And also; I had another thought today (yeah yeah, that's rare for me, shut up) I miss manuals in games. Its super disappointing to open a new game and it just be the disc/cart and nothing else. They always seemed to smell good too lol
To this day I still don't know if the manual for Dark Cloud 2 (aka: Dark Chronicle) was supposed to smell like a musty book or not. My cousin and I are the only two people I know (IRL) who bought the game originally and both of us had the same phenomenon. The manual was obviously designed to appear as an adventuring journal, but I remember as a kid thinking it also
smelled like an adventuring journal.
Was it intentional, or was their warehouse flooded just before shipping? I'll probably never know...
EDIT: I bet little things like the exclusion of creative instruction manuals have a cumulative impact on my waning interest in gaming after the PS2 era.