Without knowing more about your game mechanics, I’ll make a few comments on RPG difficulty.

1. Don’t let the difficulty stay flat – this happened in BotW making the game boring after the 20 hour mark or so.  Octopath has this problem too. You simply get too powerful too quickly and the game stops engaging the player. 

2. Don’t let the numbers become unfathomable – many RPGs get to the point where you can’t conceptualize what a 1 point difference in stats actually means.  Paper Mario keeps the numbers easy to conceptualize, so 1 Damage at Level 1 means just as much as at Level 20.

3. Grinding shouldn’t determine all of your growth – It’s more fun to earn upgrades through exploring or overcoming challenges.  NES Zelda did this well – Rupees gave you access to things like the magic shield or health potions or even your first armour upgrade.  But Hearts, Sword Upgrades, and new equipment were found exploring and beating bosses.  

Again, can’t be specific without knowing more.  But I think the best outcome is one where your Level 1 Mob COULD still end you when you’re Level 20… you should always have to respect the enemy.

This email was marked as spam. I was able to save it.

I agree with all you said.

You know how Final Fantasy 6 has two parts? And how in those two parts, the game kinda ‘resets’ at the start of part 2? I’m doing something similar but with three parts. The game and world does change greatly. You are not stuck with the same characters.

I agree that exploration should be where the cool stuff is at.

How do I best describe my preferred level of RPG difficulty? “Moderate”? “Natural Progression”?

When I think of my experiences with the RPGs I’ve played, I don’t want the game to be a cakewalk. I don’t want the game to shepherd me through with no expectation that I actually work for anything. At the same time, I don’t want the game to feel like it’s applying an artificial “You must be Level X to proceed”.

I do want the game to be a challenge, but I want the challenge to come from figuring out the right strategy to actually beat the enemies rather than from having the willpower to run around in circles outside the next bosses lair to beat up on his minions till I’ve leveled up enough to face the boss properly.

Since you’re using Octopath Traveller as your point of reference: I enjoyed Octopath Traveller enough to beat the core game and complete each of the 8 character’s stories*. However, one of the key problems I had with the game was the grind. Far too often, I ran my characters around in circles to beat up on monsters in fights that had no purpose other than that my characters weren’t yet strong enough to advance to the next area. Maybe some of it can be credited to not playing the game in the way it was intended (I played the game primarily as if Ophilia was the ‘main character’, where the path primarily followed her story and the other character’s stories were advanced as Ophilia’s own path went near where the other stories took place), but I’m pretty sure that even when I was in one area where I was at a reasonable level to advance, I still ran into the problem of “You haven’t spent enough time in this boss’s dungeon yet, you need to beat up on his minions more before you’ll be strong enough to beat him!”

*I’ve never actually beaten OT’s post-game real final boss – I just did not have the patience to search every square foot of the game world looking for the exact right NPC to perform the exact right interaction with in order in order to kick off the absolute final boss challenge. No. Just no.

The game providing a challenge would absolutely be a good thing, but the challenge I would like to see should come from “You just don’t know how to beat this boss yet” rather than “You’re just not strong enough to beat this boss yet”. Certainly, if you can punish players for not upgrading their equipment, I would say that sounds like a fine idea since it’s far easier and faster to just buy better equipment than it is to run around looking for people to punch in the face like a pinata till XP falls out; likewise, bosses that are more than happy to give the player a really bad day if the players are just trying to speedrun to the end sound good as well. (though if they can still find a way to actually win while seeing at little of the game as possible, all the more power to them).

I don’t know how much it will help since it’s a real-time combat RPG rather than turn-based RPG, but one game where I think of it and say “This game has the perfect difficulty scaling” is Ys VIII: Lacrimosa of Dana. At no point did the game feel too difficult, but neither did the game ever feel like it was going too easy on me – the challenge it presented felt just right, landing in the perfect sweet spot. What I think made this work was that the number of enemies I had to fight while I was naturally exploring and the scaling difficulty of those enemies was at just the right level where by the time I finally got to a boss fight, my characters had scaled up to just the right level for the fight to be a challenge without feeling like I just hadn’t spent enough time beating up on lesser minions.

Also, on your note of nerfing rather than raising up – you may well have considered this already, but if you set the difficulty level of your game too hard at first, perhaps rather than nerfing the enemies, you could instead consider introducing items or skills that would instead buff the player characters to match.

Might even be a way of introducing a de facto scaling difficulty system, but one that takes place ‘in-universe’. The players who want a super-difficult challenge could play the ‘core’ game, but those who want an easier time could be presented with the option to acquire “secret” abilities, items, and upgrades that give the party a major boost to their power level.

— Longtime Reader

I did accidently have a programming left in by mistake that did ‘level scaling’ to all my enemies. So when I did a playthrough of the game, I was like, “Man, oh man, this is balanced perfectly!!!” hahaha. It felt so challenging at earlier levels. But then I realized I could never outlevel anything. The monsters were leveling with me! Then I discovered the programming mistake. “Oh nooooo!” Hahahaha.

I’ve always believed RPG difficulty is regulated by the player. The player has the ability to get gear and levels if they are in a progress choke somewhere. The only way a progress choke has appeared yet is if the player chooses to never fight any enemies. Then the player is too weak at the choke. You’ve got to fight something my friend.

I also played Ophilia as my main in Octopath Traveler. Octopath Traveler’s flaw is the formulaic nature of the game. The music is grand. The battle system is awesome. The pixel art is great. But the formulaic nature of progression gets tedious fast.

I think one big part of RPG difficulty is maintaining that feeling of growth. Of course, I am an asshole in my game as characters will take off on you. There is no main character. There is some flux there. But the arcs all have growth feelings.

I get the impression it isn’t that people don’t dislike difficulty. They dislike tediousness. If difficulty means boring grinding, then that is not what they want. If difficulty means surprise and change of tactics, then yes.

Alright… Second time I’m sending an email to this address. Didn’t get a response the first time but apparently emails were going to the Spam folder, so I hope I still got the right address and this is not a second email to some unrelated person who happens to be called Sean Malstrom. More apologies if that’s the case, ignore this email again if that’s the case (or just tell me I got the wrong person haha)

About the subject at hand: I’m not much of an RPG player but I AM currently enjoying the Xenoblade series, which ease many of my pains with your typical JRPGs. I can say difficulty is not really something I’m looking for in these games, as long as I feel engaged in the combat systems and battles last long enough for me to take advantage of it (Xenoblade DE has a “casual mode” where every enemy’s HP melts before you can have any fun). I want difficulty to be just enough that it encourages me to interact with the systems*, but not enough that I get stuck and have to grind elsewhere (I despise grinding in most games).

One approach I like is making the game FEEL difficult without really being so. In Omori, even basic encounters can kill party members fairly easily if you’re not careful, but the game offers many avenues to restoring health and reviving fallen members… So it feels like you’re being constantly challenged even though you’re going through smoothly.

* – Of course, that’s when the systems are good! There’s always a risk the game forces me to embrace a facet of gameplay I hate.

Nope to spam folder! First email I got from you on this subject. Went straight to inbox.

Now, my email account is doing all this AI stuff. I open up my email, and AI is telling me summaries of your emails! Too funny!

It’s interesting you brought up Omori. Do people realize that Omori is a RPG Maker game? It’s true!

I think the programmer was Archeia. That does sound like her personality.

I need to play through Xenoblade (all of them).

Master Malstrom,

As to how difficult your RPG should be, I can only speak of myself in that I prefer games that don’t force me to repeat large portions of a level. It can be challenging, just don’t send me all the way back to the beginning and force me to replay battles I’ve already won. Unless… the battles are so much fun that I don’t remind replaying them.

I can agree to that. I don’t like random battles because of that. Too much repetition.

One thing JRPGs do is they have the ‘must save at the crystal/save point’. I hate that shit. I allow save anywhere.

“But that allows save scumming! OMG!”

I like save scumming. You can freely save and reload at anytime. This way, I can blow you up more easily! Bahahahaha!

Above: “Don’t pet the dog, reader.” I save the game and pet the dog anyway. So hilarious!

Above: In 1988, I got to this part and went, “She’s trouble!” and saved my game. Too bad you can’t do that in real life!

Master Malstrom,

You recently asked this question, and it’s something that I’ve often thought about. Imagine the following scenario…

Imagine if Nintendo never felt the need to respond to the Sega Genesis. After all, the 8-bit games of the NES defeated the 16-bit games of the computer game industry. Why couldn’t the NES have defeated the 16-bit games of the Sega Genesis, especially since the NES cost so much less?

Imagine if, instead of releasing the SNES in 1991, Nintendo had simply kept supporting the NES with a new Super Mario Brothers game every two years. If this had happened, I doubt that Sega would have ever been able to seriously challenge Nintendo.

Next, imagine if Nintendo had waited until 1995 or 1996 to release a 16-bit console. Imagine it having a Super Mario Brothers pack-in game with 4-player multiplayer. Would the Sony PlayStation have been able to overthrow Nintendo in such a scenario? I seriously doubt it.

It wasn’t Sega that forced Nintendo to make a 16-bit console. It was Hudson with the PC-Engine. PC-Engine made impressive inroads in Japan.

Even if there were no competing consoles, I think the third parties would make major releases in PC gaming. Even on… the Amiga. The Amiga would have been a thing.

Third parties were fed up with Nintendo. Genesis got where it was because third parties were revolting. But Sega employed the same practice as Nintendo frustrating third parties. It wasn’t until Sony’s PlayStation that came around which they all flocked on.

Without a ‘console war’, we would have all those Genesis games and all those PC-Engine games on the SNES. That could be cool. It would be sweet for the gamer.

But I think Nintendo would be a sitting duck when Sony comes in next generation. The gamer would be in a better position, but I think Nintendo would be in a weaker position.

Competition really did drive a boot up Nintendo’s ass. I guarantee you wouldn’t have gotten Donkey Kong Country or Super Mario All-Stars without the console war. Maybe not even Street Fighter 2 on the SNES. And Nintendo would have likely raised their prices to $100 a game or something.

Hi master Malstrom.

I believe my previous email went to the trash because of the subject.

Anyway.

I think the emailer who tried to deny that the SNES was at one point behind Sega is pedantically correct but totally misses the point. Maybe he’s too young and didn’t live through that era of gaming, or maybe he did but was too young to be aware of how things were really going.

I love how everyone wants to re-fight the 16-bit Console War! Hahaha.

You never hear this passion about Generation 2 or Generation 1. “Gee Malstrom, that Pong clone machine sold more than that Pong clone! Get it together!” haha.

Master Malstrom – going to hit you with two different topics in one email this time.

For RPG difficulty, I think it’s important to put actual challenges in the player’s way that require effort to overcome, so that they feel a sense of accomplishment. Just steamrolling everything can be fun, but I wouldn’t call it satisfying, unless I’m going through a previously tough area with my pumped-up party.

There are two ways you can do this. You can turn bosses and enemies into level checks and force the player to grind, like NES RPGs or 7th Saga, or you can make the player use the systems you’ve built in creative ways to succeed, which allows them to tune the challenge to their liking as a side effect. I think that both are useful, but the latter results in a greater sense of achievement and player satisfaction.

The two examples that come to mind are Final Fantasy V and Octopath Traveler. FFV has almost twice as many boss fights as any other FF game. There is always a “right” combination of jobs/abilities that will easily beat them, but you can also try fighting them in unconventional ways (and you often have to if you’re playing with FJF rules), which is harder but more satisfying. Even if you just use the “right” combo, you feel good about it because you were able to figure it out and overcome the challenge.

Octopath has boss fights like Redeye that mess with the mechanics and force you to think on your feet, but the culmination of this philosophy is the Galdera fight right at the end, which demands both expert knowledge AND execution from the player. I cursed every time he beat me, but once I finally put that bastard down, it was exhilarating. Not every fight should be like this – that battle is easily the most intense one I’ve ever experienced in an RPG – but making the player feel that there’s a real chance they might not be able to pull this out now and then is important.

It’s also nice to have a couple of optional superbosses with commensurate rewards to really test the hardcore players. There’s also nothing wrong with having an occasional roadblock boss that requires some light grinding, or a game-breaking combo that the player can exploit. My point is, don’t be like modern Bungie and declare “there is only one correct way to play my game, which is MINE.” You don’t strike me as that kind of person anyway, but I’m just throwing it out there.

Regarding Slop Kart World, I think that modern corporate Nintendo made a fundamental mistake of assuming that correlation equals causation, i.e. “Mario Kart sells a sh!tload of copies on every one of our hardware platforms; therefore, people must be buying our hardware because of Mario Kart.” If you plot each Mario Kart game’s release date against its hardware launch date, they tend to come out a little after a year after launch, on average. Here are the North American hardware launch dates and release dates for every mainline Mario Kart game. I didn’t include 8 Deluxe on Switch because it was a direct port and came out a month after launch:

SNES: 11/91, 9/92 (10 months)

N64: 9/96, 2/97 (5 months)

GBA: 6/01, 8/01 (2 months)

GC: 11/01, 11/03 (2 years)

DS: 11/04, 11/05 (1 year)

Wii: 11/06, 4/08 (1 year 5 months)

3DS: 2/11, 12/11 (10 months)

Wii U: 11/12, 5/14 (1 year 6 months)

Average = 98 total months / 8 games = 12.25 average months from hardware launch to Mario Kart release.

From this, I believe that Mario Kart’s actual job is to restart hardware sales after the launch hype dies down. The one case where this doesn’t make sense is the GBA, which I thought sold pretty strongly out of the gate and thus wouldn’t need a Mario Kart jumpstart. Maybe they had it done quickly because it was a handheld game, or maybe they didn’t expect it to take off and just threw it out there. N64 makes sense because it launched with 2 games and only had 8 in the entire library by the end of 1996 (keep f***in’ that “N64 was awesome” chicken, fanboys).

This data suggests that Nintendo puts Mario Kart games out right around when people would start losing interest in their shiny new Nintendo box. Mario Kart is also great fun to play with friends, and I bet this stimulates lots of hardware sales. Potential customers who were interested in the system but not on the launch bandwagon, or even those who aren’t interested in video games at all, will play Mario Kart with their friends and decide to take the plunge on the hardware to get it for themselves. Therefore, I would modify your assertion of “Mario Kart doesn’t sell Nintendo hardware” to “Mario Kart doesn’t sell Nintendo hardware to hardcore fans or early adopters, but it DOES sell it to the ‘expanded audience.’”

In short, if I’m right, this is yet another typical short-sighted MBA executive move to try to maximize profits. They’ll get a bunch of sales now, but unless another hit game comes out of nowhere, they now have no lever to pull to spark hardware sales after the launch hype dies down. All of the hardware that would have been sold after the launch hype died down will instead be front-loaded into the launch window, and the sales won’t be nearly as much because A) hardware launches are always supply-constrained, so those later sales may never materialize, B) Nintendo has implemented insane anti-consumer practices which are turning off the non-influencer, non-Nintendo-fan-as-adult-Disney-fan markets, C) Nintendo has lessened the appeal of a new Mario Kart by spending the last few years milking its fans with DLC packs, and D) like the Wii U, this Mario Kart isn’t different or new enough compared to the last one to get folks to jump on board.

Anyways, that’s my theory. Let me know what you think.

Notably Unstable,

The Rampant Reader

There you have it, folks. The Rampant Reader has spoken.

There may be more to Slop Kart World’s choice of flagship game than just the IP’s high sales numbers. The Switch 2 is being designed as a SOCIAL NETWORKING console. This is why you see Nintendo emphasize the camera, the video chat, the group play, etc. You’re not going to get that social play experience from 3d Mario or Zelda. You will get it from Mario Kart.

Remember the Eras of Gaming? At first, it was the Tabletop Era of Gaming where video games were imitating tabletop board games or card games or D&D games (or carnival games if you look at the arcades). 3D era went into the Cinema Era of Gaming where every game was trying to become a movie. Now with the Internet Era we are going into the Social Era of Gaming. A game developer is not designing their game to be WATCHED, they are designing their game to be STREAMED. And they are inciting everyone to participate in a network way.

I do not like Social Era because my mental health suffers when I play with other people in games. It is why I have become more single player focused. But this is common around my age range. Younger people want their ‘digital community’ and all. We did the same exact thing back in the day.

Slop Kart World is to amplify the Nintendo Network.

So this gives us a preview of the games Nintendo will push hard on. It will be all games that amplify the Nintendo Network. Splatoon series will do this. Smash Brothers will do this. Animal Crossing will do this. As for 3d Mario and Zelda, I expect those games will be re-tooled to become network amplifying.

I admit I must change my mindset from thinking a console game is to demonstrate the console hardware. Today, the console game’s job is to demonstrate the console network. Slop Kart World does exactly that.

About the RPG Difficulty:

Final Fantasy V I will be doing a deep dive later on. (Meaning me playing it again, slowly, taking notes, etc.) I’m not as familiar with Final Fantasy V because I am an American (though I have played through it on emulator, I own and played the GBA version of it as well). It wasn’t released in America! Well, not until much later. And at that time, it was a retro game!

I can recreate any battle encounters or experiences in the Octopath Traveler games. I do agree the boss battles are super cool in Octopath. The problem with Octopath Traveler is that if you got the cool gear, it trivializes the content and the game got boring FAST. Even if the player gets too powerful in my game, the game plays out more like a Final Fantasy 6 than a formulaic Octopath Traveler.

One difference I have with game developers is that I believe story, or in this case, ‘vibe’, should be the horse and not the carriage. What I mean by this is simple. The story or the vibe of the game will go where it goes. It will shape the gameplay.

Now, some people cry about this. “It should be pure gameplay form.” But if you do that, you end up with Octopath Traveler which is a boring formula. The gameplay is very good, but it is too formulaic. There is a reason why Final Fantasy 4 and 6 are more well liked than, say, Final Fantasy 3 and 5.

Also, I am using my memory and going back. There was a very small game company who decided to let the ‘story’ / ‘vibe’ define where the game was going. And they would obviously respond to it. This very small game company was called Blizzard. The infamous Blizzard cutscenes was when Blizzard noticed the outsourced Warcraft 2 cutscenes were so popular and so immersive that Blizzard put it all in-house. In many ways, people bought and played to the next level of single player campaigns because they wanted to know where the story would go.

Let me give an example of vanilla World of Warcraft, a game clearly no one played. In order to be ‘story consistent’, the last areas of the game are in the Plaguelands. There is no town. No inn. It is very annoying to have to trek through everywhere. But it is this ‘story element’ that creates that friction.

You can see this in Ultima. The world of Brittannia has its shape and continents. And the next game is bound to that same shape and continents. It forces the developer to do certain things. Did that hurt the game? Was Ultima 7 a worse game because it was using the same world map as Ultima 4? No.

An indie game focused on ‘vibe’ to make a hit. This game was called FTL. FTL focused entirely on the vibe that you were Captain Picard commanding your crew in a starship. All the gameplay bent the knee to that vibe.

Why we play games and what keeps us playing games is a subject that will never be exhausted. I just remember playing Final Fantasy 4 and wanting to kill that next boss because I wanted to see where this crazy story would go! Hahaha. I remember NES Ninja Gaiden playing it to get to the next cinematic cutscene.

I hear gamers say, “I play for the story,” and I understand what they mean. They don’t mean ‘cinema experiences’ where the player is passive. They don’t want to play a formula. The so-called ‘pure gameplay’ games create their own story such as Civilization.

Keep the RPG tips coming in. I have only posted a couple so far. I am happy to see that people do want some… pushback… coming from the enemies. They don’t want the game to be a pushover (think Final Fantasy 6 when everyone has Ultima), but they don’t want it to be a slog.

It is also helpful when people point to their favorite times of RPG such as specific boss fights or even dungeon experiences.

I’ll keep it to the point. I don’t know if it applies to your game, but my ideal of an RPG dungeon is:

1) you are appropriately leveled and equipped if you never run from battles

2) this doesn’t mean the road is easy: you have to back-track to recover MPs, but the next time(s) you will get farther because of your higher level, better equipment, shortcuts opened and knowledge of the direct path.

You and I are of the same mind. I know the first leg and second leg of my game, for sure (since it is the easiest to test), number 2 definitely applies. Here is some more information for you guys.

Winning a battle does NOT recover HP and MP.

No random battles. On-Map enemies. Enemies do not respawn.

While the player is given many ways to avoid enemies (dodging them on the map, using on-map abilities to stun or confuse them, etc.), you can eliminate the enemies entirely. (One reason why I went with this is to prevent the player from OVER-GRINDING. Enough already, player. It is time to move on.)

Fast Travel, in terms of ‘teleportation’, doesn’t appear until later. So, yes, the player has to, at the beginning, march all the way back to the town to rest (or use items in the field).

When I first started my project many, many years ago, a consistent complaint was that the ‘enemies were too easy’. They just sat there and didn’t do much. So I am allowing the enemy to kick your ass. I think the player likes to have their ass kicked. They then come back all determined and angry!

This was a post-scriptum to my previous mail. I figured it deserved its own reply?

I have no interest in buying a Switch 2. Compromised physical releases, weak first-party games as demonstrated by most new Nintendo games in the last two or three years, and weak console in regards to the PS5 released 5 years ago.

In fact, I struggled with recent Switch games because of performances. It was always a risky bet that a second- or third-party game would run correctly on the system. The tipping point was with Romancing Saga 2 Revenge of the Seven. The atrocious loading times and choppy animations had the better of me. After twenty hours or so, I gave up and sold it because I was wasting my first experience of the game. Instead, I finally purchased a PS5 for Romancing Saga 2, Metaphor Refantazio and Astro Bot. All great games. (Romancing Saga 2 reminds me of Harvestella: a AA game from Square-Enix that is far more fun than it should be. I recommend it to you as much as you recommended Harvestella to us.)

Given that Switch 2 is already outdated, I do not want to experience this kind of headaches again.

Worse, PS5s come with a free game: Astro’s Playroom. It is so good (it’s a joy simply to move and jump around! provided one loves 3D plateformers) that I bought its sequel. And it’s great with children too, making it the perfect excuse for a dad to buy it, ha, ha! Switch 2 on the other hand… You often joke about artists who love to smell the odour of their own farts. That is what engineers did on Switch 2 with Nintendo Switch 2 Welcome Tour, this paid tutorial showing the technical novelties of the console.

I loved Switch 1. I bought all my favourite indies games on it for the sweet physical cartridges, even if I played them on PC. But the Switch 2 won’t do. A great exclusive may convince me otherwise, but it needs to be really convincing as I am rather hostile towards the console for now.

The Savvy Reader

There you have it. The Savvy Reader has spoken.

I do need to purchase Romancing Saga 2. But I am currently on a budget freeze due to crushing life events.

Romancing Saga 2 did get an oldschool remaster.

Above: Glorious pixels.

Can someone tell me how the 3d version of Romancing Saga 2 differs from the pixel remaster version? I already have the pixel remaster version.

The SNES did not sell 22 million in the U.S.  That emailer appears to be using the North American numbers, which are around 23.5 million.  The U.S. is not North America.

Nintendo has previously stated on its website that the SNES sold 20 million in the U.S.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Super_Nintendo_Entertainment_System

If you go to footnote 56, there’s an archived version of the Nintendo website entry, though it’s not displaying correctly for me.  It’s saying I need to download a Flash player.  But I have seen this website entry before when it was displaying correctly.  It really does say 20 million.

https://web.archive.org/web/20031209153741/http://www.nintendo.com/systemsclassic?type=snes

The Genesis numbers are more difficult to determine.  They may very well be 18.5 million.  See page 37 of this Wedbush report from 2014.

https://web.archive.org/web/20220323201155/https://equities.wedbush.com/clientsite/Research/ActionAlertFilePreview.asp?UUID=E4AFF57F-DDBC-437F-8520-AF38BEDD3E43

Also, for a good laugh, look at page 11.

“There have only been three ‘real’ console cycles before the current one—the PlayStation cycle that began in 1995, the PS2 cycle that began in 2000 and the Xbox 360/PS3 cycle that began in 2005/06.”

Anyway, getting back to the Genesis.  If we travel back in time, then the numbers should presumably become more accurate, right?  That’s a simple legal concept.  That the closer a witness’s statement was made to the actual event that took place, the more reliable it should be.

This New York Times article from 1998 claims 20 million for the Genesis in the U.S.

https://web.archive.org/web/20131002205300/http://www.nytimes.com/1998/03/14/business/international-business-sega-enterprises-pulls-its-saturn-video-console-us-market.html?pagewanted=1

It was cited in this blog post:

https://segatastic.blogspot.com/2009/12/mega-drive-sales-figures-update.html

So yes, the SNES/Genesis war was neck and neck in the U.S.  You already addressed Donkey Kong Country.  I thought people already knew that it took DKC to get to the SNES to start outselling the Genesis, but oh well.

Good work, emailer. Sega, the Red Ocean Console Company, carving out marketshare made Nintendo begin to adopt a Red Ocean mindset. And this Red Ocean mindset would persist into the N64 and Gamecube eras.

What would be an interesting ‘what if’ is if the 16-bit console war never happened. How would Nintendo respond to Sony then? Perhaps Sony would be stronger since there would be more third parties pissed off at Nintendo with a Nintendo dominated 16-bit era? Perhaps Nintendo would be more arrogant then and wouldn’t be able to pivot.

The great ‘pivot’ of Nintendo with the DS and Wii shows that the collapse of Sega definitely impacted Nintendo and cut through their status quo way of thinking.