Shihali

Sounds like point and click adventures might be your jam? Check out the Macventures (which had NES ports, although some of the ports go past your cutoff date): Deja Vu, Shadowgate, Uninvited.

Point and click adventures were a very popular genre at the time, although they had a well-earned reputation for difficulty and illogic. Someone who knows more about them could give you more specific advice.

I played a lot of JRPGs, and it's hard to recommend JRPGs of the period. They're rather different from both their 90s descendants and their late 80s WRPG contemporaries, and you look like you would much prefer 90s JRPGs. The 80s have two phases: the antique JRPGs focused on exploring the world with a simple plot, and the pre-classic JRPGs with a much heavier focus on plot not yet accompanied by much skill at storytelling or pacing. The best of the antique JRPGs is Dragon Quest 3/Dragon Warrior 3 (1988). It's a little complex to just jump into, so if you bounce off the complexity I would retreat to Dragon Quest/Dragon Warrior (1986). If Dragon Warrior's grinding weren't so slow, it would be easy to recommend as a tutorial game to anyone trying to get into JRPGs.

If you'll take a game from 1990 on the nose, Dragon Quest 4/Dragon Warrior 4 is the most polished pre-classic JRPG in your time range. If not, Phantasy Star 2 (1989). But these games are hard to recommend nowadays to someone with modern tastes because they're not as polished as Dragon Quest 3 and don't have a 1990s-sized storage device for better storytelling and writing. The one thing I'll say for Phantasy Star 2's writing is that it has the guts to go places that games even now rarely go.

On thinking it over, "proper" spelling of foreign words has done its own share of damage to English spelling. We don't just have to learn our own spelling conventions, we also have to learn foreign ones. Or not (sent to you from Cairo, Illinois, locally pronounced "care-oh")

It'll be part of the great English spelling reform. Until then, it's going to be spelled the way we Romanized Greek in the 16th century.

You're about twenty centuries too late on the χ thing. You're gonna need to go back and talk to the Romans.

It's because -us is the Latin second declension nominative singular, and its nominative plural is -i. People educated enough to know the -us/-i pattern (cactus/cacti, alumnus/alumni, stimulus/stimuli) but unaware that "octopus" is Greek and has an irregular stem are likely to misapply the Latin pattern.

As a manga reader, I disliked the exam arc, but I've appreciated what has been built on it and you'll see that in season 2.

Funny, just a few weeks ago I read a comment elsewhere about how Frieren's worldbuilding is unrealistic. Like its JRPG ancestor Dragon Quest 3, there's no obvious source of food to support the walled cities of the Northern Countries. Feeding all the people in Äußerst or Eiseberg would need miles and miles of surrounding farms, not forests. I didn't mind that on an NES, because a world map at its scale wouldn't show farms anyway. It's more of an issue in a manga.

I…would probably play Pathfinder with a great roleplaying party.

Pathfinder 2e does have some more tools for roleplaying, but the game's real strength is tactical combat. Pathfinder 2e wants to be D&D 4e done right.

Zelda 1 randomizer is popular, and it's all about procedural generation of dungeons and procedural assignment of items to locations. It's not as well designed as the original Zelda 1, not by a long shot, but it combines the familiar gameplay of Zelda 1 with the novelty of procedural generation.

The previous season covered chapters 1-60, so I'm going to guess that this season will cover chapters 61-119.

I've tried those.

Sea of Stars looks as pretty as Chrono Trigger, but its writing is noticeably worse and it completely fails at one of Chrono Trigger's great strengths, pacing. In Sea of Stars' defense, it is generally better than Chrono Trigger at interesting dungeon design and its battle system has more potential. But those don't compensate enough for poor writing and especially pacing.

Chained Echoes tries really hard to fit a 32-bit plot into a 16-bit running time, and it doesn't quite work. Still, it left me interested in more by the same dev team, especially if trends and tech change so that they can switch to doing a game explicitly inspired by Xenogears and its ilk.

Thank you!