started playing a new game last night: dragon warrior monsters 2, originally for gbc. its ovbs a dragon quest-type rpg but it also tries to be a pet raising sim.
im only like 30-40 minutes into the game and like most games of the era, theres kind of an arbitrary inciting incident that is moved through quickly to get you to the meat of the gameplay. however this opening bit of this game is completely player led rather than a bunch of cutscenes and other cooler characters doing cool things you can aspire to one day be. i tried getting through breath of fire on gba and while that opening was cool, i dont really feel connected to the world as much.
conversely in this game i was encouraged to talk to everyone and they all blew off a warning i was sent to deliver because i was a kid, but minor spoiler, there's a merchant in the opening area that wants to open a shop but once he hears the bad news he leaves! and stays gone! like there was an active choice on my part to approach this guy and tell him stuff might be fucked and he listened and the game actually changed to accommodate that. the dialogue of a bunch of npcs change after certain story beats, encouraging you to talk to people again after stuff has happened.
what im saying is that while this game is for babby kids who dont know much about rpgs (which i appreciate because i am Bad at other dragon quest games), the game's writing and story progression so far feels so Modern??? like the more i play of this game the more i feel like i want to make an adventure game almost exactly like this.
the game boy color era of games is defo nostalgic for me, but at the same time i am rarely disappointed by games i revisit from this era since even if they weren't successful or "good" they all tried very very different things.