a long time until we got a new one for my birthday, my brother's birthday, or Christmas, something like that. So you would get a game and just keep playing at it until you got past it because that is all you had.

What I remember in the early 90s to mid 90s, you just had to rely on guides for some shit. A lot of spoken word between kids, as well. Magazine would also have tips in them. But I remember by at least 1996 or 97 using a dial up modem to look up the Secret of Evermore guide on gamefaqs or some pure text based guide like you would find on gamefaqs to get past the that lost forest in the castle land.

>>4184326
I was trying to get into some dungeon as a kid and didn't know if I had everything I needed to get in and was just dumb or if I needed some item I missed and had no way of knowing without looking it up...hell, I wasn't even sure that's where I was supposed to be going at the time.

>>4184326
>>4185057
As a kid I was stuck for the longest time in the second pendant temple in the desert. You need to light up two torches to open up a door, but my non native English speaker self never figured out those grey blocks were torches. I figured the lamp harmed enemies and lighted up the way through dark rooms. I remember beating the Tower of Hera and all but being stuck for ages until by dumb luck I just happened to light up a "torch" tile by accident. It's pretty dumb, but it did happen to me as a kid.

>>4184270
Flawed games give purpose