When PC gaming slowly died down worldwide (or consolidated, if you will) due to rising development costs as well as issues with developers not being able to secure sales without proper publishers, Japan was, of course, not unaffected. They had tons of PC games in the 80s and 90s but it slowed down late 90s and really dropped early 00s. Add to that the Japanese rating board coming into place late 90s which was a large issue for their eroge section and which pushed developers towards doujin works. On the other side, consoles were cheaper to develop for and had a larger, unified audience. The PS2 being beastly as it was really drew Japanese developers away (not to mention not nearly as large since space is an issue in Japan). (It used to be the other way around, Japanese arcade games for instance (Street Fighter II, Castlevania) used to be ported on the PC even.) So anyway, after the sharp decline early 00s, only eroge (including the doujin section) remained really strong and the developing MMO section, as they were always basically a PC-only thing if you wanted to play properly. There were also some small, normal doujin works and then of course Falcom for instance who remained on the PC until 2008 when they also abandoned it. But yeah, in terms of MMOs in the East, it was South Korea > China > Japan > SEA countries. They got a lot of MMOs that basically stayed there/in Asia.
Yeah, there were tons of them and there should also be a lot still around if you look for them. Had some fun times in Travian with coordinating attacks and basically having 0 seconds margin.
Personally, I hate mobile gaming. I tried it with Puzzle & Dragons but I hate touch controls as well as smartphones. Their monetization methods are also mostly terrible.
Could have just stayed with the way they did it in browser but I think back in the day, not many people were around that knew how to port all those things onto mobile. Heck, even large companies like Facebook failed to get onto mobile properly until years later.
Of course I do
IIRC, the game box was smaller than the Oath of Felghana one and basically like the second and third game of the Trails in the Sky trilogy. I think they switched to slightly smaller boxes with the second game in that trilogy because I somewhat remember Xanadu Next still being large (or it was just super heavy, so I remember it being larger). Some interesting tidbit regarding Ys Origin: The Vista version actually released just around three months later and added some extra stuff. Due to the original limited edition not selling out in that timeframe, they put the benefits in the Vista version too.
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