You have no idea how many green and blue slimes that I innocently murdered trying to farm metal slimes in Dragon Warrior on my NES.
Of course back in those days 20-40 hours of gameplay was considered almost too long for a game. Try charging modern day game prices for 20 hours of content.
Of course back then we played the games out of the box after spending the car ride home reading the instruction manual. There were no build guides, most of us didn’t even have access to the internet. The only subscriptions I had was to Nintendo Power and Boys Life magazine and gaming was just something we did when the weather was bad!