LogFAQs > #981521045

Leonhart4 posted...

I'm always surprised whenever people are surprised Mario RPG is strong

It never received a European release until the remake, and even in the regions where it did release it was only a few months before the release of the N64--I vaguely remember seeing a testimonial from someone who only played it for the first time with the Switch remake who said it was a simple matter of their birthday not being in the right part of the year for them to be getting any more SNES games after SMRPG came out, because they solely relied on getting them on birthdays and Christmas and by the time one of those came up again it was already all about the N64. It's a great game, but it getting overlooked wouldn't be surprising either.

I legitimately feel like it winning that match in 2004 is more surprising than its run in 2015, because by 2015 the site was mostly only frequented by the real hardcore gaming nerds that won't overlook anything.

Yesmar_ posted...

109. Golden Sun vs. Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (Fall 2010) R2

Is there a more definitive Only on GameFAQS result than this one? You have (following opinions not my own!) a Game of the Decade Contest where one of the most acclaimed, definitive games of its generation loses to a JRPG from a second rate series that no ones cared about in years. This is a result that would be almost beyond comprehension on any other site, and even on GameFAQS it was almost beyond ours. Despite a disappointing 2009 contest for the GTA team, especially San Andreas, it entered the contest as the heavy favorite in this match. Sure, it had lost to Tales of Symphonia in 2009, but that was a narrow loss, and ToS was a cult hit that had a lot of devoted fans. Did anyone really still care about Golden Sun in the year of our Lord 2010?

I've always felt that this board underestimated handheld games. I mostly noticed it when it came to them being surprised by Pokemon holding up to Nintendo SFF as well as it did, which I always attributed to the fact that even when they were losing the console wars, Nintendo always dominated the market on handhelds, to the point that the GBC's "biggest" competition was the Neo Geo Pocket Color and the GBA's was...the Japan-exclusive Bandai Wonderswan. Or for the rest of the world, the never-released-in-Japan Nokia N-Gage. Yes, seriously. The Wonderswan and the N-Gage are the #2 and #3 handhelds of the sixth generation by sales. And here's the point I'm about to make. The GBA, Gamecube, and XBox all came out in 2001. The Nintendo DS came out in 2004, the XBox 360 in 2005, and the Wii in 2006. The GBA outsold the Gamecube and XBox combined.

And Golden Sun was one of its first big hits. I'd long known that the first two games were originally meant to be a single game and were split up due to hardware constraints, but what I didn't realize until I was looking up dates for this, but that's because it was originally meant to be an N64 game. A full-fledged console game.