Japanese games primarily designed for use with NEC PC-88 and PC-98 computers that came on floppy disks had an even worse problem:
In order to save your game, you have to write to the floppy disk, usually wash disk needed to write somesort of data. Unfortunately, this means that the disk cannot be read-only protected. You probably see where this is going, but this sadly led to some players having uncompletable copies of games because they wrote to the wrong disk and accidentally ended up overwriting game data with save data.
Some games came with manuals that warned of this, and some games spent the cost of disk space to store actual in-game warning screens to try to prevent this.
brsrklf@jlai.lu 4 hours ago
I had those. I am pretty sure they were huge because everything was mostly uncompressed.
I remember using a program to extract game data. Every environment was a literal bitmap image the size of the area, and there were additional bitmaps of the same size for each, where pixel colours were used by the engine to check where characters could walk, what part of the scenery is overhead, etc.
It was cool looking into the adaptive music though. Every track was split in multiple bits of like a dozen seconds, so for example if the battle theme needed to end it could branch into a specific ending variation seamlessly. I don’t think a lot of games did that back then.