I get why this would put people off from playing it, especially since it’s always conflicted with the design’s speedrun-like emphases. Its most significant downside is a miserable framerate. Virtual Hydlide is noteworthy too as a strange and perhaps unique attempt at crafting a lightly randomized, score- and time-based 3D arcade game for a home console using the overworld + dungeon crawler format. Understood as such - compare the PC releases of Hydlide to, e.g., the original Dragon Slayer, also released for the PC-88 in 1984 -, we can also begin to understand its popularity as a consequence of something more than millions of Japanese citizens being deprived and deluded. It’s better to see Hydlide in its PC-6001/PC-88 context as an innovator of the action-adventure-RPG genre, and the influence for the first two Ys games’ format (also little-known: Ys III: Wanderers from Ys was modeled on the design of Tritorn 2, a game by developer Sein/Xain/Zain Soft it even copied some of the settings!). Both of these have acquired a pretty undue notoriety, mostly encouraged by the exaggerations of e-personalities intent on making everything out to be either AWESOME or LMAO TERRIBLE, since that’s what gets the most attention. Most English-speaking people today who are aware of videogame developer T&E Soft only know of them through two titles: the first Hydlide (specifically the, by 1987, dated/inferior NES re-release) and Virtual Hydlide.