Yeah but what I'm getting at is that the trend of games towards this was just beginning. It was the point at which people were realising "these sequels have the same gameplay as all the other games, they are changing nothing except the cutscenes". It was the point at which they were recognising that games were becoming a factory line for profit instead of art.

Nintendo is guilty of the opposite thing. Instead of selling their games on cutscenes/story they sold their games on gameplay while reusing the same characters and story over and over again. Reusing the same characters over and over is interesting though I suppose because it forces your entire focus to be on "So what gameplay are we making?" as your characters and their background already exist.

Obviously this didn't stop things like Pokemon doing the same gameplay over and over again though. But Pokemon made 150+ new characters each game generation so I suppose they felt like that was different enough to what anyone else was doing.