Oh man, the US release, at least of the original Final Fantasy had so many bugs in the combat system, you could just about throw the manual in the trash.

- All weapons special effects would never trigger - They failed to dereference the index for critical hits, so the higher index the weapon had, the better its critical rate - A bunch of spells either don't work or have the opposite effect they are supposed to - The code for calculating run chance is so terribly messed up, it reads the wrong field from 2 characters down (so the last two characters read from some coincidental memory location causing them to be unlikely to run)

[edit]

Found a fairly comprehensive list of bugs; totaling nearly 50:

https://gamefaqs.gamespot.com/boards/522595-final-fantasy/45...

Given my experience with using modern software, I can say with confidence that had Final Fantasy been released 5 years ago, all of these bugs would have open issues for them but none of them would actually be fixed. Each new patch would only exist to arbitrarily change the interface, update the embedded adware, or add features no on asked for.

I guess that depends on the definition of "complete". Games back then tended to ship with whole features simply not working. The already mentioned Final Fantasy series comes to mind, I think Diablo 2 shipped with a Holy Fire Aura Skill that was supposed to deal periodic damage in a radius but simply didn't. Games also had their fair share of bugs that nobody would really call "easter eggs", for example Elder Scrolls Daggerfall had the tendency to generate Dungeons that had no entrance/exit so once you got in you were stuck. Ocarina of time, a console release, had three different versions released to fix various crashes and possibly game breaking bugs (https://www.zeldaspeedruns.com/oot/generalknowledge/version-...).

I guess it mostly comes down to the fact that players just didn't notice a lot of things (the "blind" status effect in Final Fantasy 6 did nothing, but this is really hard to notice as the hit chance it affects is called a chance for a reason) because they didn't know how things were supposed to work or they just worked around bugs if possible because patches often weren't an option.

[Edit]: I'm not trying to argue that the current way of things is in any way better than the old, both have their fair share of pros and cons.

Also, nostalgia. It's known that for example music alters our teen brains and we react more strongly to music from back when we were 12-16.