If you were bored after that cliffhanger in the plot, I can’t see much point to continuing Chrono Trigger.

I’d finish out Magus’s Castle, because that does change things some. But if you’re still not having fun after beating Magus, it’s time to cut bait.

Everyone says DQ5, for good reason, so I’m going to suggest some other options. Please keep in mind that these are 8-bit games, so their dialogue is less copious and their art style is more retro than anything else.

DQ4 is my favorite. Every version has its own problems, although the mobile version [sic] might have the fewest for someone who isn’t comfortable playing in Japanese. It’s broad rather than deep: it’s got a big cast but doesn’t go as deeply into each character as DQ8 does. If you like the Middle Ages parts of Chrono Trigger, DQ4 is a lot like that scenario at full game length.

If you’re able to go even further back, DQ1 is calling. It’s a simple and grindy game, but you will learn the basics of JRPGs and have a solid foundation for DQ2 and DQ3. (You don’t have to play DQ2 before DQ3.)

As a fan of Chrono Trigger, how far did you get? There’s a section that’s noticeably duller than the rest before it picks up again.

https://archipelago.gg/ is not the same thing, but you can set up a multi-person, multi-game asynchronous randomizer that usually lasts for days because Link’s sword is in the Marsh Cave, but to get to the Marsh Cave you need the ship and the ship is in Pewter Gym…

It’s a real shame that they broke font fallback and it’s staying broken. That was one of the main reasons I’ve been sticking with Firefox and I’m going to have to find a new browser if they don’t fix it soon.

Crystalis has forced or near-forced grinding due to level requirements to hurt bosses, so it’s on the fence. If its progression were a little smoother it would be a shoo-in.

There is a hack to remove boss level requirements but fighting a boss below the intended level may not be fun.

StarTropics on NES. It’s a near-clone of Zelda 1, but harder. I’ve heard some really bad things about how LCD lag and emulator lag affect gameplay, though.

Faxanadu on NES maybe? It’s side-scrolling, but otherwise fits. It does have a level system but leveling doesn’t seem to affect your basic stats.

If side-scrolling works for you, Faxanadu isn’t a million miles away from Castlevania II and the Igavanias, and those are closely related to the Metroid series and newer “Metroidvanias”.

CrossCode seems too puzzle-heavy and stat-heavy and loot-heavy, but it’s adjacent for sure.

Nay

I think we should be wary and keep them on a short leash, but I don’t see them causing enough trouble here in October 2025 to defederate. If I’d wanted a safe space I would have gone to Beehaw.

Sounds like point and click adventures might be your jam? Check out the Macventures (which had NES ports, although some of the ports go past your cutoff date): Deja Vu, Shadowgate, Uninvited.

Point and click adventures were a very popular genre at the time, although they had a well-earned reputation for difficulty and illogic. Someone who knows more about them could give you more specific advice.

I played a lot of JRPGs, and it’s hard to recommend JRPGs of the period. They’re rather different from both their 90s descendants and their late 80s WRPG contemporaries, and you look like you would much prefer 90s JRPGs. The 80s have two phases: the antique JRPGs focused on exploring the world with a simple plot, and the pre-classic JRPGs with a much heavier focus on plot not yet accompanied by much skill at storytelling or pacing. The best of the antique JRPGs is Dragon Quest 3/Dragon Warrior 3 (1988). It’s a little complex to just jump into, so if you bounce off the complexity I would retreat to Dragon Quest/Dragon Warrior (1986). If Dragon Warrior’s grinding weren’t so slow, it would be easy to recommend as a tutorial game to anyone trying to get into JRPGs.

If you’ll take a game from 1990 on the nose, Dragon Quest 4/Dragon Warrior 4 is the most polished pre-classic JRPG in your time range. If not, Phantasy Star 2 (1989). But these games are hard to recommend nowadays to someone with modern tastes because they’re not as polished as Dragon Quest 3 and don’t have a 1990s-sized storage device for better storytelling and writing. The one thing I’ll say for Phantasy Star 2’s writing is that it has the guts to go places that games even now rarely go.

On thinking it over, “proper” spelling of foreign words has done its own share of damage to English spelling. We don’t just have to learn our own spelling conventions, we also have to learn foreign ones. Or not (sent to you from Cairo, Illinois, locally pronounced “care-oh”)

It’ll be part of the great English spelling reform. Until then, it’s going to be spelled the way we Romanized Greek in the 16th century.

You’re about twenty centuries too late on the χ thing. You’re gonna need to go back and talk to the Romans.

It’s because -us is the Latin second declension nominative singular, and its nominative plural is -i. People educated enough to know the -us/-i pattern (cactus/cacti, alumnus/alumni, stimulus/stimuli) but unaware that “octopus” is Greek and has an irregular stem are likely to misapply the Latin pattern.

As a manga reader, I disliked the exam arc, but I’ve appreciated what has been built on it and you’ll see that in season 2.

Funny, just a few weeks ago I read a comment elsewhere about how Frieren’s worldbuilding is unrealistic. Like its JRPG ancestor Dragon Quest 3, there’s no obvious source of food to support the walled cities of the Northern Countries. Feeding all the people in Äußerst or Eiseberg would need miles and miles of surrounding farms, not forests. I didn’t mind that on an NES, because a world map at its scale wouldn’t show farms anyway. It’s more of an issue in a manga.

You’ve got it reversed. Nothing whose value increases long-term can be a good replacement for fiat currency, because then anyone with crypto will ask “should I buy this today when I know that everything will cost fewer coins next year?” and at the very best you get Japan’s Lost Decades forever.

That’s not to say that the average shitcoin would work better as a fiat currency than baseball cards, but they might not be doomed at the design stage – although they probably were to bring in the initial base of speculators who now need to find a bigger fool willing to trade something immediately usable for the shitcoin.

Give it at least until you reach Junon.

That said, I never liked FF7 as much as I liked FF6. FF6 has an ensemble cast, so if Terra doesn’t speak to you, one of half a dozen other characters can pick up the slack. I felt that FF7 relies on your attachment to Cloud and the rest of the cast matters less.