Nah, he was completely full of shit even back then. The main issue is that all of their criticisms applied as much to Western games as Japanese ones. They're both equally handholdy, and it's obvious why they do that. It's to attract a wide audience who aren't no-lifers with 20000 hours of experience playing videogames. We're talking about entire games like COD with the whole single player is just a tutorial for the multiplayer lmao