Hacker's Memory is shorter and more streamlined than Cybersleuth.
Hacker's Memory is better than Cyber Sleuth, and Time Stranger is five times better than both of them combined.
The thing with Hacker’s Memory is that you won’t know what’s going on for a chunk of it without having played Cybersleuth first.
Do you specifically mean JRPG or adventure platformer because the level design kind of reminds me of rareware a bit plus the ys series.
Pause at the start of each line and cross reference from gameFAQs, it's what I did to beat the minigame. It's especially BS because half of the lines in that game are from unlocalized entries so unless you're a turbo autist you're not beating it legit.
This is a good time to remind everyone that most JRPGs were, and some still are, intended to push the player to buy the strategy guide.
Tales Of games are especially like this with a lot of the side content being hidden behind NG+ or timed sidequests that start and end at awkward times. It helps freshen up NG+ playthroughs but I can imagine how annoyed some people would be that they missed full sidequest chains in Vesperia and Abyss because they didn't go back to the first town and talk to some random NPC halfway through the game.
I have a lot of childhood memories looking at guides for games that I played, making sure I didn't lock myself from entire parts of the game because I didn't go to a some town on the other side of the world that must be accessed only during a time a party member is kidnapped (and you are urged to go after them right now).
I have to say, after finishing Tales of Vesperia, I really don't see why so many hailed it as a classic. I think a large part of it in the west was the fact it was an Xbox exclusive, because it sure wasn't anything special in most respects, and was quite annoying and obtuse in others and lacked a lot of key quality-of-life stuff, like marking locations on the world map.
To be perfectly fair, the Japanese didn't invent that shit - old Western RPGs like Ultima also had cryptic shit intended to drive sales of official guidebooks.
They didn't invent it, but they sure as shit perfected it. No western game I ever encountered had anything like the Final Fantasy XII Zodiac Spear bullshit in it.
This was actually considered heavily for a localized release and Sony even provided a few magazines with Japanese copies for coverage. I was always disappointed they elected not to release it, and the best I could ever find out about why was issues with the ESRB, or the likelihood thereof.
I recently saw someone describe the 3d Trials of Mana remake as being more similar to Kingdom Hearts than the original game but I haven't played it so I have no idea if that's true.
I rented Xenosaga 2 back in the day. Out of the 18 hours or so of playtime I got in the 2 or 3 days or whatever it was I had the game for I'd say maybe 5 hours of that at most was actual play time doing things with a controller in my hand. The rest of that time was spent watching excessively long cutscenes. It was basically a movie you occasionally interacted with. When I returned it I had the option to rerent it. I returned it and rented Star Ocean 3 instead and have had no desire to play any Xeno game again because of it. Even though I did like Xenogears even if the second disc was a bit meh.