Better Island Console in '25: N64 or PS1?

[Jumpin]

PSX beat N64 soundly. It wasn't even close. And I'm a Nintendo fan - the only non-Nintendo console I've owned since the PS3 is the Vita.

Just on RPGs alone:

• Xenogears, my favourite game of all time.
• Final Fantasy 7, 8, and Tactics, half of my favourite Final Fantasy games of all time.
• Suikoden 1 and 2
• Lunar Silver Star Story and Eternal Blue Complete
• Parasite Eve
• Vagrant Story
• Wild Arms 1 and 2
• Vandal Hearts
• Even the RPGs I consider more on the mediocre side of the PSX RPG collection - like Chrono Cross, Final Fantasy 9, Breath of Fire 3 and 4, Grandia, and Dragon Quest 7 - would still easily make top 10 on N64 for me.

That's not even getting into other non-RPG franchises I liked on PSX:

• With Symphony of the Night we saw the birth of Metroidvania
• Metal Gear Solid was truly a work of art and kicked off the more cinematic action adventure genre.
• Resident Evil and Silent Hill put survival and horror on the map in a big way.
• DMA succeeded with GTA independently where Nintendo failed controlling them. They'd blossom creatively and commercially from here forward.

Onto the N64

I found that, aside from Rare, and a few offerings from Nintendo, the N64 had almost nothing to play. And that's not even touching on the other major issues the console had:

• Frequent game droughts - N64 had an 10 and a half month dry season every year from January to November - some months had no games, not even shitty ones.
• Missing genres - including proper RPGs like Chrono Trigger and Final Fantasy, which was the most important genre at the time - it had a handful of sub-genre games - hybrid RPGs like Quest 64 (which was utter trash), and a single strategy RPG (Ogre Battle 64) that barely anyone knew about until it launched on the Virtual console as it came out at the end of the generation with no advertisement.
• Flimsy controllers whose sticks would inevitably come loose/break - and unlike Joy con drift, this couldn't be resolved with a few sprays of contact cleaner and rotation for 2-3 minutes.
• Obscene game prices due to expensive cartridges.
• Blurry graphics.
• Simple music and dull/poor quality SFX.
• Even on the leading software: Mario 64 felt broken in execution because the difficulty was 90% fighting the camera. Ocarina of Time felt broken in design because the combat and puzzles were easy to solve, but finding keys/switches was absurdly time consuming and ultimately annoying - to solve the issue, you could use a guide, but then the game was pointless.
• I also found the N64 was when Mario and Zelda stopped being two of my favourite franchises. It took until Super Mario Galaxy for me to find that same love for the Mario franchise again, and all the way until Breath of the Wild for the Zelda franchise.

This generation, I played hundreds of hours of PSX game ports/remasters on Switch and I'm left wanting even more! (Suikoden is coming, Xenogears and Final Fantasy Tactics are still MIA). For N64, only Ogre Battle 64, and that's the only one I care to play.

Last edited by Jumpin - on 05 January 2025