[chrisco255]

Oh, I remember anticipating Earthbound 64 (Mother 3) so hardcore back in the day. The game looked absolutely fantastic and I loved the SNES Earthbound.

However, I think RPGs could have done just fine on ordinary cartridges. Ocarina of Time was an epic 3D game with all the size and scope and themes of an RPG, it just plays like an action adventure game. It relied on text and real-time cutscenes for storytelling, though (more efficient space-wise than audio and pre-rendered cut scenes).

I think it was mainly the capital requirements of developing on the 64. If I recall, the tooling was rough and 3rd parties were largely developing in the dark prior to the release of the 64. I think a lot of hardware details were still being sorted out in the year leading up to the 64's release. There wasn't much lead time for 3rd parties to start on games. Nevermind that most game developers at the time had very little 3D gaming experience and the engines had to be basically built from scratch (you couldn't just boot up Unreal or Unity).