> What's odd to me, is that almost no one on the N64 chose to simply recreate 2D graphics from the SNES era with improved quality. A quality JRPG built with SNES-like graphics would have still sold just fine, but I think the belief back then was that everything had to be 3D and cutting edge to sell.
I think that's something that's easy to say in hindsight, but hard to justify at the time.
The switch to 3d gaming was probably the biggest technological leap games ever had. 3d allowed a huge amount of experiences not possible with 2d games. And while early 3d games look incredibly dated now, at the time they were mind blowing and cutting edge. The SNES and Genesis were also too recent to really have any nostalgia, so and thus no real desire for throwback or "retro" titles. Any 2d game on the N64 would probably have felt cheap and dated at the time.
Finally, for Nintendo specifically, they did release 2d titles during the N64 generation. They just released them for the Game Boy (and later, Game Boy Color). There wasn't much sense devoting resources to make a 2d game on the N64 when your 2d-only console is still selling really well.
I'm not talking about Nintendo themselves, per se. They did a phenomenal job with the titles they did make for N64, including of course Ocarina of Time (a masterpiece) and I'll also never forget how revolutionary Super Mario 64 was.
I'm mainly talking about 3rd party publishers and specifically the JRPG genre. The N64 suffered from a lack of games compared to PS1. It was difficult to do 3D development back then, developers were just getting the hang of it.
In fact that you bring up Game Boy dev as a thriving platform for 2D content is an important point. Pokemon came out during this era. And a 2D N64 based Pokemon would have sold like hotcakes. Instead they built these half baked 3D Pokemon experiences like Pokemon Snap and Pokemon Stadium, which featured no storyline and no overworld.
Even something resembling Super Mario RPG with prerendered graphics on a isometric view would have been fine. It just wasn't generally done on N64. Everyone wanted to mimic Mario 64. The few RPGs N64 did get, like Quest 64, felt so empty, that it would have been much better to just ship it in 2D.
You’re right that Pokémon on consoles would have been great, but you’re conflating some stuff that easily explains why it didn’t happen. First is the idea that Pokémon is a Nintendo franchise. It’s convoluted, but let’s say Nintendo has a stake that allows them some control but they cannot control Game Freak, the developer of Pokémon, directly.
Second is Game Freak proper. They have always valued a small headcount. This has been a problem consistently. They never had the staff to make a console game. They always had the same difficulty with building new ideas. And when they were forced to move to consoles with the Switch, they released their worst games yet, absolutely dispiriting games that probably soured millions of kids on the franchise.
What percentage of The Pokemon Company does Nintendo own? They must have some exclusive arrangement in writing or a 50% or more ownership because it's never been hosted on a non Nintendo platform.
They certainly had the staff to make Pokemon Stadium and Pokemon Snap. Most 2D games in the SNES era only needed like 4 to 7 developers. It would have been fine and trivial even to pair Nintendo game artists with Pokemon developers for a true console Pokemon game. It just wasn't done. It took until the Switch to see a true console Pokemon game.
Pokémon Snap and Stadium were made by other companies, not Game Freak.
We don’t know everything about the Pokémon corporate structure in the English-speaking world. Presumably Florent Gorges is researching this as we speak. But the common theory is that when Nintendo invested in Game Freak in the early 90s to bail them out, there must have been a requirement of exclusivity for the franchise in the contract. Game Freak made games for other consoles after Pokémon, and the Pokémon cards had Windows games, but the main RPG series that’s been both only on Nintendo and only done by GF. Last year was the first time another company touched the mainline RPGs: another company did the remake of Pearl and Diamond.
I always assumed it was the memory problem. There is more memory for 2D sprite maps on the CD than the cartridge, and it is easier to cull the landscape to fit in the small RAM of PS1 than to optimize the texture packing for N64. There is Ogre Battle 64, but noticeably the textures look much worse than Final Fantasy Tactics. I thought maybe it is too difficult to get nice textures on the N64, even Paper Mario looks nice, but the textures are not that complex.
The N64 had almost 40 times more RAM than the SNES. Plus you could create custom ROMs with more memory if needed in the cartridge itself.
If textures looked better in FF Tactics vs Ogre Battle 64, it is purely due to storage on CD vs cartridge, a notable 10x plus advantage.
Square used a ton of prerendered graphics in their PS1 games. That is to say, they'd farm out the graphics to super computers and then store them as rasters on disc.
I think that's something that's easy to say in hindsight, but hard to justify at the time.
The switch to 3d gaming was probably the biggest technological leap games ever had. 3d allowed a huge amount of experiences not possible with 2d games. And while early 3d games look incredibly dated now, at the time they were mind blowing and cutting edge. The SNES and Genesis were also too recent to really have any nostalgia, so and thus no real desire for throwback or "retro" titles. Any 2d game on the N64 would probably have felt cheap and dated at the time.
Finally, for Nintendo specifically, they did release 2d titles during the N64 generation. They just released them for the Game Boy (and later, Game Boy Color). There wasn't much sense devoting resources to make a 2d game on the N64 when your 2d-only console is still selling really well.