I grew up in the 80s and 90s era of gaming. My favorite genre of those days were RPG games on the NES, SNES and Genesis.
You're looking at the Dragon Warrior games (1 thru 4) on the NES and FF3. Also all the FF games on GameBoy.
Breath of Fire, Secret of Mana, Secret of Evermore and so on for the SNES.
Shinning in the Darkness and the Phantasy Star series on Genesis.
I had many other games I enjoyed back then, but RPGs were my bread and butter.
Before all those games I played every game imaginable on the Atari 2600. I found out later in life that my uncle, through his place of work at the time, had pirated every single Atari 2600 game (this includes the X-rated ones) and gave copies to his siblings. We had them all back in 1985.
Now, can I say that games were better back then? Not really. It's all about your own personal perspectives and opinions. Did I really like playing games and trying to do special tasks in them, like in the first Dragon Warrior on NES where you'd try find and to kill the metal slime? Yeah, I thought that was a fun challenge (even though the stupid slime ran away almost every single encounter), but doesn't mean it was a better game over what is out there now. Even as the Dragon Warrior games expanded and improved as you moved up the Roman numeral count doesn't mean they were better games over what is available now. I thought it was amazing when you could get a ship in the DW2 game (if memory serves me right) and how it vastly increased the areas you got to explore and enemies you encountered and then getting party members to aid you in your quest..... All are great memories and I really did like these games for the value they offered then. Today, though, it's just nostalgia.
Out of sheer curiosity some years ago I found an emulator for the NES and even found copies of the Dragon Warrior games....while it was neat to see them again and play them just a little, the nostalgia wore off as I found them to be dull, boring and tedious. Does that mean the games suck? No, not as I think about it. I just means that the games were great when I played them all those years ago. Just like it means that some newer, more recent games I've played were great (for me) when I played them, even after multiple play throughs.
As I've been going back and replaying older PC games in my collection there were a couple that I really, really liked and I even played through them multiple times when I first got them. The most recent play through I found the games to be kind of lackluster and boring, but some I still found to be as fun as enjoyable as the first time I played them. Does that mean the games I used to like, but don't really enjoy anymore are bad games or does that mean something else such as maybe I got all the enjoyment out of them that I ever will?
Nostalgia is a bitch.