it's always kind of amusing when you read some of these IGN/Polygon or whoever "long-form" histories [of RPGS/NINTENDO/WHATEVER] that ignore that Nintendo essentially subsidized Square and Enix, famously taking a bath on importing Dragon Warrior, as part of their attempts to convince the US population that the NES could compete with PC's and weren't just arcade titles rehashed endlessly like doomed the market earlier
then truly successfully won over the older market with the Game Boy
just to get their teeth kicked in by Sega and Sony's advertising regimes, with the terrible "PLAY IT LOUD" era albeit producing the SNES's eventual "win" of market share, the period when it put out arguably the consoles best titles across multiple niches, eased up on third parties, and survived in the market against the flailing 32-bit era as the N64 delays piled up, just for Nintendo to abandon nearly everything they had learned and, tying this back into the original thing, most notably completely abandoning RPG's not only in the US, but in Japan right when the Sony-Square-EA partnership took them from good sellers for video games into titles that moved consoles and flooded the PS1 market with them
now this is where some dickbag tries to tell me Aidyn Chronicles: The First Mage was actually pretty okay and i just slap Robin while yelling that THQ IS DEAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAADDDDDDDD
