>> Though I am entirely curious how the games would play given that there'd be timing and other small differences between the consoles.
It's been too long for to remember any differences, plus I was quite young, but I am now going to blame the fact that I was never any good on this timing tidbit...
A different trick in games that don't have an internal clock, but are instead timed by wall clock is to use a region platform where the text loads faster. For example for Zelda Ocarina of time, the Japanese Wii Virtual Console version is used almost exclusively because of faster text and loading times: https://www.speedrun.com/oot#100
As a developer I find Speed running extremely interesting. The creativity used to eek out performance gains is incredible.
Using a GBA (and later, a DS) emulator on a PC to (re)play Pokémon, I was absolutely stunned by how much of the wall time was spent waiting for the ridiculously slow page-after-page of speech bubbles to scroll into view.
I don’t think it’s an accident that they’re that slow (because this is with the “text loading speed” in the game options set to so-called “fast”) but rather a much-gamed and an integral part of stretching out the “playable campaign hours” metric. When you 16x the speech scenes with a keyboard shortcut, the whole game is laughably short.
That may be the case in many games, but in most games that were translated from Japanese, the reason is that Japanese is a much more compact language (many words are just 1 character long, for example) so the speed is OK in Japanese, but horribly slow in Western languages. A few devs actually increased the text speed for oversea releases, but most didn't.