The SNES classic comes with no paper manuals, but it includes copies of every manual in the software. You're free to read them all. (And you may have to, if for example you want to know what the controls are.)

GOG also provides the manuals for games as "extra" content.

Sometimes it was more creative. E.g. people who remember F-19 / F-117 flight sims might also remember how on startup you had to pass an "aircraft identification exam" - given an image, guess what it is. And if you got that wrong, you could only fly training missions. Of course, this one didn't strictly require the manual - you could learn from playing the game itself, or you could get that info elsewhere. I wonder how many people still remember that kind of arcane knowledge just because that was the game they played a lot as a kid and eventually just memorized all the answers.

Mother 1 doesn't give you any plot guidance on what to do and is insanely overly difficult due to poor balancing.

I believe Phantasy Star 1 was designed to be played while using grap paper to map the dungeon. A modern re-release has the game do this for you automatically.

Even in Playstation era games like Suikoden there's this problem where if you put the game aside for a week and return to it and forget where to go next there's often no way to re-show the dialogue telling you where to go and no quest log.

Suikoden 2 makes you collect 108 characters for the good ending. You definetly would need to take notes to try to do this without a guide. But it's poorly designed because you can miss one of them due to RNG during a mandatory fight scene with no way to know this.

A major influence on RPGs in Japan was Wizardry, which was probably even more popular in Japan than in the US. Influences from it can be seen in many early JRPGs.

Dragon Quest was intentionally made simpler than Wizardry both to reach a wider audience and to be easily playable on the Famicom; it's probably the easiest of the first 3 DQ games still has some "hunt for the right square" puzzles.