How to Build and Market a Role-Playing Game
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Japanese RPG
Side quests in JRPGs should either be painstakingly difficult (fighting a secret boss that has 99,999,999,999 hit points but otherwise looks just like the first boss) or extremely frustrating (punching 500 eagles in the face in three minutes while your controls are reversed due to a curse by the understandably upset mama eagle).
Make sure the completionist catnip is only really doable right before the last boss fight, and by completing them you've essentially overpowered your party, relegating the final boss to an ugly speed bump on the road to the melodramatic conclusion.
Western RPG
The main selling point of western RPGs is freedom, so be sure to completely overwhelm the player with side quests right after the requisite hour-long tutorial tells them what their real goal should be.
In Fallout 3 the main mission is to find the avatar's father James, but the second the player emerges from Vault 101 they can kill raiders at a nearby school, go shopping at a supermarket, get lost in the labyrinthine DC subway system, help an annoying woman write a book full of questionable information, kill mutants... basically, you want to give the player every reason not to keep up with the main quest since, if you're doing a western RPG, that aspect should be the weakest.
