Square and Enix (before they became one) both jumped ship to PlayStation because they deemed the N64 cartridge's memory capacity far too small for the kind of games they wanted to make. And to that extent, they're probably right--Final Fantasy VII took three CDs as it was. A game across three cartridges would've cost a fortune, and that's assuming you somehow got a 1:1 rate between them. The RE2 N64 port is the only game that got close, and that was with a ton of clever compression and massive downsizing of audio and video. More likely it would've taken 5-10 carts.
A game across three cartridges would've cost a fortune, and that's assuming you somehow got a 1:1 rate between them
The problem is worse than that:
1. The largest NES cartridge is 64MB, a PS1 CD is 10x that, so imagine 30 carts
2. A lot of the data across the 3 discs is actually the same data. Think character models and attack animations for your party members, locations you can revisit at any time, the base world map, common soundtracks, etc. The disk to disk differences were mostly things like FMVs and event soundtracks as a result. So the minimum data for the game to run would exceed 1 cartridge. So not only would you have to swap discs at certain points in the story, you'd have to swap them at other points, e.g. because you were backtracking. Trying to gather a spell from a starter dungeon for Beta? Please remove Vincent from your party and insert cartridge 2.
I'm very thankful that a basic statement from myself like, "N64 was surprisingly devoid of memorable RPGs" would be met with input by people who were actually there, and provide first hand accounts. You are the folks who make Hacker News an absolute treat.
