How did they fit open world games like Zelda and the original Final Fantasy into NES cartridges

Question

With some basic Googling It looks like that the max size was around 512 KB. How is this even possible to fit games of this size onto such little memory? What is this magic?

In: Technology

Answer 1

Old games are like storing a brick and the plan of the house, then tell the processor to copy the brick according to the plan to build the house. Most of the size gain is because the graphics are done using repeating patterns and only storing a little square and telling the processor to repeat it.

Modern games are like storing the whole house and its 500 000 bricks. Often even the parts of the bricks you never see because they don’t care about size anymore.