With "terminal", for the sake of the argument, I'm just going to assume no display server (X, wayland compositor) and no desktop environment is meant.
mplayer can play videos also "properly" in the framebuffer, no ascii symbols needed. There's a whole big media suite for watching, videos, videostreams (e.g. youtube, netflix) viewing pictures and other stuff that works without either X or wayland directly in the framebuffer, it's called kodi.
Generally everything that uses libsdl can run directly in the linux framebuffer without display server, one example off the top of my head is grafx2, a pixel art program. There's also arachne which is a graphical browser. (which doesn't understand modern standards) There's actually a whole lot of games and programs in linux that can run without any display server, in binary distributions usually just the support for that isn't compiled into the common packages. Gentoo let's you do it. With yaft you can also get a framebuffer console which properly supports unicode fonts and 256 colors. On top of that, yaft supports
sixels experimentally, meaning it can directly display graphics. (xterm can do this too, btw.) Interesting about such features is that they work over a network connection seamlessly.
With gbm you can get terminal support for a mouse, e.g. for selecting text. I am muddy if this worked with yaft though.
The question really is, why would you want to. You can set up a very lightweight X with a very simple window manager and a suit of simple programs which don't depend on bloated things like gtk3 which will be a lot easier to use and which would run on any earlier ARM-SoC or pentium class machine (and somewhat less) without a hitch if you pick your software carefully. It's just that the distros are not really built for it. We did not hate GUIs back then. The only disturbing thing nowadays is that you need more and more to do less and constant reinvention of the wheel that leave it sometimes square.