I’d finish out Magus’s Castle, because that does change things some. But if you’re still not having fun after beating Magus, it’s time to cut bait.

Everyone says DQ5, for good reason, so I’m going to suggest some other options. Please keep in mind that these are 8-bit games, so their dialogue is less copious and their art style is more retro than anything else.

DQ4 is my favorite. Every version has its own problems, although the mobile version [sic] might have the fewest for someone who isn’t comfortable playing in Japanese. It’s broad rather than deep: it’s got a big cast but doesn’t go as deeply into each character as DQ8 does. If you like the Middle Ages parts of Chrono Trigger, DQ4 is a lot like that scenario at full game length.

If you’re able to go even further back, DQ1 is calling. It’s a simple and grindy game, but you will learn the basics of JRPGs and have a solid foundation for DQ2 and DQ3. (You don’t have to play DQ2 before DQ3.)

As a fan of Chrono Trigger, how far did you get? There’s a section that’s noticeably duller than the rest before it picks up again.

https://archipelago.gg/ is not the same thing, but you can set up a multi-person, multi-game asynchronous randomizer that usually lasts for days because Link’s sword is in the Marsh Cave, but to get to the Marsh Cave you need the ship and the ship is in Pewter Gym…

It’s a real shame that they broke font fallback and it’s staying broken. That was one of the main reasons I’ve been sticking with Firefox and I’m going to have to find a new browser if they don’t fix it soon.

I think a specialist would be interested. I don’t know enough about dyslexia to make a sound guess as to whether this is more like hearing-people dyslexia or character amnesia.

Character amnesia (forgetting how to write Chinese characters, often ones you can recognize without trouble) for me shows up as forgetting components or slightly misremembering them, as if I couldn’t quite remember whether it was “CD” or “CP” or “CO”, or if it was a “DVD” or a “DVV”.

That’s interesting. Since they were born deaf and can’t speak Dutch, do they act like they’re memorizing words as if they were hieroglyphs?

There was a study of Chinese kids learning English, and only 1/4 or 1/3 of kids who were dyslexic in one language were dyslexic in the other one too. I don’t have the link to hand but can probably dig it out if someone is interested.

There’s also the famous case study of Alex, who was dyslexic in English but an excellent reader in Japanese.

So my uneducated understanding is that “dyslexia” has to be a cover term for multiple issues. Difficulty matching characters to sounds might make for a below-average reader in Chinese, and difficulty recognizing characters might make for a below-average reader in English, but reverse the languages and both kids would be dyslexic. On the other hand, there are those 1/4 to 1/3 of kids who are bi-dyslexic which suggests there may be some global mechanism accounting for some dyslexia.

P.S. The most recent trendy thing I know about is the “crowding” explanation for dyslexia, which hypothesizes that dyslexia really is a vision problem, but the problem isn’t mirroring but rather difficulty separating characters at normal spacing. This only appears to hold true for a subset of dyslexics, and that particular study totally failed to distinguish between the effects of increased spacing between characters, increased spacing between words, and increased spacing between lines. This study of Italian dyslexics found that increasing spacing between characters without also increasing spacing between words is worse than nothing, a condition that wasn’t tested in the study above.

I’d like to see a test of increased line spacing only. I remember that increasing line spacing was (and is) helpful when reading a script that I read slowly and poorly because when reading what were very long lines for me but normal for natives I’d lose track and my eyes would wander onto adjacent lines.

Edit: The English study I linked to showing spacing greatly helping a small group of dyslexics drastically helped with reading “pseudowords”, a common test of ability to sound out words. It helped much less with real words. So it’s interesting that the Italian study showed no useful effect, because Italian spelling is much simpler than English spelling and so you’d expect Italian readers to rely much more on sounding out words.

What language do those deaf dyslexics read? Could they speak it before going deaf? Is it their first language or a second language after a sign language?

I can’t think of a comparable situation elsewhere in the world for hearing people. The closest that comes to mind is learning Classical Chinese in ancient Korea or Japan or ancient and medieval Vietnam, but nowadays all those countries have good phonetic writing systems and still don’t expect everyone to learn Classical Chinese.

Not really a recent discovery, but I’m in the mood for serif fonts without too much contrast. Appli Mincho seems decent for Japanese in that regard.

Crystalis has forced or near-forced grinding due to level requirements to hurt bosses, so it’s on the fence. If its progression were a little smoother it would be a shoo-in.

There is a hack to remove boss level requirements but fighting a boss below the intended level may not be fun.

StarTropics on NES. It’s a near-clone of Zelda 1, but harder. I’ve heard some really bad things about how LCD lag and emulator lag affect gameplay, though.

Faxanadu on NES maybe? It’s side-scrolling, but otherwise fits. It does have a level system but leveling doesn’t seem to affect your basic stats.

If side-scrolling works for you, Faxanadu isn’t a million miles away from Castlevania II and the Igavanias, and those are closely related to the Metroid series and newer “Metroidvanias”.

CrossCode seems too puzzle-heavy and stat-heavy and loot-heavy, but it’s adjacent for sure.

Nay

I think we should be wary and keep them on a short leash, but I don’t see them causing enough trouble here in October 2025 to defederate. If I’d wanted a safe space I would have gone to Beehaw.

Sounds like point and click adventures might be your jam? Check out the Macventures (which had NES ports, although some of the ports go past your cutoff date): Deja Vu, Shadowgate, Uninvited.

Point and click adventures were a very popular genre at the time, although they had a well-earned reputation for difficulty and illogic. Someone who knows more about them could give you more specific advice.

I played a lot of JRPGs, and it’s hard to recommend JRPGs of the period. They’re rather different from both their 90s descendants and their late 80s WRPG contemporaries, and you look like you would much prefer 90s JRPGs. The 80s have two phases: the antique JRPGs focused on exploring the world with a simple plot, and the pre-classic JRPGs with a much heavier focus on plot not yet accompanied by much skill at storytelling or pacing. The best of the antique JRPGs is Dragon Quest 3/Dragon Warrior 3 (1988). It’s a little complex to just jump into, so if you bounce off the complexity I would retreat to Dragon Quest/Dragon Warrior (1986). If Dragon Warrior’s grinding weren’t so slow, it would be easy to recommend as a tutorial game to anyone trying to get into JRPGs.

If you’ll take a game from 1990 on the nose, Dragon Quest 4/Dragon Warrior 4 is the most polished pre-classic JRPG in your time range. If not, Phantasy Star 2 (1989). But these games are hard to recommend nowadays to someone with modern tastes because they’re not as polished as Dragon Quest 3 and don’t have a 1990s-sized storage device for better storytelling and writing. The one thing I’ll say for Phantasy Star 2’s writing is that it has the guts to go places that games even now rarely go.

There is one big group of losers from UTF-8: Eastern Europeans. Greek and Cyrillic need two bytes per letter and there’s no way around it in Unicode, while national code pages only used one byte per letter.

On the other hand, unless you have a big strictly monolingual database (or strictly national language/English), it seems worth taking the hit to size for the flexibility.

On thinking it over, “proper” spelling of foreign words has done its own share of damage to English spelling. We don’t just have to learn our own spelling conventions, we also have to learn foreign ones. Or not (sent to you from Cairo, Illinois, locally pronounced “care-oh”)

It’ll be part of the great English spelling reform. Until then, it’s going to be spelled the way we Romanized Greek in the 16th century.

You’re about twenty centuries too late on the χ thing. You’re gonna need to go back and talk to the Romans.