PS1 was infamous for its kind of redonkulous goals. I assume you've already visited the Naula Cake Shop.
Yeah, I'm trying to remember whether I actually managed to work that one out without a walkthrough.
I DO remember an annoying bit where you can observe that there is a sewer there but can't actually go down into it until you talk to the right person. It's full of shit like that. In fact, I happened to meander on over to the translation thread and find that things are about to get
much, much worse.
Don't remember any dragon, but it seems like something that would happen.
It's after you get the spaceship. You have to fight a dragon on Motavia to get the key to a cave back on Palma, where you get the Iron Claws.
Seems like the kind of thing that would have been there in the original, though there's some chatter in that thread about the remake really overdoing it with linearity, so it could be that in the original it was a lot easier to do things out-of-sequence.
(Talking of nonlinearity, there's a dragon on Dezoris too but the game discourages you from doing that one first through the old 8-bit technique of making the enemies way the hell harder there. You've got easy access to the Skure weapon shop, though, which makes the Casba one basically pointless.)
PS4's Tech system is mostly undocumented but since the only Tech you really need is Res it shouldn't stop you from enjoying a pretty awesome game.
Yeah, as I noted in the post, the biggest two benefits the PS2 remake has over the original are an (annoying but workable) automap system and documentation of what all the items and spells do. (It DOES stop short, in most cases, of telling you whether a weapon is single, double, or group attack. And the automap requires a consumable item and only works for 100 steps. But still, workable.)
As for PS4, I remember working my way to the last boss and then getting stomped, and suspecting I'd missed some sidequests. I bought the cartridge on eBay right before Sega started rereleasing it left and right. I expect after I'm done with PGS1 I'll play through 2 (haven't decided on official Genesis version, Genesis fan translation, or wait for the PlayStation 2 fan translation) and 4 (haven't decided on cartridge, emulator on PC, or PlayStation 2 Genesis pack -- regrettably PS4 never got the Sega 3D Ages treatment like the first two did).
Brad spent most of high school repeatedly renting PS4 and worked out a bunch of advanced combos -- not sure if that was just through trial-and-error, or word-of-mouth, or he found a website somewhere.
Probably do Earthbound first, though. I like to think of this as research -- getting a flavor for nontraditional 8- and 16-bit JRPG's, what they do right and what needs fixing, because some damn day I DO intend to make my own take on the genre. PSG1's given me some good ideas on weapons (and Breath of Death 7 uses essentially the same system), and also some good ideas on what to avoid (big open areas with nothing in them; too many of the same kind of monster group; bullshit event triggers). I've only played the beginning of Earthbound but I definitely think its encounter system's got the right idea; I'm sick to death of unavoidable random encounters, and while I think DQ9 managed a great twist on the formula I think that would be tricky to implement (especially if I wind up making a game where you can only move in four directions).
I really think Penny Arcade Adventures Ep 1 had some great ideas too, but the damn Linux binary is pretty much inoperable at this point and I can't find what I did with my Windows/Mac installation binaries and registration codes.
Which BTW brings us back around to Unforgivable Sins of Game Design: a game that fucking exits with an error if it can't initialize SOUND.