Here's my view on that one. No, no one's opinion as to what games are more enjoyable is "wrong", though some views might be harder to justify than others. I'm sure someone, somewhere out there thinks that the pre-NES era has the best RPGs of all time (I owned a few D&D games on intellivision personally) but good luck convincing anyone else of that.
As for playing games in Japanese, let's put aside the fact that gamers in that target audience (8-21, generally) with a working knowledge of japanese and the means to import were in the extreme minority, and look at this instead as a series of business decisions.
In the 16 bit era, it was very, very common for square, enix, and similar to simply arbitrarily decide not to bring high profile games over and ignore the fanbase. It was also very common for these companies to give a big middle finger to western gamers by *dumbing down* RPGs they considered "too hard" for the audience. FFIV was straight up butchered. FFV? We can't have that. But We CAN get "mystic quest", and while it's a cute game that I personally think gets more shit than it deserves, it's not FFV. We got Secret of Evermore, but no Seiken Densetsu III. Dragon Warrior I-IV gained a following on the NES, Dragon warrior 5 and 6 were totally MIA. What was the justification for any of this?
Again, as I said in a previous post- this was not the exception, this was the rule. And I didn't even touch on some games that DID make it over having bizarrely limited print runs. Ogre Battle SNES was rare as hell- Wiki gives the print run for that game as *25 thousand*. That's basically enough for Blockbuster Video and no one else. The sequel never made it over here (at least not as a SNES game), but with a print run of 25K, it was clearly never intended to.
The modern era gets shit on left and right for consumer unfriendly policies like DLC and microtransactions- It's only fair to consider the equally consumer unfriendly policies that were absolutely rampant during the 16 bit era. Whether or not some gamers could import, speak japanese, or fly to japan on lunchbreak doesn't change that- There were extremely frequent unnecessary barriers for the audience to play the games they wanted to play, that did not exist in later generations.
Ten years from now when we discuss the modern era's place in history, no one is going to handwave away shitty DLC policies just because a "game of the decade" compilation gets released 5 or 6 years down the line with all the content, or someone had an black Amex with no limit, so cost didn't matter. Likewise handwaving away japanese developer's terrible handling of western markets during the 16 bit era should also be taken into account when discussing the 16 bit era's place in history.
