I find the Demon King and beat the game.
Sorry, but this made me belly laugh :D
I also assumed that quest was the end, went exploring and got the sword/mineru “too early”. I did think it was weird that I had to bruteforce my way through opaque fog there at one point…
As I recall, there was an uproar back then as well when they started cleaning up subreddits. (/r/jailbait was one, /r/beatingwomen another, /r/fatpeoplehate, and a bunch of subreddits about various illegal activities.) People were really into "free speech over anything else" at that point.
In fact the vitrol directed at spez currently really reminds me of that, there were pictures of the then-CEO's face everywhere along with "fuck Ellen Pao". Then, funnily enough, spez came in (came back) as the replacement and people were happy again because he was one of the OG admins.