We've got a long weekend in the UK for Easter, so I'm away for most of it! And I figured that since this is a time of celebration, I might as well vent my grievances about our favourite genre first before letting the good times roll.
I would also add that thing, then you complete 95% of game, and you have only one last dungeon, and game like. Hey now you can at last go all around the world one more time to collect all this random staff and maybe get top weapon for one or two character. Of course we can disperse collectibles trough all game, but we dont wana. Go you know that this meteor will kill planet, but he can wwit 2-3 days untill you complete game on 100%
I recently finished Atelier Rorona DX, I loved the game with all my heart, but I was really bummed that I couldn't get the ending for one of my favorite characters because one of hers event required me to fail to synthesize something. In a game like Atelier Rorona, where every day counts, I obviously opted to minimize my number of misses and that cost me an ending.
I think Etrian Odyssey does random encounters well. There's a little icon on the bottom right that shifts color from green to red, and as it gets redder the encounter rate goes up, and then it resets once you get into a battle. Basically, you'll always know when you're about to get into a battle, but there's still a slight element of chance/surprise to what pops up in the encounter and exactly how long it'll be when it happens. Sometimes you get the encounter the instant it turns red, sometimes you can walk around for a little bit before it happens. It prevents the 'back-to-back-to-back battles' problem while still preserving some of the surprise.
That´s also the system used in Ar Tonelico, only that in AT the bar also goes down with each encounter, and when the bar is empty, there are no more encounters in that map, even when you change screens, it only reset when you change areas
Ar Tonelico did this too, and I didn't mind that. At least I had an idea of when an encounter was on me, and it would straight up end them when the bar was depleted.
Something that annoys me not just with JRPGs but overal with games (don't happen a lot thank goodness) but it's bosses/dungeons/story bits locked behind NG+. I am someone who likes to experience (close to) everything in one playthrough, so when I find out that there's something locked behind NG+ I am like "oh damn" there have been a few exceptions like experiencing both paths in Scarlet Nexus. But when I played Trails From Zero and found out (after I put enough hours into it) that there's a NG+ dungeon & boss I didn't feel like doing it. That doesn't mean that I'll never do it, but just not anytime soon.
What made it worse for Zero is that it also has treasure chests that are required for the achievement...so I had to get every single chest in the game a second time. I started my first playthrough on Nightmare as I always do so part of me recognizes that I needed the extra loot to help me through that, but the other part of me still felt like I wasted time and effort on something I didn't need to do just yet.
The point about final dungeons is interesting because I also don't really care for them most of the time speaking purely in terms of gameplay, but conceptually, I can't really see how else you would properly build up to the final boss and otherwise literal end of the game you're playing. They serve the purpose of being impressive set pieces as to set the tone for the end of the game while also giving you time to think about the journey you had that brought you to this point. I definitely understand the complaints about spongey enemies or branching paths that lead to nothing though. But as much as I dislike when those things happen, I think I'd be more upset if I were simply thrown into the end of the game with no time to consider my journey or what I was getting ready to fight. That build up, that tension, that reminiscing. I think it's all important for the core feel of a JRPG.
Build up to the final boss is fine, I wasn't suggesting removing the concept all together. What I was touching on more is that final dungeons are so often 'needlessly grand', in that developers sometimes think that a longer dungeon means a grander experience. It's not, it just takes away from the moment. Not a JRPG, but the staircase leading up to Ganon in Ocarina of Time for example is perfect to set the stage. If JRPGs had moments of substance in their dungeons like that, then I wouldn't hate them nearly as much.
A lot of times I find with games that require a lot of grinding it is because when a game was localized for the U.S. it is because the developers for some reason lowered the EXP or money for that version of the game. For example, with Legend of Legaia the U.S. version was made more difficult by having enemies give less EXP and money maknig the game much harder then the original Japanese version or PAL version of the game. Lunar 1 PS1 and Lunar 2 Sega CD U.S. versions also were made more difficult by Working Designs when both of those games were localized by making enemies harder then in the original Jaapnese version.
On the topic of multiple endings, I think another big problem with them is the fact that most feature “golden” endings means that such a mechanic feels redundant. Like I can understand a golden ending that uses its existence to prove a point and further the big questions at the heart of the game, a great example being The Banner Saga trilogy. But too often it feels like the best ending is a bunch of random stuff you need to do to get actual closure and undercuts the existence of the other endings. The most clear example of this from recent times is Triangle Strategy. If you go onto the subreddit for the game and see the threads about the endings, most people discuss the three main alignment endings with only a little cheeky reference to how the fourth ending is the real one anyway. Why is this the case? For one the game’s whole selling point is about weighing what convictions the player values the most, and thus talking about which conviction is best is simply more interesting than saying, “hey, that true ending am I right?” The second is that the true ending requires a very specific route through the game, so unless you happen to get really lucky the true ending doesn’t so much feel like a choice you make as it does a script you follow, again undercutting the multiple choice selling point. In my eyes if a game is going to follow a multiple endings route I say write them all as equally valid endings to the story and let the players decide which one is their favorite ending. Unless they have a really good reason to have a best ending it just defeats the purpose of the mechanic.
I think the reason to have a true ending is to cover their backs in case the game gets a sequel. Because having to make a sequel taking into account wildly different endings would be very difficult at best, and most likely impossible. Unfortunately, that makes the other endings superfluous, since they end up relegated to non canon status
Agreed 100%. All the endings should be treated as equally viable/canon, otherwise having multiple endings feels pointless. Another annoying example is SMT V which was SO CLOSE to having every alignment ending feel equally viable, but then they just HAD to shoehorn in a "true" ending.
@@danielbritoperez This is actually a fair point. To some extent I’ve always felt it would be funny if more multiple endings games just had sequels that picked one of the previous endings and went with it instead of this future proofing golden ending stuff (if nothing else the fallout of watching fans lose their minds at their favorite ending becoming non-canon would entertaining in its own way), but at the end of the day both methods are a sort of a darned if you do darned if you don’t situation.
I love how differently "golden" endings can be done. The way you showcase Triangle Strategy, that one done awful for sure. Same awfully done all of Persona "ultimate" endings. It's always clear that those are add-ons and weren't intended to be in there. Like, if you ever ask fans, they recommend to play Persona 4 Golden but finish it with Vanilla ending. With Persona 5 Royal same thing don't happen but only because there some things in additional ending people expected from vanilla. But SMT 3-4 quite other way around. Ordinary endings rarely mentioned and ultimate one the one most known. Tho for different reasons. In both normal endings "don't feel right" for most people. But in Nocturne ultimate ending not really hard to go into but hard to win over(it require challenging battles and finish specific dungeon). While IV do same thing as Triangle Strategy where you must balance invisible stat by conversations before specific point in story. Nocturne ultimate ending quite loved and IV hated but "there's no reason to waste time on other". I actually surprised about Triangle Strategy being done so bad, since in Octopath Traveler you clearly meant to gather all 8 characters and do their stories... But "golden ending" granted to those who invested into completing all the side quests. Sure, that may be optional thing but it isn't criptic or anything too hard to get.
I do agree with what you said about random encounters, but I think their appeal comes from making sure you have enough experience for a boss. Because people would probably skip most encounters if they could, but then could come a moment where they would have to stop and grind. With random encounters, the game is atleast making sure u are getting experience and leveling up.
You are certainly right about this for games designed in the past. The modern solution is to have several scripted encounters or mid bosses before the final boss. If they are written in to the plot they have meaning unlike most random encounters and they can prevent players skipping thru to boss fights without getting stronger. But it obviously takes more work from Devs. I think a mixture of these methods is the right way to go. A good modern example was Bravely Default giving the player a slider for encounter rate but i havent seen this on many other games.
@John Smith I kinda see them as two paths that lead to the same outcome. No matter the RPG, you are going to do alot of battles. So scripted or random doesn't really matter in the end.
Rena guarantees that i will never touch tales of arise again. I seriously considered dropping the game when I hit the halfway point of that dungeon. It was more frustrating for me than the entirety of Elden Ring bc at least the minute to minute gameplay of ER was fun.
@@shutup1037 I actually like ToA right up until Lenegis and Rena. However the 1-2 pinch of exposition dumps and the final dungeon left a horrible last impression.
I dont like random encounters either, but ive always felt the reason for them is to make sure you are levelling up your characters and not just avoiding everything. Else you could end up very under levelled and effectively soft lock yourself.
this. i also think that it served as a way to bypass limitations of the technology, where they could add more detail in battle screens, but not have to accommodate that level of detail in the whole world.
GREAT VIDEO! I definitely got annoyed in Trials of Mana when it came to the enemy encounters, you could see them on your screen but there’s no way to get through without a battle initiating a battle. After 100 times of that happening, gets pretty annoying lol. The final boss for immortals fenyx rising was absolutely brutal too, took me like 5 tries, 2 hours total I wanted to rip my hair out lol
As for the multiple ending. I had the exact same case in P5 Royal as you did. I wasn't invested in Kasumi, and the game had characters that I wanted to see their stories way more than her, and completely missed the ending of Royal, and that's when I never played OG P5. So yeah, I played P5 Plus, not P5 Royal.
Great vid. Even though we're not 100% on the same page, I see where you're coming from even where I disagree with you. Some targeted replies: *Cheap mechanics* : IME usually instant death is resistable (but it is annoying because you have to specifically equip something you usually wouldn't equip to get that). Also IME 1 hp attacks are a DPS check, or sometimes a HPS (heal per second) check. You respond with either sudden burst damage, sudden burst heals, or by doing a swap with folks that aren't about to die (in games that have that mechanic). I hate the omni-status thing though, and I don't really like these other ones either because of how directly they warp your strategy. *Random encounters/difficulty spikes* : I sometimes find that the non-random encounters approach leads to an excess of player choice, which can lead to the player falling off the power curve, especially if the rewards for the mook fights are not tuned well. Trails games have really good tuning on mook fights in general but even they are not immune to this. I remember having no particular difficulty with the final dungeon mook fights in Sky FC, so I started skipping them. Then I got wiped by the final boss back when I first played the game. This was a bad enough experience that it almost drove me away from the series altogether, I only went back to it 3 years later. *Characters leaving* : This can pretty much singlehandedly drive me to take a quick glance at a guide. A sneaky sub-issue with this is that it basically spoils that the character will be back, so that your stuff isn't just gone forever. It's still usually outdated by the time it comes back, though. *Multiple endings* : Realistically, especially taking into account how franchise-happy studios are, there's just not really a way to do multiple endings right unless you do some timey-wimey stuff to make multiple endings canon at the same time like CS4. Usually there's some kind of true ending which usually undermines the other ones. Even in something like Chrono Trigger there are only two meaningfully different endings that you might get in a first playthrough without ridiculous amounts of grind. The rest feel more like fun what if scenarios than satisfying conclusions. *Final dungeons/multi phase bosses without checkpoints* : I have mixed feelings about these. I think this issue is a quirky thing about playing a *game* primarily for the *story* but also wanting the *gameplay* to be enjoyable. You get this feeling when the gameplay is getting in the way of your experience of the story, essentially. Recent Tales games seem to have this a lot because they are treating the final dungeon as a training ground for the postgame, but the postgame is like 98% gameplay 2% fanservice, so folks like you and me are generally not very interested in it. The unskippable cutscenes in between phases is a straight up flaw, however. I think my remark about "gameplay getting in the way of your experience of the story" is actually at the root of a lot of these things. That doesn't excuse it, to be sure, but maybe it helps illuminate why some of these issues are hard for developers to avoid.
@Game Design Andy I guess I wasn't totally clear: these weren't really meant to be rebuttals. Most of them were arguments for softer takes on the same ideas. In particular, random encounters don't really *fix* what I described. They're a decent band-aid for it, and if the encounter rate is tuned appropriately then they may not be annoying. But they still aren't a magic fix. In general I'd prefer not to have forced encounters (which includes unavoidable but visible encounters). But if you go with skippable encounters, then the developers do need to either make the mook fights not really necessary for progression or else give the player some cues to do them as they go. The classic way to do the latter is to make the mook fights challenging in and of themselves until you're ready for the boss, but there are other ways to do it as well.
I think grinding is one one side of the sin medaillon of JRPGs: Slogpacing. So many JRPGs suffer from it and I hate it. While forced grinding destroys the pacing from a gameplay perspective, I also hate the super slow story progression and the verbosity of a lot of JRPGs. I love Persona 5, but good lord how many hours i clicked through meaningless and repititive dialogues (especially the phone chats). I hate it when games don't respect my time and bloat up their gametime like that. Of course its easier to deliver a bloated game, editing and being short and precise is an art form, but most JRPGs dont even try. Most Japanese games in general, Visual Novels suffer from the same disease. Recently I played Paranormasight a VN that is so refreshing, because its so fucking fast paced. In 10-12 hours it delivers a complex story with many characters and sideplots - and it works. Because I am not stupid, I don't need plot element repeated and detailed explanations all the time. Wish more Japanese games would be like that. (When I think about it, Western games also have it, I avoid most Open world games for a reason)
About the random encounter thing, I'll give my spiel as a game designer who has worked on an RPG: Basically, Random Encounters are necessary if you want to create a combat system based on resource management. Let's take a classic game like Dragon Quest 3. In that game, no individual enemy encounter will kill the player unless they've gone way off the beaten path. What does kill the party is slowly using items and MP to recover from battle damage until you have to enter fights with too little health. With a sprite-on-screen approach, you cannot force players to expend resources. If you do make an om-screen battle unavoidable, players will rightfully be annoyed since in doing so you violated the entire purpose of the system (letting you choose when to fight). If you let players avoid fights, as soon as they get low on resources they will avoid all fights, therefore making resource drain moot. Where Random Encounters get a bad rap is when they are used just because "that's how it's always been done," rather than for the purpose of encouraging resource management. And I agree, most JRPGS don't really care about resource management, so they shouldn't have random encounters. There's also ways to make them less annoying, like using the warning indicator from SMT3/Etrian Odyssey. But if a JRPG wants to have dungeon crawling or steady resource drain, random encounters are still the way to go.
The final boss of XC3 took so long that by the time I beat it, I assumed it was a scripted fight that was impossible to lose. Then I found out people had died and needed to start it over...guess I was one of the lucky ones.
I can only agree. Fortunately some of your points like random encounters aren't that much of an issue in modern games anymore. Some points I'd like to add: - Fights you have to loose for story purposes even if you just decimated the enemy - A party that only consists of overly mature teenagers which behave as if they were 10 years older - Cheap fanservice - One-dimensional characters - Extreme foreshadowing as if you were stupid
Man, I don't recall the final dungeon of Tales of Arise being that bad at all, but I was probably heavily overpowered by that point. The only thing I'd really disagree with you about is random encounters, and the reason why is that in games with visible encounters, I've found that all the devs that use them tend to just make a bunch of narrow corridors filled with them to force you into them, and sometimes at a rate higher than you'd get in random encounter games. Also, rare monsters in games with visible encounters tend to be harder/more laborious to find than in random encounter games in my experience. By a lot. In a random encounter game, one step into a designated area might have your screen filled with metal slimes or their equivalent. In a visible encounter game, they're usually tucked away in some corner, through a gauntlet of a dozen choke-points filled with other enemies, and when you get to their one spawn point, they might not even be there, or if they are, they might have the same irritating tendency to just dip out before you can kill them. Then to try again, you might have to go as far as exiting the entire area and repeating the process. One other thing - If there are save/recovery areas in a place where you want to stop and grind for whatever reason, you don't have to go chase-assing through the area, possibly through loading screens, to get the job done. Anyway, it's not by a lot, but I prefer random encounters, and those are some reasons why.
Random encounters is a mechanic of the nes snes days when game were super short and needed padding, theres speedruns of the original nes ff1 done in under 20 minutes, random encounters should be a lost mechanic that never sees the light of day again
Well I agree with some of your points, there are some circumstances surrounding "Grinding". For example if a game does not provide the needed extra content seperate from the main scenerio, then I don't think additional grinding should be a primary stepping stone to overcome the challenges, because after all you are just following a single straightforward linear story. How ever, I do think some games have difficulty spikes put in place to distract the player from the main story, so that you go out of your way to experience additional side activities and supplemental material not just mini games and the like, but also its part of a key incredient of preperation. I have always felt that there is a balance when it comes to grinding and even some of the steep difficulty curves are appropriate because the game has alot of distractions outside the main campaign that you can sink your teeth into and the developers want you to experience the full game rather then to just speed rush your way through. It also helps to motivate the player to go hunt for materials, prepare your self more effeciently for the challenges ahead so you can overcome those blocks in the road and these are all aspects of a jrpg I don't want to ever change. I do not like that some jrpgs are just to easy and doesn't require hardly any sort of grinding. Even going back to its heydays and roots of the genre, adventuring and grinding is the makeup of a progression system in a jrpg. In that case, the grinding is deffinitly warrented.
I agree with your list but I'll add a few. 1. Dungeon maps- i hate when the dungeon area all looks the same and I have to spend extra time remembering which doors I've been in and which I haven't. Especially on dungeons late in the game giving you usually but not always the final weapon for your characters. 2. Weapons or armor in dungeons that I just bought in the town. 3. Final bosses that make the platforms disappear underneath your character that make them disappear and cause me to redo the final boss. 2 different games I played had this. They teach me throughout the game to keep my characters close in big fights to buff/heal. Then the final boss when close to death will cause certain platforms to disappear. 4. Difficulty spikes. Yakuza 7 was like this. Went from level 30 or 35 to 40 and even 50 in just a chapter
4:38 A lot of older gamers have experienced the ultimate version of this (having characters leave your party after you build them ). Back when FF7 was new, most of us used Aeris most of the time on the first disc since she was a good healer. Then she gets removed from your party forever. I still remember how that impacted me because I had spent all that time using her only to come to the realization she was gone for good. JRPGs were also very new to me back then, so I did not know I was probably going to be getting new characters later in the game either. Too bad most new players will never experience this anymore since now even if you have not played the game, you know it is coming
So as an American guy who grew up playing the original NES final fantasy and dragon quest (called dragon warrior at the time) and who fondly remembers the rivalry square used to have with Enix, I'll try to explain random encounters. Fairly early on (probably starting with dragon quest II), JRPG dungeons started getting longer and more Maze-y. So, resource mgmt became important, not necessarily with items but definitely with spells and heals. And keep in mind there were no faqs or readily available maps back then. So let's say you're 45 mins into a dungeon and you're running out of heals, which path(s) do you decide to take to get to the exit? If you get there early, do you decide to backtrack in case you missed a chest that might have an OP set of armor? You don't know how many enemies you'll run into, and likely you won't be able to run from them... so if you're low on resources maybe you just decide to keep going but then maybe you miss out on that great weapon. Decisions, decisions. And the fact these encounters are random introduced a level of nerves / anxiety / maybe fear you don't get in today's RPGs. Also those games were undeniably harder, I can't recall a recent time when I wiped in a non-boss fight but that happened all the time in the early JRPG days. All that to say the random encounters / length of dungeons added atmosphere to those older games and additional difficulty because wiping was an actual possibility (partly bc of potential encounter volume). Today's games are more forgiving in a lot of ways, and I think for accessibility it makes more sense to see enemies on the screen and be able to run from them if you need to (like what trails does). Anyway hopefully that answers your Q about why random encounters were there in early JRPGs, and imo in a lot of ways that design choice supported the games that were being made back then.
My least favorite thing in RPGs is unmarked, missable optional quests or items that the game never tells you about that have some sort of importance. Falcom and Tales are significantly guilty of this. I played Abyss years ago before I used guides for games to make sure I'm not missing anything, and I missed literally every sidequest so I never learned Jade's full backstory. So when I went reading TVTropes as I did back in the day, it started talking about stuff that I didn't know and I was so confused. Trails was less frustrating to me because at that time I was using guides, but it's still annoying just conceptually because I shouldn't need to use a guide to see everything I want to see. Thankfully, both series have gotten much better about it.
It's like you picked this list straight out my head. Especially multiple endings. Like Nier. I bought it on sale recently, but I'm so intimidated because you have to play like, what like 5 times, to get the true ending. And then there's Chrono Trigger. I recently beat a first play through and everyone keeps telling me to unlock more endings... when there's 13 of them. My backlog is too big and my time is too short for all that
The good thing with Automata (I'm assuming you're talking about that one) is that the endings flow in to one another. Every playthrough is slightly different and it's whole premise is designed around those multiple endings, so I quite liked it since you're not actually missing anything come the finale.
Another thing to add is consecutive boss fights with no warning whatsoever. I'm looking at you Vulcan and C boss fight from trails of cold steel 1. You waste your resources like hp, mana and items on a boss fight then another one appears making the fight even harder and if you die you gotta do everything over again.
Grinding on your own terms and time is fun but when it’s forced upon you, it instantly becomes tedious. Of the more notable one is Octopath Traveler (the first game). Having collect your characters at Level 3-5 then suddenly seeing that Chapter 2 is Level 20+ made me groan 😩 the game is great but the sudden gap in levels was really annoying to grind for. As for random encounters, I much prefer it when games give you the option to either approach or run past the overworld enemies. The invisible random encounters are the worst.
I don't think this is unique to JRPGs, but a problem with the industry as a whole. Too many devs are overly focused on making a game "bigger" for bigger's sake. I'll take a 10 hour game that's laser-focused and fun over an 80 hour grindfest any day.
@@usbmindlink I think it's a lot about them making the game's content in order. So they invariably run out of resources (which includes time) towards the end and have to cheap out on that. It's not bigger in and of itself, it's that they focus to much on the first parts and run out of steam to finish things up.
Rena in Tales of Arise wasn't that bad. But I HATED one of the last side quest of defeating EVERY boss in a row. Especially when I can only carry 15 of each item & apple gels are worthless at that point.
For number 6, the absolute worst is the true/secret ending for Octopath Traveler. I’m order to finish that, you have to beat something like 8 bosses in a row then a two form final boss with two separate parties. You cannot save at any point during this process. I got to the boss’s second form only to get wiped, and I had to start from the beginning, again. Many hours wasted, and I put octopath down after that.
@@TheKisekiNut Let's all pretend that the Infernal Castle is the final dungeon. I honestly forget about the Reverie Corridor constantly when talking about the game with friends. If we just ignore it, it might go away!
The only time I appreciated Random Encounters was in the Octopath Traveler games, because worrying about them while trying to sneak through end-game zones/dungeons early on to cheese the chest/gear was nerve wracking in the best way. Aside from that VERY SPECIFIC circumstance, the very idea of random encounters should have been cast into the void as far back as the PS2 era.
Talking about long final dungeons, do you remember the abomination that is the final dungeon in Trails in the Sky FC? If you were unlucky enough to not get the Haze Quartz it can take perfectly 5 hours simply to make it through.
One thing I feel about grinding is that, if it possible to do (if they don't bound the exp, like how Trails keeps you form overleveling too much), it creates the problem of the game becoming too easy for some and too hard for others. I tend to faff about a lot and get overleveled without even trying, so while playing games like Nier Automata I was 10 to 20 lvl above enemies by route B. But I read other people's experience of rushing the story and getting the opposite problem, being stuck in the beginning of route C, full of enemies 15 lvls higher than them. Had similar experience recently, playing Yakuza Like a Dragon. The only main story fight that gave me trouble, besides the final-ish boss, was in the game's difficulty spike. Had the game not had one I would have breezed through the main story, so I'm weirdly thankful for it . haha
Turn base battles is something of a divisive topic amongst the community but I deffinitly agree with you. I think its something that is distinctly part of the JRPG formula but its not a required mechanic for jrpg progression. It just forces the player to impeed his/her progress and I guess the anticipation of not knowing when your going to run into an enemy was the initial conceptual idea of the mechanic when first introduced way back in the early 80's with FPS dungeon crawling, but as technology has evolved, this has become pretty archaic over the years. There is other ways to provide the same sort of mechanic but also give the player more freedom and a realistic depiction of what it would be like if monsters really roamed out on the fields. Obvously that is why most jrpgs are going by way of ARPG these days. Though I love when a JRPG allows you to see the enemy encounters, it gives you that much more control and in some cases the challenges are still there like monsters might run faster then you can or they might block some path, but its not this nagging constant random screen just programmed by numbers that you have to deal with every 5-6 steps.
The moment you started talking about final dungeons, Tales of Arise popped up in my head before you even mentioned it. I absolutely despised that dungeon. Enemies that take up half an episode of The Simpsons to kill, and worst of all, they're often blocking doors so they can't be avoided.
I like random encounters if its for something like a nuzlocke in Pokémon games. It makes encounters more interesting. I completely agree with the multiple endings. Sometimes it works well but when it has specific conditions you'd have to look up overwise it just ruins the ending experience unless you get that true ending. As much as I love the Neptunia series the main-line games do this far too often.
Pokemon is perfectly fine, probably the only franchise I can tolerate the random encounters because it's always a lottery on what you'll find in many cases.
The ‘Epilogue’ in Trails of Cold Steel 2 annoyed me to no end. I thought the game was going to be over and I ended up spending over 2 hours doing another dungeon.
Long, unskippable cutscenes prior to a boss fight for me. It's like if this boss is gonna take me 6 or 7 tries, I don't want that 5 minute cutscene 6-7 times or to have to spam the dialogue button to try to get through it as fast as possible.
Long unskippable and not fast-forwardable cutscenes with a boss marathon with no savepoints afterwards. Are these devs trying to annoy people or do they really not realise just how stupid that setup is?
#4 is the one I absolutely DESPISE. Just unequip the character as they depart. Give me back my stuff. I can live with equipping them again later... I probably will have better great by then anyway. But don't make me lose stuff.
Here's my additions to the list- - when it takes a very long time between starting a game and being able to freely play it. Persona 4 is notorious for its 3 hours of story and dialog before you get to run around the first dungeon. - waiting in battles. As in those moments when you can do nothing but wait for meters to fill or for a very long special attack animation that you've already witnessed 100 times to play out. Some games like World of Final Fantasy have a fast-forward option, but why not make it move that fast by default? - mascot characters. Small non-human characters that are trying too hard to be cute and marketable but just come off as irritating. More often than not have an annoying speech impediment.
The thing that I hate most about JRPGs is the final dungeon. Every single game that I love has a final dungeon that is a maze, reuses textures for each and every room and have multiple floors. The game that did this the worst for me was Xenogears.
I agree with all your point, but i'll have to add : Having a big roster and characters not in your party NOT F*CKING GETTING XP TOO !!!!!!!!!!!!! And of course, later in the game (usually in the last dungeon) you need to make 2 or more party using ALL your characters and you end with low levels one and either get rekt, or need to grind a lot to level them... I HATE THIS SOOOOOOOO MUCH!!!!
For the end of random encounters. They are more than tolerable in older games, like pre-PS2 era since a lot of games would have struggles showing that many sprites or even models moving around on screen or being programmed to show up on the overworld sometimes so it was an easy say to get around a technical limitation at the time. If you're making a game that is meant to run on a 'potato' PC then it does become more necessary but with some processing power now for consoles, it is less and less necessary to do the random encounters. So having a toggle or a slider would be helpful to have if they decide to use random encounters for 'old times sake'. But in the same manner, games that are first-person dungeon crawlers or have a lot of movement in narrow areas (like Etrian Odyssey as a prime example) outside of the FOEs, for regular encounters I cannot think of any way to not implement battles as random encounters outside of just making them almost indisquishinables from FOEs basically. So in a sense, there are some games in which it is hard to determine how else to do an alternative depending on how it is set to be played. (If you have full movement, IE recent FF games, Tales, or recent DQs then yeah, no need for randoms. But if you're have like..just 4 directional movement or even in some instances only 2 directional movement because of narrow areas, how would you implement avoidable encounters (if you're not playing an action RPG) outside of a toggle slider of random encounters being on or off? (or equipment/items to ward away)
Loved the video and I have to agree with all ur points. As much as I love JRPGs, they really need to do something with these problems. My main gripe is with grinding, if a game cant pace the level grinding and story telling properly, I drop the game, this is exactly the reason why I am not a fan of the disgaea series, the level grinding is too much.
None of these are really problems to begin with honestly. Just adapt to the game's rules. If you arent willing to do that, just drop the game and move on. The only time there would ever be issues, is if the game's mechanics dont work properly.
@@ThundagaT2 adapt to the games rules? So basically cut off hours of my life and dedicate it to grinding fr hours upon hours to be strong enough to win the fight and see the next bit of story. Sorry but I have a life to live and responsibilities.
@@TheAwsomeuser It is not the game's fault if it takes you that long to get past a story section. Thats just you needing to get better at the game. If you cant overcome the game's challenges then you just need to learn from any mistakes you have made, simple as that. Besides name me an rpg that requires hours of grinding to see main story stuff. If you were talking about optional/post game content then it would start making more sense. If it takes you hours of grinding to get past a story section in an rpg then likely you are either skipping too many battles and therefore underleveled, or you dont understand the game's mechanics enough.
@@byletheisner5006 Not every rpg has to appeal to every demographic. Some games just arent for some people. This is not an example of saying "git gud" as a lot of people like to say. Its just moreso realizing what kind of things you like. If you dont like to see some of these things, then you just ignore the games that have them, thats what i meant with my comment.
Random encounters can be very annoying. What i noticed in recent history, is that a lot of JRPGs use visible encounters and crank the visible mobs to 100 and every enemy runs at mach speed towards you so you have to fight encounter after encounter after encounter without much progress made. Tales of Berseria and to some extend the Trails series come to mind, although at least in Trails you can mitigate it via a quartz.
You’ve got a great list there. I would also add “getting lost” and “no auto maps” as two areas that drive me crazy. Im currently playing Trails in the Sky first chapter and the sewers and other end game areas are hard to navigate without an automap.
Yep that about sums it up :)), just a few extra comments from me on two of your points since they really resonated with me In regards to point 1. fully agree, most horrendous of cheap mechanics for me personally is Elisabeth in P3 where killing her is left entirely up to chance - like seriously 0 agency from the player , just sit there and pray to all deities that the 2nd attack is a counter when you need it to - And then about point 5. I assume you screwed up in P5R by not focusing on Maruki but to play devil's advocate the game hints pretty heavily at that :) , still i also hate it when some crucial aspects of the game are being kept "hidden" from you ( Personally i screwed up in P4 on December 3rd and i was like : really game.. really ? )
My other issue is mini games that are fundamentally opposite of RPG. Don't make me do button mashing in a turn based game (FF9 jump rope, Trails Horror Coaster). Don't make me play a racing game with poor mechanics (FFX Chocobo racing). Terrible. I want to play a good RPG not a racing game or button masher.
Surprised you didn't mention tales of zesteria for the party members leaving gripe. It's probably the most egregious example in jrpg history, one of your characters leaves your party about 30% of the way through and NEVER comes back. They don't specifically imply they will never come back either because the shop vendors are still selling their weapon type in the shops so imagine my shock when my main motivating factor for playing through the game is getting to play that character again, only to have the game just end before it happens. It's probably the biggest controversy surrounding that game.
Well wasn’t there something going on between the Japanese voice actor for that one specific character and the director of the game? Like that character (no names due to spoilers) was originally supposed to be in the party for longer hence the equipment at plot points where the character is no longer in your party. That’s why the other human character got more screen time.
I like random encounters,i can appreciate the environment more and focus on finding path or hidden chest rather than focus on enemy in my sight(like how to dodge them when i don't want to battle)..but hey Maybe because i grow up with DQ series and all other jrpg on 90 and almost all of them is using it so i get used to it.
I’ve just beat Rhapsody on switch as part of the Prinny Presents and there is hardly any encounters. I was surprised how few there are. They must have changed it from the DS release. I found it really enjoyable.
Oh and no save/checkpoint before the boss, too. Nier Automata's first stage is the biggest offender. Was my first playthru and I wanted to play on hard. Get to the boss, die, then you have to start the entire game over again because the first checkpoint/savepoint is after that boss. Then by the time I spend another 30 minutes getting to the boss, I either forgot it's patterns or it'd change form/shape and have a new pattern I haven't seen yet. After 3 days of not geting passed the first boss, I lowered the difficulty, beat the boss, then raised it back up.
I've heard so many people complain about the final dungeon of Arise, but I never even thought anything of it when I played! I'm struggling to to find even a single complaint I had 😂If anything I thought it was unmemorable.
As I've gotten older random encounters have been a huge turn off for me as well. I remember loving Final Fantasy 8 as a kid, I tried replaying it recently and getting into combat after taking 5 steps each time was infuriating. And a huge, resounding THANK YOU to your final point. Super long final dungeons leading right up to the final boss is infuriating. I didn't even finish SMT3 because of how infuriated I was with the Tower. I just googled the ending.
never play xenogears if you hate final dungeons lol. all of that game's dungeons aren't that good but i had to stop the game and never finished because of it, which is a shame because xenoblade chronicles 3 is my favorite game ever
Loving Octopath 2 so far, but the grind between parts of different characters story chapters so far is nuts- I mean its often that certain party members have recommended levels 15 levels above the previous chapter often. Love the game so far but the grind is enough of a slog that I had to increase the battle speed even with using the gear that increases rare monster spawns.
Does doing the other character's chapters not get you far enough for that? That's only about 2 levels per chapter. Don't know about 2, but in octopath traveler i reached 65 before being even halfway through all Chapter 4s.
It's more that I love the game, probably one of the better JRPGs that has come out in the las few years, but since getting older I've noticed that I do like RPG games that respect your time in some way have ways to level up your party all at once- see Yakuza 7 or Ys 9 for example, where the game itself has backup party members either gain a reduced or similar amount of experience in battle. Or increase the rate of experience like the upcoming FF Pixel Remasters- sure it would have maybe messed with the difficulty curve, but it would make each Traveler generally around the same level and therefore I don't walk in with two or three faves and the character I need for their story and almost steamroll a boss or two.
@@RollingStone501 A way of dealing with that i like is basically having only a single party level, rather than individual characters. Other mechanics could still work the same, just when you would normally use the character level, you use the party level instead. That way, you don't have to worry about leaving characters behind in level or late arrivals being underleveled - they're automatically the same level as everybody else simply because that's how the mechanic works. The exact implementation can vary - maybe everybody just gets full experience regardless of where they are (and whether you even met them yet), maybe it's an actual mechanic where the level is only actually tracked for the group, or like Chained Echos you don't really have traditional levels and experience.
I can't believe unskippable cutscenes didn't make the list. So many games place checkpoints before cutscenes, forcing the player to rewatch sometimes minutes of content before retrying a boss. Also unskippable animations and cutscenes during fights should be punishable by law. I'm sure anyone who played ff7 back in the day died inside doing some of the optional bosses and watching the kotr summon animation on a loop. It wastes so much time... On the subject of wasting time - scarcity of checkpoints/save points is another. This one is rare but when it happens its the most frustrating thing in the world. (hello the optional dungeon in ff15, like wtf, you cant save for the whole duration of it and its like 3 hours long) Fortunately modern consoles/handhelds can suspend a game but it can go wrong if your hardware decides to update or your battery runs out...
I'll defend random encounters. I think the real purpose of them is that they're, well random and unavoidable. In an old RPG with random encounters, conserving your resources throughout the dungeon so you still had some healing items or MP left for the boss at the end of the dungeon was an important strategic consideration that's mostly absent in games where you can just avoid every encounter on your way to the boss. I feel like RPGs are very boss-centric nowadays, and it's mostly an outgrowth of this design trend. Now that the norm is that the player can avoid every non-boss battle, what purpose do they actually serve? How do you balance MP when there's no multi-battle pressure? Some games don't really have a good answer.
That's a fair point, doesn't really help though if there's also a mechanic that prevents you from escaping. Maybe it adds to tension but it's not really for me, I just want to see how the story comes to an end.
One that I hate is the "final" dungeon. More than once I have gone into a dungeon thinking that it's the last one so I blow my good items there/during the "final boss". Then bam! 2 more dungeons for you! I'm looking at you Tokyo Xanadu ex+ and TOCS II
I finished Trails to Azure yesterday, and while I love the game, the final boss was a case of cheap mechanics. They used a skill when its almost dead, that kills the entire party, regardless if you had shields on or not. It made me redo an already long fight for the 2nd time, and without any idea of how to avoid it, I had to go all out and only had one spare turn with Lloyd to beat the boss before getting owned again. Also Kuro no Kiseki's final boss was an ailment spam bitch with strong, altho not really insta kills. I don't know what I did wrong because it felt like a huge difficulty spike from anything prior, and not being able to grind anymore before the boss sure doesn't help.
This might just be a me thing, but one of my biggest problems in RPGs is the 3/4 of the way through the game problem. You know, that point where you have pretty much seen everything the game has to offer other than the ending and the story while good enough to get you this far is not great enough to make you want to finish the game. Enhanced further if there is a bunch of cheaply made side content that just opened up, so you can get the ultimate equipment. I don't know how many games I have quit at this point, but the amount is staggering. I think this also link into your final dungeon pet peeve because facing the biggest, most annoying dungeon ever when you are already burnt out on the game is so soul grating!
I won't defend random encounters necessarily, but placing enemies on-screen doesn't always make it better either, particularly when they chase after you and you can't outrun them. (Looking at you Xenosaga II.) At that point, the encounters might as well be random since you have no control over the rate at which you get into fights anyway. Suikoden I and II handle random encounters much better by tweaking encounter rate based on how you're moving around. The game can tell if you're trying to grind on the overworld map by sticking to one area and changing direction frequently, so it'll increase it. But if you move in one direction for a long time, it assumes you're just trying to get somewhere, so it reduces the rate. It was an amazing QoL feature for the time.
If I can't outrun them, I can at least 'see' that a battle is near, so I can prepare for what's about to happen. Random encounter is still a lottery on what I could bump in to.
When I realised Tales of Arise released the same year with Scarlet Nexus. NO WONDER. Seriously tho, JRPGs should do what Tales of Xillia did for "final not-so fungeons".
Fun video! As an exercise I wrote down 7 things before I listened to your video to see how they compared. We had a few commonalities, but I'll list them all for fun. 1. Random Encounters: You said it all. Random encounters are strictly inferior to seeing enemies on the overworld and avoiding if you want. 2. Grinding: Yup, we agree here! 3. Excessively Large Dungeons: You noted final dungeons, which to your point tends to be the biggest and worst culprit especially since near the end of the game is when the game is pushing the boundaries of overstaying its welcome. But to me excessively long dungeons are ALWAYS bad - no matter where in the game they fall. And yeah omg that Arise dungeon... 4. Excessive Run Time: I'd rather have a game understay its welcome than overstay it. I generally look at long as a drawback nowadays than a positive (exempting FEW tittles such as Trails, which earn their run-time). 5. Bloated / Overly Complex Systems: I'm looking at you, XBC2. Halfway through the game and still getting interrupted with tutorials? Need to RUclips the game just to understand the intricacies of the mechanics? Need spreadsheets to itemize? No thanks. 6. Stiff Writing: This usually isn't a problem. But when it is, it's a deal-breaker. I'll put up with almost anything for characters / a story I care about. Lose me there, and you lose altogether. 7. *Hot Take* Sim mechanics / Excessive Player Choice on Story: Multiple Endings! Branching Paths! Major story Beats Gated Behind Obscure Choices! Yeah, pass. Honestly, I don't *want* to have to beat the game more than once to experience all it has to offer. And I don't want to have to follow a guide to do it either. I always say this is probably why Sky sits ahead of all the others for me in trails. The lack of Sim mechanics and *too much* player choice allows the Falcom story writers do what they do best and *tell a story*. This is to say nothing about the annoyingness of Harem mechanics. How basically there is almost no peripheral romance in Steel because every woman on the continent is reserved for Rean. -_- Anyways, fun video!
I think Bravely Default has my favorite random encounter system. The sliding bar that goes between "farm stuff here" and "let's get somewhere". Would be super easy to implement in most games dead set on random encounters.
There are only two things that I generally hate on jrpg: 1- timer mechanics like the ones on the atelier series, man I just wanna play the game and relax a little bit, jesus christ. 2- missable achievements/scenes/fights/content that require you to either do another playthrough or suck it up and just ignore it, I mean I get the fact that these are either meant for second playthroughs or for those who just wander around 30 hours in between chapters grinding but when we're talking about a game that runs for about 80+ hours I just cant bother anymore
tbh... not a problem for me with random encounters. If you can evade monsters on the map then it sometimes makes it way to easy to go to the end. Sometimes you need that tension of battling through a horde of monsters to get to the end. I mean if you step like 1 meter and then there is a random encounter or rooms with puzzles full of'em then I get it. But yeah.. got no problems if they implement them in a non annoying way or at least make it like Wild arms where you can avoid with a button, which cannot be spammed all the time or a sign which lets you know that there will be an encounter like legends of dragoon.
so thing on random encounters. random encounters have vastly lost their point in later JRPGs. if you ever play stuff like say dragon quest 1. the random encounters id go as far to say carry the entire game. in DQ1 typical fashion of random encounters you get swarmed by mobs and they hit your health piece of piece. the thing is when your say pushing a dungeon you do have to make the active choice of pushing onwards vs risking dying and losing half your money which can be a pretty (IMO reasonable) punishment for dying forcing you to grind out that lost cash. the active choice making of assesses or assuming you have enough resources to push onwards vs hightailing it back and keeping your spoils made it a lot of fun. that said i think overworld encounters are a mixed bag to most games dont really do them all that well. i think cold steel having the super meter in CS3/4 was a great addition to encourage players to not skip fights. trails games also have the EXP scaling if your underleveled to force you back into a range to deal with whatever issues. but i find more often then not most other games i just end up overly skipping fights and not really getting enough XP and being forced to grind (DQ11 this absolutely happened to me). having influences to actually fight things is a really big thing. i liked the romancing saga 3 approach where enemies scale to some degree based on various factors so if you run into to many they will start to brutalize you but on the flip side its free stats if they are weak to so you gotta be a bit choosy with how many you want to do. granted that game gives no craps about murdering you so it works in that context lol. also semi related but i think the ability to "turn off random encounters" is a trash idea of game design cause its missing the entire point of what random encounters could be as far as resource management. at that point just do overworld encounters.
I enjoy random encounters, if done well. That is a knives edge though and a moving target, every player will have different preferences. For me, the intro can't be too long. I kinda love FF7-9 epic camera moves that start each fight, that whoosh and the transition when the battle starts, the celebration and loot and everything, but all of that needs the option to be fast forwarded. If you have no control over when to fight and are forced into it, time becomes important, lest you feel like nails on chalkboard when the music starts. random encounters have a couple unique qualities. You are on edge. It harkens back to games that focused on resource management, where time spend in a dungeon offered the potential for great loot and balanced that with the risk of being overwhelmed. Though I agree, that most games don't utilise them like that at all, making random encounters a bad fit. I like that you can't predict the combat. I recall moments where I was surprised that battle started, or the type of enemy in it. It's a neat way to hide secrets and diversify the experience. I like that it makes the world seem larger. Sprites on the level screen kinda take me out of it if done poorly. If everything is a bit abstract my mind just comes up with why and how this makes sense. But sprites just aimlessly moving about often feels silly to my brain, like a low effort puppet show.
btw, I'd be interested in a video on combat mechanics. You seem to have a lot of experience and likely seen all sorts of styles. What do you like, what works best, hidden gems, bad habits, all of that.
I don't mind random encounters when you first enter a new area, but once you've hit the effective level cap for that zone, there really should be an option to turn them off. Get there, fight new enemies, level up? That parts fine. When the xp slows to a crawl and the fights are just annoying roadblocks...? Yeah, then they can get in the bin. And I don't mind the final dungeons so much normally, but yeah, I've got to agree with you on Tales of Arise's. My God was that tedious. Which is a shame because the rest of the game was actually really good!
Random encounters drive me nuts. Especially running through a dungeon and being spammed with random enemies. JRPGs are my favourite game genre but I just cant stand these random encounters!!!
The encounter rate for random battles is why I won’t ever beat Octopath 1. I had so much fun the first 30 hours but the random battles and the lack of turbo mode is just such a slog.
I got the true ending in Persona 5 Royal just because I prioritized new Confidants that I had never seen before, as opposed to the ones I had already seen in the original Persona 5, I feel like that's what Atlus was expecting us to do. Especially because one of the confidants thats mandatory only has 5 ranks as opposed to everyone else's 10
I like random encounters. I enjoy the challenge, the feeling of exploring a trully dangerous place, and the ressource management that comes from them. If your encounters are optional you often end up not fighting enough leading to a lack of XP that is arbitrary and ultimately the need to grind flares up as a new problem.
I think that's the real argument 'for' random encounters. They force you to fight and keep up with the curve. But I look at Trails for example, especially Cold Steel which did a very solid job of just keeping me up to speed at every point, and that had visible sprites all the way through.
Great video and 100% agree with you, especially random encounters and final dungeons. I never really noticed how annoying random encounters can be until I played games that actually did not have them - now going back to older games with that feature I always get that "oh no, not that mechanic" melancholy. It disrupts the flow so hard and especially without speed up options, its just so slow. And final dungeons: I do understand how they should build up to the epic finale, but most of the time they do fail in doing that. If I have the feeling of "today i finish that game" and 3 hours later I am still walking through the same dungeon - that can literally destroy the whole game/experience and leave you with bad memories for that game.
Just watched your Retro JRPGs vids and you literally hit on the thing that takes Valkyrie Profile down a notch for me. The obscurity in getting the best ending. Because after I beat it... I looked it up and somehow I was only one criteria away from best ending. I still love VP but man... Seeing I was missing that one thing made me a little frustrated
One thing i didn't like about Trails was their Forceful Romance Matchmaking and their restricted bonding events. Like Sky was totally fine, Joshua was the main bf and all and its established that theres romance between them so sure, its nice and sweet to see them together. BUT COLD STEEL ...... how dare they bar my way with these bonding events and still have a canon love interest. THEN proceeds to add even more love interests in the rest of the quartet and have all of them pursuable. Its just so jarring. Don't give players a choice if the canon is still gonna be Alisa. And don't restrict the no. of bonding points i have and force me to play a second time for max bonding points. Instead of bonding points for romance give me bonding points for the character development and make it max bonding point from the start so that none of these developments are locked behind New game +.
Yep, I was nodding at all these. Resonance of Fate combined 2, 6 and 7 into one for me: hope you can make it through the final dungeon in one go and take on a boss gauntlet for good measure! Oh and the enemies reset in most rooms and will require backtracking too! I'd like to add a couple more: the thou-must-lose boss, especially when it isnt obvious at first and you exhaust good items for no reason. Or take a game over when you think it's an impossible fight but isn't. Second is the boss that "barely used 10% of its power" after a usually very tough fight. I love Trails, but it does this too much. I get a party needs time to grow, but it feels to over the top and cheapens the mood for me.
For your 1st offense (which I agree with) Octopath Traveler 1 & 2 does a great job handling this. When they’re about to do a 1hit KO the enemy goes into a new stance & powers up thus giving you 1 or 2 turns to prepare.
Do not think of random encounters as a thing that should add up something they should define how the battle system works. There are a bunch of things that random encounters do that are unachieveable without them: - they ensure balance, especially if the run/avoid system is properly tuned to work with them. If properly implemented, they ensure that the party would not be underlevelled. At least for me they pacify my mind that I would not need to design the game instead of the designers - they create a sense of dread. People share dreading the random the encouter in games (and thus not liking it). Well, dreading it is what should happen. If you need to be on the edge and not wanting to be faced by the enemy, then the random encouter is the way to go. For a proper implementation of it, see Darkest Dungeons. Had it not had random encounters, it would have been hurt by the lack of them - they ensure that you would not overstay in a certain dungeon, if they are implemented like that - when the encounter rate rises while you are in a certain dungeon. That creates incentive to move on if done properly and the encounters are properly challenging while your resources are limited Random encouters are not a problem in and out of their own, their bad implementation is. They are easily scapegoated which is unfair imho. If random encounter does not feel in place, it is almost exclusively due to bad implementation. To your point: "How is giving the player more control ever a bad thing?" Well, it is if it is not how the game should feel. Random encounters shine when tension is needed, when you need to feel unsafe and when you need to properly manage your resources in order to finish a dungeon. I myself love their implementantion in numerous games and dislike it in others. I would even go as far as saying that I would love to see them in games like the Tales dungeon crawl spinoff (where your items are capped out at 15) for example.
TKN: *Goes on a long tantrum about the final dungeon in Arise* Also TKN: *Shows literally nothing about the final dungeon in Arise* Gotta be honest, the final moments in Arise, I really did not mind. Might just be me loving the idea of trampling titanic enemies with my super bois and gals, I dunno. Honestly, I was more annoyed by the fact that to gain new game plus benefits, you literally have to do most of the post-game. You know...the thing that New Game Plus benefits would work more or less the best with?! I do agree to a certain point though. Final Dungeons are a real hit-or-miss area for me. I can name a fair few on both ends. The characters just up and splitting from your gang...FUCK that noise though, easily the dumbest thing in an rpg.
I still like to keep these videos somewhat spoiler free, wasn't even contemplating putting in the still image but that won out in the end. I go in with the mindset that no-one has played the games I mention, and thus keep it general for that reason.
@@TheKisekiNut Oh, don't worry I get ya. I was mainly just joking around, sorry if I came of as rude. Literally never was my intention, and I can see how my comment mighta been a little on the cocky side XD
The only series I am okay with having random encounters is Pokémon. The surprise is an aspect to entice the player to explore and see what new thing you can catch. And because the encounter area was noticeable (Tall Grass), it's avoidable. Plus repels exist to lower the encounter rate or stop it entirely. Otherwise I think they're annoying and I don't trust anyone who likes them
My main gripe, is that almost every single JRPG keeps referring to powerful enemies as "gods". Even after ~30 years of playing JRPGs, I STILL roll my eyes every single time this comes up. No, having lots of fun superpowers does not, in any way, make you a "god". In fact, party members, attack that guy. Did your attack do anything? If so, you have proven that he's not a "god". I feel like they think they have to make the stakes as high as possible, by making the enemy as powerful as possible. But, all it does is make it nonsensical and/or make the characters seem like morons. If it was really a "god", then game over, you lose, and there's is absolutely nothing you could do about it. He could blink you out of existence, and then yawn.
@@Ronjonbify Not at all. I'm Christian. That part of Xenoblade also made me roll my eyes. I immediately thought, "A world with no gods..? Well, you asked for it..." **sudden and complete non-existence of everything**
This may have to do with to Shintoism in Japan in Shinto mythology there are hundreds of gods quite a few of them gets killed and not to mention Japan has not had a good history with Christianity might have also been a factor two am not defending it or saying i like it just different countries have different outlook on Gods not to mention different mythologies and religions
Love this video. One additional pet hate of mine is poor maps. Ys8 I'm looking at you! 70 hours of a fab game let down by a map so pish it nearly drove me to despair. And I didn't quite finish the game - I gave up. Years later it still grinds my gears. 😡
I hate when games force you into back to back battles with no chance to heal or save and make you rdo the whole set if you get taken down. I actally like Random battles though. Its nice to be surprised and I think there are many more ways to mess up a viable encounter system compared to random battles. They can have enemies appear so close you can't react before getting into battle which renders making the enemies visible meaningless, they can have either too high or too low respawn rates, or bad placement for enemy groups. Random encounters can only have two of those four problems.
Agreed, all very fair points. I don't doubt that some of these are just a natural lack of polish due to how the development cycle works. multiple endings, artificial difficulty, random encounter rates.
Bosses with HP restoration moves are at the top of my list. No, you're not allowed to heal the HP I just spent the last twenty minutes chipping away at, that's cheating. If it's draining your health to restore its own that's even worse. I don't like this in scripted fights where the boss restores it health for a second phase either, it's demoralising. Just...have it keep the HP bar and transition to the next phase, don't restore it to full health and make it worse! Also, RNG for item drops. I don't like leaving sidequests undone, but nor do I like farming enemies for items for fetch quests. There's got to be a better way to do this...or just, don't do it at all. Make sidequests meaningful and engaging, not mindless drivel designed solely to pad the game out further and infuriate completionists or people who just want the rewards.
Bosses being able to heal is not really cheating, if you can do it, why cant they? Most games that have that kind of thing, you can mitigate it anyway, either with a status ailment, or just straight up preventing them from doing so.
I think the bigger issue with what you're describing is the bloated health that some bosses have. Yes, they're supposed to be much tougher than regular enemies, but if you can survive a couple minutes, you've obviously got the chops to win, and anything beyond that is just dragging it out unnecessarily. It's a lack of respect for player time.
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We've got a long weekend in the UK for Easter, so I'm away for most of it!
And I figured that since this is a time of celebration, I might as well vent my grievances about our favourite genre first before letting the good times roll.
I would also add that thing, then you complete 95% of game, and you have only one last dungeon, and game like. Hey now you can at last go all around the world one more time to collect all this random staff and maybe get top weapon for one or two character.
Of course we can disperse collectibles trough all game, but we dont wana. Go you know that this meteor will kill planet, but he can wwit 2-3 days untill you complete game on 100%
Kiseki nut why do jrpg have linear straight path maps with nothing interact with example kh2 or Pokemon swsh do you think this is will change soon
Wow, this list is spot on. As a veteran rpg player, this video summarizes the annoyances perfectly.
I recently finished Atelier Rorona DX, I loved the game with all my heart, but I was really bummed that I couldn't get the ending for one of my favorite characters because one of hers event required me to fail to synthesize something. In a game like Atelier Rorona, where every day counts, I obviously opted to minimize my number of misses and that cost me an ending.
I think Etrian Odyssey does random encounters well. There's a little icon on the bottom right that shifts color from green to red, and as it gets redder the encounter rate goes up, and then it resets once you get into a battle. Basically, you'll always know when you're about to get into a battle, but there's still a slight element of chance/surprise to what pops up in the encounter and exactly how long it'll be when it happens. Sometimes you get the encounter the instant it turns red, sometimes you can walk around for a little bit before it happens. It prevents the 'back-to-back-to-back battles' problem while still preserving some of the surprise.
Shin Megami Tensei Nocturne did the same thing.
That´s also the system used in Ar Tonelico, only that in AT the bar also goes down with each encounter, and when the bar is empty, there are no more encounters in that map, even when you change screens, it only reset when you change areas
@@Ghalion666 Yeah, I don't mind random encounters in first person dungeon crawlers.
Ar Tonelico did this too, and I didn't mind that. At least I had an idea of when an encounter was on me, and it would straight up end them when the bar was depleted.
@@ironuru526 I loved that in Ar Tonelico. Gives you a bit of grinding in a new zone, but then leaves you to explore in peace. Its fantastic.
great video! you actually helped me bite the bullet in starting the trails series and after finishing sky first chater im really happy i did
Enjoy it! Series isn't for everyone but those it clicks for become fans for the long haul.
Something that annoys me not just with JRPGs but overal with games (don't happen a lot thank goodness) but it's bosses/dungeons/story bits locked behind NG+. I am someone who likes to experience (close to) everything in one playthrough, so when I find out that there's something locked behind NG+ I am like "oh damn" there have been a few exceptions like experiencing both paths in Scarlet Nexus. But when I played Trails From Zero and found out (after I put enough hours into it) that there's a NG+ dungeon & boss I didn't feel like doing it. That doesn't mean that I'll never do it, but just not anytime soon.
What made it worse for Zero is that it also has treasure chests that are required for the achievement...so I had to get every single chest in the game a second time. I started my first playthrough on Nightmare as I always do so part of me recognizes that I needed the extra loot to help me through that, but the other part of me still felt like I wasted time and effort on something I didn't need to do just yet.
The point about final dungeons is interesting because I also don't really care for them most of the time speaking purely in terms of gameplay, but conceptually, I can't really see how else you would properly build up to the final boss and otherwise literal end of the game you're playing. They serve the purpose of being impressive set pieces as to set the tone for the end of the game while also giving you time to think about the journey you had that brought you to this point. I definitely understand the complaints about spongey enemies or branching paths that lead to nothing though. But as much as I dislike when those things happen, I think I'd be more upset if I were simply thrown into the end of the game with no time to consider my journey or what I was getting ready to fight. That build up, that tension, that reminiscing. I think it's all important for the core feel of a JRPG.
Build up to the final boss is fine, I wasn't suggesting removing the concept all together. What I was touching on more is that final dungeons are so often 'needlessly grand', in that developers sometimes think that a longer dungeon means a grander experience. It's not, it just takes away from the moment. Not a JRPG, but the staircase leading up to Ganon in Ocarina of Time for example is perfect to set the stage. If JRPGs had moments of substance in their dungeons like that, then I wouldn't hate them nearly as much.
A lot of times I find with games that require a lot of grinding it is because when a game was localized for the U.S. it is because the developers for some reason lowered the EXP or money for that version of the game. For example, with Legend of Legaia the U.S. version was made more difficult by having enemies give less EXP and money maknig the game much harder then the original Japanese version or PAL version of the game. Lunar 1 PS1 and Lunar 2 Sega CD U.S. versions also were made more difficult by Working Designs when both of those games were localized by making enemies harder then in the original Jaapnese version.
That's interesting, never knew that!
On the topic of multiple endings, I think another big problem with them is the fact that most feature “golden” endings means that such a mechanic feels redundant. Like I can understand a golden ending that uses its existence to prove a point and further the big questions at the heart of the game, a great example being The Banner Saga trilogy. But too often it feels like the best ending is a bunch of random stuff you need to do to get actual closure and undercuts the existence of the other endings.
The most clear example of this from recent times is Triangle Strategy. If you go onto the subreddit for the game and see the threads about the endings, most people discuss the three main alignment endings with only a little cheeky reference to how the fourth ending is the real one anyway. Why is this the case? For one the game’s whole selling point is about weighing what convictions the player values the most, and thus talking about which conviction is best is simply more interesting than saying, “hey, that true ending am I right?” The second is that the true ending requires a very specific route through the game, so unless you happen to get really lucky the true ending doesn’t so much feel like a choice you make as it does a script you follow, again undercutting the multiple choice selling point.
In my eyes if a game is going to follow a multiple endings route I say write them all as equally valid endings to the story and let the players decide which one is their favorite ending. Unless they have a really good reason to have a best ending it just defeats the purpose of the mechanic.
I actually like Triangle Strategy s route system, in the way that Zero Escape 999s true ending was super rewarding.
I think the reason to have a true ending is to cover their backs in case the game gets a sequel. Because having to make a sequel taking into account wildly different endings would be very difficult at best, and most likely impossible. Unfortunately, that makes the other endings superfluous, since they end up relegated to non canon status
Agreed 100%. All the endings should be treated as equally viable/canon, otherwise having multiple endings feels pointless. Another annoying example is SMT V which was SO CLOSE to having every alignment ending feel equally viable, but then they just HAD to shoehorn in a "true" ending.
@@danielbritoperez This is actually a fair point. To some extent I’ve always felt it would be funny if more multiple endings games just had sequels that picked one of the previous endings and went with it instead of this future proofing golden ending stuff (if nothing else the fallout of watching fans lose their minds at their favorite ending becoming non-canon would entertaining in its own way), but at the end of the day both methods are a sort of a darned if you do darned if you don’t situation.
I love how differently "golden" endings can be done. The way you showcase Triangle Strategy, that one done awful for sure.
Same awfully done all of Persona "ultimate" endings. It's always clear that those are add-ons and weren't intended to be in there. Like, if you ever ask fans, they recommend to play Persona 4 Golden but finish it with Vanilla ending. With Persona 5 Royal same thing don't happen but only because there some things in additional ending people expected from vanilla.
But SMT 3-4 quite other way around. Ordinary endings rarely mentioned and ultimate one the one most known. Tho for different reasons. In both normal endings "don't feel right" for most people. But in Nocturne ultimate ending not really hard to go into but hard to win over(it require challenging battles and finish specific dungeon). While IV do same thing as Triangle Strategy where you must balance invisible stat by conversations before specific point in story. Nocturne ultimate ending quite loved and IV hated but "there's no reason to waste time on other".
I actually surprised about Triangle Strategy being done so bad, since in Octopath Traveler you clearly meant to gather all 8 characters and do their stories... But "golden ending" granted to those who invested into completing all the side quests. Sure, that may be optional thing but it isn't criptic or anything too hard to get.
I do agree with what you said about random encounters, but I think their appeal comes from making sure you have enough experience for a boss. Because people would probably skip most encounters if they could, but then could come a moment where they would have to stop and grind. With random encounters, the game is atleast making sure u are getting experience and leveling up.
This seems to be the common argument in favour of them.
You are certainly right about this for games designed in the past. The modern solution is to have several scripted encounters or mid bosses before the final boss. If they are written in to the plot they have meaning unlike most random encounters and they can prevent players skipping thru to boss fights without getting stronger. But it obviously takes more work from Devs. I think a mixture of these methods is the right way to go. A good modern example was Bravely Default giving the player a slider for encounter rate but i havent seen this on many other games.
@John Smith I kinda see them as two paths that lead to the same outcome. No matter the RPG, you are going to do alot of battles. So scripted or random doesn't really matter in the end.
Rena guarantees that i will never touch tales of arise again. I seriously considered dropping the game when I hit the halfway point of that dungeon. It was more frustrating for me than the entirety of Elden Ring bc at least the minute to minute gameplay of ER was fun.
Damn, it wasnt just me that dislike ToA.
@@shutup1037 I actually like ToA right up until Lenegis and Rena. However the 1-2 pinch of exposition dumps and the final dungeon left a horrible last impression.
Horrible final dungeon, overstays its welcome and then some.
I dont like random encounters either, but ive always felt the reason for them is to make sure you are levelling up your characters and not just avoiding everything. Else you could end up very under levelled and effectively soft lock yourself.
this. i also think that it served as a way to bypass limitations of the technology, where they could add more detail in battle screens, but not have to accommodate that level of detail in the whole world.
GREAT VIDEO! I definitely got annoyed in Trials of Mana when it came to the enemy encounters, you could see them on your screen but there’s no way to get through without a battle initiating a battle. After 100 times of that happening, gets pretty annoying lol. The final boss for immortals fenyx rising was absolutely brutal too, took me like 5 tries, 2 hours total I wanted to rip my hair out lol
As for the multiple ending. I had the exact same case in P5 Royal as you did. I wasn't invested in Kasumi, and the game had characters that I wanted to see their stories way more than her, and completely missed the ending of Royal, and that's when I never played OG P5. So yeah, I played P5 Plus, not P5 Royal.
Great vid. Even though we're not 100% on the same page, I see where you're coming from even where I disagree with you. Some targeted replies:
*Cheap mechanics* : IME usually instant death is resistable (but it is annoying because you have to specifically equip something you usually wouldn't equip to get that). Also IME 1 hp attacks are a DPS check, or sometimes a HPS (heal per second) check. You respond with either sudden burst damage, sudden burst heals, or by doing a swap with folks that aren't about to die (in games that have that mechanic). I hate the omni-status thing though, and I don't really like these other ones either because of how directly they warp your strategy.
*Random encounters/difficulty spikes* : I sometimes find that the non-random encounters approach leads to an excess of player choice, which can lead to the player falling off the power curve, especially if the rewards for the mook fights are not tuned well. Trails games have really good tuning on mook fights in general but even they are not immune to this. I remember having no particular difficulty with the final dungeon mook fights in Sky FC, so I started skipping them. Then I got wiped by the final boss back when I first played the game. This was a bad enough experience that it almost drove me away from the series altogether, I only went back to it 3 years later.
*Characters leaving* : This can pretty much singlehandedly drive me to take a quick glance at a guide. A sneaky sub-issue with this is that it basically spoils that the character will be back, so that your stuff isn't just gone forever. It's still usually outdated by the time it comes back, though.
*Multiple endings* : Realistically, especially taking into account how franchise-happy studios are, there's just not really a way to do multiple endings right unless you do some timey-wimey stuff to make multiple endings canon at the same time like CS4. Usually there's some kind of true ending which usually undermines the other ones. Even in something like Chrono Trigger there are only two meaningfully different endings that you might get in a first playthrough without ridiculous amounts of grind. The rest feel more like fun what if scenarios than satisfying conclusions.
*Final dungeons/multi phase bosses without checkpoints* : I have mixed feelings about these. I think this issue is a quirky thing about playing a *game* primarily for the *story* but also wanting the *gameplay* to be enjoyable. You get this feeling when the gameplay is getting in the way of your experience of the story, essentially. Recent Tales games seem to have this a lot because they are treating the final dungeon as a training ground for the postgame, but the postgame is like 98% gameplay 2% fanservice, so folks like you and me are generally not very interested in it. The unskippable cutscenes in between phases is a straight up flaw, however.
I think my remark about "gameplay getting in the way of your experience of the story" is actually at the root of a lot of these things. That doesn't excuse it, to be sure, but maybe it helps illuminate why some of these issues are hard for developers to avoid.
@Game Design Andy I guess I wasn't totally clear: these weren't really meant to be rebuttals. Most of them were arguments for softer takes on the same ideas. In particular, random encounters don't really *fix* what I described. They're a decent band-aid for it, and if the encounter rate is tuned appropriately then they may not be annoying. But they still aren't a magic fix.
In general I'd prefer not to have forced encounters (which includes unavoidable but visible encounters). But if you go with skippable encounters, then the developers do need to either make the mook fights not really necessary for progression or else give the player some cues to do them as they go. The classic way to do the latter is to make the mook fights challenging in and of themselves until you're ready for the boss, but there are other ways to do it as well.
I think grinding is one one side of the sin medaillon of JRPGs: Slogpacing. So many JRPGs suffer from it and I hate it. While forced grinding destroys the pacing from a gameplay perspective, I also hate the super slow story progression and the verbosity of a lot of JRPGs. I love Persona 5, but good lord how many hours i clicked through meaningless and repititive dialogues (especially the phone chats). I hate it when games don't respect my time and bloat up their gametime like that. Of course its easier to deliver a bloated game, editing and being short and precise is an art form, but most JRPGs dont even try. Most Japanese games in general, Visual Novels suffer from the same disease. Recently I played Paranormasight a VN that is so refreshing, because its so fucking fast paced. In 10-12 hours it delivers a complex story with many characters and sideplots - and it works. Because I am not stupid, I don't need plot element repeated and detailed explanations all the time. Wish more Japanese games would be like that.
(When I think about it, Western games also have it, I avoid most Open world games for a reason)
About the random encounter thing, I'll give my spiel as a game designer who has worked on an RPG:
Basically, Random Encounters are necessary if you want to create a combat system based on resource management. Let's take a classic game like Dragon Quest 3. In that game, no individual enemy encounter will kill the player unless they've gone way off the beaten path. What does kill the party is slowly using items and MP to recover from battle damage until you have to enter fights with too little health.
With a sprite-on-screen approach, you cannot force players to expend resources. If you do make an om-screen battle unavoidable, players will rightfully be annoyed since in doing so you violated the entire purpose of the system (letting you choose when to fight). If you let players avoid fights, as soon as they get low on resources they will avoid all fights, therefore making resource drain moot.
Where Random Encounters get a bad rap is when they are used just because "that's how it's always been done," rather than for the purpose of encouraging resource management. And I agree, most JRPGS don't really care about resource management, so they shouldn't have random encounters. There's also ways to make them less annoying, like using the warning indicator from SMT3/Etrian Odyssey. But if a JRPG wants to have dungeon crawling or steady resource drain, random encounters are still the way to go.
The final boss of XC3 took so long that by the time I beat it, I assumed it was a scripted fight that was impossible to lose. Then I found out people had died and needed to start it over...guess I was one of the lucky ones.
If only it was scripted... it was horribly bloated, which is unfortunate considering I loved the rest of the game.
I can only agree. Fortunately some of your points like random encounters aren't that much of an issue in modern games anymore.
Some points I'd like to add:
- Fights you have to loose for story purposes even if you just decimated the enemy
- A party that only consists of overly mature teenagers which behave as if they were 10 years older
- Cheap fanservice
- One-dimensional characters
- Extreme foreshadowing as if you were stupid
Man, I don't recall the final dungeon of Tales of Arise being that bad at all, but I was probably heavily overpowered by that point.
The only thing I'd really disagree with you about is random encounters, and the reason why is that in games with visible encounters, I've found that all the devs that use them tend to just make a bunch of narrow corridors filled with them to force you into them, and sometimes at a rate higher than you'd get in random encounter games. Also, rare monsters in games with visible encounters tend to be harder/more laborious to find than in random encounter games in my experience. By a lot.
In a random encounter game, one step into a designated area might have your screen filled with metal slimes or their equivalent. In a visible encounter game, they're usually tucked away in some corner, through a gauntlet of a dozen choke-points filled with other enemies, and when you get to their one spawn point, they might not even be there, or if they are, they might have the same irritating tendency to just dip out before you can kill them. Then to try again, you might have to go as far as exiting the entire area and repeating the process.
One other thing - If there are save/recovery areas in a place where you want to stop and grind for whatever reason, you don't have to go chase-assing through the area, possibly through loading screens, to get the job done.
Anyway, it's not by a lot, but I prefer random encounters, and those are some reasons why.
I don't even remember it being _that_ long. Bit optically boring, but that kinda made sense for what it was.
Random encounters is a mechanic of the nes snes days when game were super short and needed padding, theres speedruns of the original nes ff1 done in under 20 minutes, random encounters should be a lost mechanic that never sees the light of day again
Well I agree with some of your points, there are some circumstances surrounding "Grinding". For example if a game does not provide the needed extra content seperate from the main scenerio, then I don't think additional grinding should be a primary stepping stone to overcome the challenges, because after all you are just following a single straightforward linear story. How ever, I do think some games have difficulty spikes put in place to distract the player from the main story, so that you go out of your way to experience additional side activities and supplemental material not just mini games and the like, but also its part of a key incredient of preperation. I have always felt that there is a balance when it comes to grinding and even some of the steep difficulty curves are appropriate because the game has alot of distractions outside the main campaign that you can sink your teeth into and the developers want you to experience the full game rather then to just speed rush your way through. It also helps to motivate the player to go hunt for materials, prepare your self more effeciently for the challenges ahead so you can overcome those blocks in the road and these are all aspects of a jrpg I don't want to ever change. I do not like that some jrpgs are just to easy and doesn't require hardly any sort of grinding. Even going back to its heydays and roots of the genre, adventuring and grinding is the makeup of a progression system in a jrpg. In that case, the grinding is deffinitly warrented.
Going to Sotenbori in Yakuza 7 was the absolute WORST because enemies were lv 40-50 when I was 30, and there was zero indication of that spike.
The game tells you to train
They did... by suddenly telling you about a dungeon tower when you arrived there, kind of like finding health items lying around in a particular area.
I agree with your list but I'll add a few.
1. Dungeon maps- i hate when the dungeon area all looks the same and I have to spend extra time remembering which doors I've been in and which I haven't. Especially on dungeons late in the game giving you usually but not always the final weapon for your characters.
2. Weapons or armor in dungeons that I just bought in the town.
3. Final bosses that make the platforms disappear underneath your character that make them disappear and cause me to redo the final boss. 2 different games I played had this. They teach me throughout the game to keep my characters close in big fights to buff/heal. Then the final boss when close to death will cause certain platforms to disappear.
4. Difficulty spikes. Yakuza 7 was like this. Went from level 30 or 35 to 40 and even 50 in just a chapter
4:38 A lot of older gamers have experienced the ultimate version of this (having characters leave your party after you build them ).
Back when FF7 was new, most of us used Aeris most of the time on the first disc since she was a good healer. Then she gets removed from your party forever.
I still remember how that impacted me because I had spent all that time using her only to come to the realization she was gone for good.
JRPGs were also very new to me back then, so I did not know I was probably going to be getting new characters later in the game either.
Too bad most new players will never experience this anymore since now even if you have not played the game, you know it is coming
So as an American guy who grew up playing the original NES final fantasy and dragon quest (called dragon warrior at the time) and who fondly remembers the rivalry square used to have with Enix, I'll try to explain random encounters.
Fairly early on (probably starting with dragon quest II), JRPG dungeons started getting longer and more Maze-y. So, resource mgmt became important, not necessarily with items but definitely with spells and heals. And keep in mind there were no faqs or readily available maps back then. So let's say you're 45 mins into a dungeon and you're running out of heals, which path(s) do you decide to take to get to the exit? If you get there early, do you decide to backtrack in case you missed a chest that might have an OP set of armor? You don't know how many enemies you'll run into, and likely you won't be able to run from them... so if you're low on resources maybe you just decide to keep going but then maybe you miss out on that great weapon. Decisions, decisions. And the fact these encounters are random introduced a level of nerves / anxiety / maybe fear you don't get in today's RPGs. Also those games were undeniably harder, I can't recall a recent time when I wiped in a non-boss fight but that happened all the time in the early JRPG days.
All that to say the random encounters / length of dungeons added atmosphere to those older games and additional difficulty because wiping was an actual possibility (partly bc of potential encounter volume). Today's games are more forgiving in a lot of ways, and I think for accessibility it makes more sense to see enemies on the screen and be able to run from them if you need to (like what trails does). Anyway hopefully that answers your Q about why random encounters were there in early JRPGs, and imo in a lot of ways that design choice supported the games that were being made back then.
My least favorite thing in RPGs is unmarked, missable optional quests or items that the game never tells you about that have some sort of importance. Falcom and Tales are significantly guilty of this. I played Abyss years ago before I used guides for games to make sure I'm not missing anything, and I missed literally every sidequest so I never learned Jade's full backstory. So when I went reading TVTropes as I did back in the day, it started talking about stuff that I didn't know and I was so confused.
Trails was less frustrating to me because at that time I was using guides, but it's still annoying just conceptually because I shouldn't need to use a guide to see everything I want to see. Thankfully, both series have gotten much better about it.
It's like you picked this list straight out my head. Especially multiple endings. Like Nier. I bought it on sale recently, but I'm so intimidated because you have to play like, what like 5 times, to get the true ending. And then there's Chrono Trigger. I recently beat a first play through and everyone keeps telling me to unlock more endings... when there's 13 of them. My backlog is too big and my time is too short for all that
The good thing with Automata (I'm assuming you're talking about that one) is that the endings flow in to one another. Every playthrough is slightly different and it's whole premise is designed around those multiple endings, so I quite liked it since you're not actually missing anything come the finale.
Another thing to add is consecutive boss fights with no warning whatsoever. I'm looking at you Vulcan and C boss fight from trails of cold steel 1. You waste your resources like hp, mana and items on a boss fight then another one appears making the fight even harder and if you die you gotta do everything over again.
Grinding on your own terms and time is fun but when it’s forced upon you, it instantly becomes tedious. Of the more notable one is Octopath Traveler (the first game). Having collect your characters at Level 3-5 then suddenly seeing that Chapter 2 is Level 20+ made me groan 😩 the game is great but the sudden gap in levels was really annoying to grind for. As for random encounters, I much prefer it when games give you the option to either approach or run past the overworld enemies. The invisible random encounters are the worst.
What about late game slog. I feel like it happens in so many JRPG. Like around the last 30% of the game, the game feels like it lost its magic.
Felt that way towards DQ11 when I played it surprisingly.
I don't think this is unique to JRPGs, but a problem with the industry as a whole. Too many devs are overly focused on making a game "bigger" for bigger's sake. I'll take a 10 hour game that's laser-focused and fun over an 80 hour grindfest any day.
@@usbmindlink I think it's a lot about them making the game's content in order. So they invariably run out of resources (which includes time) towards the end and have to cheap out on that.
It's not bigger in and of itself, it's that they focus to much on the first parts and run out of steam to finish things up.
That's a fair point, but it's never been too much of an issue for me.
Rena in Tales of Arise wasn't that bad.
But I HATED one of the last side quest of defeating EVERY boss in a row. Especially when I can only carry 15 of each item & apple gels are worthless at that point.
See, I didn't mind that side quest! Rena can burn though.
For number 6, the absolute worst is the true/secret ending for Octopath Traveler. I’m order to finish that, you have to beat something like 8 bosses in a row then a two form final boss with two separate parties. You cannot save at any point during this process. I got to the boss’s second form only to get wiped, and I had to start from the beginning, again. Many hours wasted, and I put octopath down after that.
In defense of final dungeons, specially in Trails games: The music makes them worth it.
Spiral of Erebos best dungeon theme
@@V2ULTRAKill I'm a Phantasmal Blaze fan more, but Spiral is a very close second!
I can tolerate Trails final dungeons for the most part for that reason. Except Reverie Corridor, the design of that dungeon is non existent.
@@TheKisekiNut Let's all pretend that the Infernal Castle is the final dungeon. I honestly forget about the Reverie Corridor constantly when talking about the game with friends. If we just ignore it, it might go away!
The only time I appreciated Random Encounters was in the Octopath Traveler games, because worrying about them while trying to sneak through end-game zones/dungeons early on to cheese the chest/gear was nerve wracking in the best way. Aside from that VERY SPECIFIC circumstance, the very idea of random encounters should have been cast into the void as far back as the PS2 era.
Talking about long final dungeons, do you remember the abomination that is the final dungeon in Trails in the Sky FC? If you were unlucky enough to not get the Haze Quartz it can take perfectly 5 hours simply to make it through.
One thing I feel about grinding is that, if it possible to do (if they don't bound the exp, like how Trails keeps you form overleveling too much), it creates the problem of the game becoming too easy for some and too hard for others.
I tend to faff about a lot and get overleveled without even trying, so while playing games like Nier Automata I was 10 to 20 lvl above enemies by route B. But I read other people's experience of rushing the story and getting the opposite problem, being stuck in the beginning of route C, full of enemies 15 lvls higher than them.
Had similar experience recently, playing Yakuza Like a Dragon. The only main story fight that gave me trouble, besides the final-ish boss, was in the game's difficulty spike. Had the game not had one I would have breezed through the main story, so I'm weirdly thankful for it . haha
Turn base battles is something of a divisive topic amongst the community but I deffinitly agree with you. I think its something that is distinctly part of the JRPG formula but its not a required mechanic for jrpg progression. It just forces the player to impeed his/her progress and I guess the anticipation of not knowing when your going to run into an enemy was the initial conceptual idea of the mechanic when first introduced way back in the early 80's with FPS dungeon crawling, but as technology has evolved, this has become pretty archaic over the years. There is other ways to provide the same sort of mechanic but also give the player more freedom and a realistic depiction of what it would be like if monsters really roamed out on the fields. Obvously that is why most jrpgs are going by way of ARPG these days. Though I love when a JRPG allows you to see the enemy encounters, it gives you that much more control and in some cases the challenges are still there like monsters might run faster then you can or they might block some path, but its not this nagging constant random screen just programmed by numbers that you have to deal with every 5-6 steps.
The moment you started talking about final dungeons, Tales of Arise popped up in my head before you even mentioned it. I absolutely despised that dungeon. Enemies that take up half an episode of The Simpsons to kill, and worst of all, they're often blocking doors so they can't be avoided.
High random encounter rate and where the hell do I need to go from here. Those are the only things that bother me a lot with JRPGs.
I like random encounters if its for something like a nuzlocke in Pokémon games. It makes encounters more interesting.
I completely agree with the multiple endings. Sometimes it works well but when it has specific conditions you'd have to look up overwise it just ruins the ending experience unless you get that true ending.
As much as I love the Neptunia series the main-line games do this far too often.
Pokemon is perfectly fine, probably the only franchise I can tolerate the random encounters because it's always a lottery on what you'll find in many cases.
The ‘Epilogue’ in Trails of Cold Steel 2 annoyed me to no end. I thought the game was going to be over and I ended up spending over 2 hours doing another dungeon.
Long, unskippable cutscenes prior to a boss fight for me. It's like if this boss is gonna take me 6 or 7 tries, I don't want that 5 minute cutscene 6-7 times or to have to spam the dialogue button to try to get through it as fast as possible.
Long unskippable and not fast-forwardable cutscenes with a boss marathon with no savepoints afterwards.
Are these devs trying to annoy people or do they really not realise just how stupid that setup is?
#4 is the one I absolutely DESPISE. Just unequip the character as they depart. Give me back my stuff. I can live with equipping them again later... I probably will have better great by then anyway. But don't make me lose stuff.
100%! Just unequip them, would fix the issue immediately!
Here's my additions to the list-
- when it takes a very long time between starting a game and being able to freely play it. Persona 4 is notorious for its 3 hours of story and dialog before you get to run around the first dungeon.
- waiting in battles. As in those moments when you can do nothing but wait for meters to fill or for a very long special attack animation that you've already witnessed 100 times to play out. Some games like World of Final Fantasy have a fast-forward option, but why not make it move that fast by default?
- mascot characters. Small non-human characters that are trying too hard to be cute and marketable but just come off as irritating. More often than not have an annoying speech impediment.
The thing that I hate most about JRPGs is the final dungeon. Every single game that I love has a final dungeon that is a maze, reuses textures for each and every room and have multiple floors. The game that did this the worst for me was Xenogears.
I agree with all your point, but i'll have to add : Having a big roster and characters not in your party NOT F*CKING GETTING XP TOO !!!!!!!!!!!!! And of course, later in the game (usually in the last dungeon) you need to make 2 or more party using ALL your characters and you end with low levels one and either get rekt, or need to grind a lot to level them... I HATE THIS SOOOOOOOO MUCH!!!!
This is a problem in Octopath 2, especially when witnessing all the stories is so integral to the experience. Some sort of XP sharer would be lovely.
Good to see you making content. Hope you have been doing better
For the end of random encounters. They are more than tolerable in older games, like pre-PS2 era since a lot of games would have struggles showing that many sprites or even models moving around on screen or being programmed to show up on the overworld sometimes so it was an easy say to get around a technical limitation at the time. If you're making a game that is meant to run on a 'potato' PC then it does become more necessary but with some processing power now for consoles, it is less and less necessary to do the random encounters. So having a toggle or a slider would be helpful to have if they decide to use random encounters for 'old times sake'.
But in the same manner, games that are first-person dungeon crawlers or have a lot of movement in narrow areas (like Etrian Odyssey as a prime example) outside of the FOEs, for regular encounters I cannot think of any way to not implement battles as random encounters outside of just making them almost indisquishinables from FOEs basically. So in a sense, there are some games in which it is hard to determine how else to do an alternative depending on how it is set to be played. (If you have full movement, IE recent FF games, Tales, or recent DQs then yeah, no need for randoms. But if you're have like..just 4 directional movement or even in some instances only 2 directional movement because of narrow areas, how would you implement avoidable encounters (if you're not playing an action RPG) outside of a toggle slider of random encounters being on or off? (or equipment/items to ward away)
Loved the video and I have to agree with all ur points.
As much as I love JRPGs, they really need to do something with these problems.
My main gripe is with grinding, if a game cant pace the level grinding and story telling properly, I drop the game, this is exactly the reason why I am not a fan of the disgaea series, the level grinding is too much.
None of these are really problems to begin with honestly. Just adapt to the game's rules. If you arent willing to do that, just drop the game and move on. The only time there would ever be issues, is if the game's mechanics dont work properly.
@@ThundagaT2 adapt to the games rules?
So basically cut off hours of my life and dedicate it to grinding fr hours upon hours to be strong enough to win the fight and see the next bit of story.
Sorry but I have a life to live and responsibilities.
@@TheAwsomeuser It is not the game's fault if it takes you that long to get past a story section. Thats just you needing to get better at the game. If you cant overcome the game's challenges then you just need to learn from any mistakes you have made, simple as that. Besides name me an rpg that requires hours of grinding to see main story stuff. If you were talking about optional/post game content then it would start making more sense. If it takes you hours of grinding to get past a story section in an rpg then likely you are either skipping too many battles and therefore underleveled, or you dont understand the game's mechanics enough.
@@byletheisner5006 Not every rpg has to appeal to every demographic. Some games just arent for some people. This is not an example of saying "git gud" as a lot of people like to say. Its just moreso realizing what kind of things you like. If you dont like to see some of these things, then you just ignore the games that have them, thats what i meant with my comment.
Random encounters can be very annoying. What i noticed in recent history, is that a lot of JRPGs use visible encounters and crank the visible mobs to 100 and every enemy runs at mach speed towards you so you have to fight encounter after encounter after encounter without much progress made. Tales of Berseria and to some extend the Trails series come to mind, although at least in Trails you can mitigate it via a quartz.
You’ve got a great list there. I would also add “getting lost” and “no auto maps” as two areas that drive me crazy. Im currently playing Trails in the Sky first chapter and the sewers and other end game areas are hard to navigate without an automap.
Yep that about sums it up :)), just a few extra comments from me on two of your points since they really resonated with me
In regards to point 1. fully agree, most horrendous of cheap mechanics for me personally is Elisabeth in P3 where killing her is left entirely up to chance - like seriously 0 agency from the player , just sit there and pray to all deities that the 2nd attack is a counter when you need it to -
And then about point 5. I assume you screwed up in P5R by not focusing on Maruki but to play devil's advocate the game hints pretty heavily at that :) , still i also hate it when some crucial aspects of the game are being kept "hidden" from you ( Personally i screwed up in P4 on December 3rd and i was like : really game.. really ? )
My other issue is mini games that are fundamentally opposite of RPG. Don't make me do button mashing in a turn based game (FF9 jump rope, Trails Horror Coaster). Don't make me play a racing game with poor mechanics (FFX Chocobo racing). Terrible. I want to play a good RPG not a racing game or button masher.
Surprised you didn't mention tales of zesteria for the party members leaving gripe. It's probably the most egregious example in jrpg history, one of your characters leaves your party about 30% of the way through and NEVER comes back. They don't specifically imply they will never come back either because the shop vendors are still selling their weapon type in the shops so imagine my shock when my main motivating factor for playing through the game is getting to play that character again, only to have the game just end before it happens. It's probably the biggest controversy surrounding that game.
Well wasn’t there something going on between the Japanese voice actor for that one specific character and the director of the game? Like that character (no names due to spoilers) was originally supposed to be in the party for longer hence the equipment at plot points where the character is no longer in your party. That’s why the other human character got more screen time.
I like random encounters,i can appreciate the environment more and focus on finding path or hidden chest rather than focus on enemy in my sight(like how to dodge them when i don't want to battle)..but hey Maybe because i grow up with DQ series and all other jrpg on 90 and almost all of them is using it so i get used to it.
I’ve just beat Rhapsody on switch as part of the Prinny Presents and there is hardly any encounters. I was surprised how few there are. They must have changed it from the DS release. I found it really enjoyable.
Oh and no save/checkpoint before the boss, too. Nier Automata's first stage is the biggest offender. Was my first playthru and I wanted to play on hard. Get to the boss, die, then you have to start the entire game over again because the first checkpoint/savepoint is after that boss. Then by the time I spend another 30 minutes getting to the boss, I either forgot it's patterns or it'd change form/shape and have a new pattern I haven't seen yet.
After 3 days of not geting passed the first boss, I lowered the difficulty, beat the boss, then raised it back up.
I've heard so many people complain about the final dungeon of Arise, but I never even thought anything of it when I played! I'm struggling to to find even a single complaint I had 😂If anything I thought it was unmemorable.
As I've gotten older random encounters have been a huge turn off for me as well. I remember loving Final Fantasy 8 as a kid, I tried replaying it recently and getting into combat after taking 5 steps each time was infuriating.
And a huge, resounding THANK YOU to your final point. Super long final dungeons leading right up to the final boss is infuriating. I didn't even finish SMT3 because of how infuriated I was with the Tower. I just googled the ending.
never play xenogears if you hate final dungeons lol. all of that game's dungeons aren't that good but i had to stop the game and never finished because of it, which is a shame because xenoblade chronicles 3 is my favorite game ever
Xenoblade 3 is the king of shit last dungeons. Copy pasted enemies everywhere way to long and terrible story
Sad given how good the first 2/3 was
Loving Octopath 2 so far, but the grind between parts of different characters story chapters so far is nuts- I mean its often that certain party members have recommended levels 15 levels above the previous chapter often. Love the game so far but the grind is enough of a slog that I had to increase the battle speed even with using the gear that increases rare monster spawns.
I have never had to grind in Octopath 2, and I was going straight from chapter to chapter at all times.
Does doing the other character's chapters not get you far enough for that? That's only about 2 levels per chapter. Don't know about 2, but in octopath traveler i reached 65 before being even halfway through all Chapter 4s.
I'm actually on the other side for that, I was exploring so much that my characters are well in to the 60s before I even started checking chapter 2.
It's more that I love the game, probably one of the better JRPGs that has come out in the las few years, but since getting older I've noticed that I do like RPG games that respect your time in some way have ways to level up your party all at once- see Yakuza 7 or Ys 9 for example, where the game itself has backup party members either gain a reduced or similar amount of experience in battle. Or increase the rate of experience like the upcoming FF Pixel Remasters- sure it would have maybe messed with the difficulty curve, but it would make each Traveler generally around the same level and therefore I don't walk in with two or three faves and the character I need for their story and almost steamroll a boss or two.
@@RollingStone501 A way of dealing with that i like is basically having only a single party level, rather than individual characters. Other mechanics could still work the same, just when you would normally use the character level, you use the party level instead. That way, you don't have to worry about leaving characters behind in level or late arrivals being underleveled - they're automatically the same level as everybody else simply because that's how the mechanic works.
The exact implementation can vary - maybe everybody just gets full experience regardless of where they are (and whether you even met them yet), maybe it's an actual mechanic where the level is only actually tracked for the group, or like Chained Echos you don't really have traditional levels and experience.
I can't believe unskippable cutscenes didn't make the list. So many games place checkpoints before cutscenes, forcing the player to rewatch sometimes minutes of content before retrying a boss. Also unskippable animations and cutscenes during fights should be punishable by law. I'm sure anyone who played ff7 back in the day died inside doing some of the optional bosses and watching the kotr summon animation on a loop. It wastes so much time...
On the subject of wasting time - scarcity of checkpoints/save points is another. This one is rare but when it happens its the most frustrating thing in the world. (hello the optional dungeon in ff15, like wtf, you cant save for the whole duration of it and its like 3 hours long) Fortunately modern consoles/handhelds can suspend a game but it can go wrong if your hardware decides to update or your battery runs out...
I'll defend random encounters. I think the real purpose of them is that they're, well random and unavoidable. In an old RPG with random encounters, conserving your resources throughout the dungeon so you still had some healing items or MP left for the boss at the end of the dungeon was an important strategic consideration that's mostly absent in games where you can just avoid every encounter on your way to the boss.
I feel like RPGs are very boss-centric nowadays, and it's mostly an outgrowth of this design trend. Now that the norm is that the player can avoid every non-boss battle, what purpose do they actually serve? How do you balance MP when there's no multi-battle pressure? Some games don't really have a good answer.
That's a fair point, doesn't really help though if there's also a mechanic that prevents you from escaping. Maybe it adds to tension but it's not really for me, I just want to see how the story comes to an end.
One that I hate is the "final" dungeon. More than once I have gone into a dungeon thinking that it's the last one so I blow my good items there/during the "final boss". Then bam! 2 more dungeons for you!
I'm looking at you Tokyo Xanadu ex+ and TOCS II
I finished Trails to Azure yesterday, and while I love the game, the final boss was a case of cheap mechanics. They used a skill when its almost dead, that kills the entire party, regardless if you had shields on or not. It made me redo an already long fight for the 2nd time, and without any idea of how to avoid it, I had to go all out and only had one spare turn with Lloyd to beat the boss before getting owned again.
Also Kuro no Kiseki's final boss was an ailment spam bitch with strong, altho not really insta kills. I don't know what I did wrong because it felt like a huge difficulty spike from anything prior, and not being able to grind anymore before the boss sure doesn't help.
This might just be a me thing, but one of my biggest problems in RPGs is the 3/4 of the way through the game problem. You know, that point where you have pretty much seen everything the game has to offer other than the ending and the story while good enough to get you this far is not great enough to make you want to finish the game. Enhanced further if there is a bunch of cheaply made side content that just opened up, so you can get the ultimate equipment. I don't know how many games I have quit at this point, but the amount is staggering. I think this also link into your final dungeon pet peeve because facing the biggest, most annoying dungeon ever when you are already burnt out on the game is so soul grating!
Sounds like a you problem
The confusing/ convoluted requirements for multiple endings is probably my pick for most hated thing in any jrpg
Worst last boss that i ever see is definently Octopath Chronicles. As much as i like it 99% till the end, as much i hate its ending.
I won't defend random encounters necessarily, but placing enemies on-screen doesn't always make it better either, particularly when they chase after you and you can't outrun them. (Looking at you Xenosaga II.) At that point, the encounters might as well be random since you have no control over the rate at which you get into fights anyway. Suikoden I and II handle random encounters much better by tweaking encounter rate based on how you're moving around. The game can tell if you're trying to grind on the overworld map by sticking to one area and changing direction frequently, so it'll increase it. But if you move in one direction for a long time, it assumes you're just trying to get somewhere, so it reduces the rate. It was an amazing QoL feature for the time.
If I can't outrun them, I can at least 'see' that a battle is near, so I can prepare for what's about to happen. Random encounter is still a lottery on what I could bump in to.
@@TheKisekiNut Fair enough. To each his own.
When I realised Tales of Arise released the same year with Scarlet Nexus. NO WONDER.
Seriously tho, JRPGs should do what Tales of Xillia did for "final not-so fungeons".
Fun video! As an exercise I wrote down 7 things before I listened to your video to see how they compared. We had a few commonalities, but I'll list them all for fun.
1. Random Encounters: You said it all. Random encounters are strictly inferior to seeing enemies on the overworld and avoiding if you want.
2. Grinding: Yup, we agree here!
3. Excessively Large Dungeons: You noted final dungeons, which to your point tends to be the biggest and worst culprit especially since near the end of the game is when the game is pushing the boundaries of overstaying its welcome. But to me excessively long dungeons are ALWAYS bad - no matter where in the game they fall. And yeah omg that Arise dungeon...
4. Excessive Run Time: I'd rather have a game understay its welcome than overstay it. I generally look at long as a drawback nowadays than a positive (exempting FEW tittles such as Trails, which earn their run-time).
5. Bloated / Overly Complex Systems: I'm looking at you, XBC2. Halfway through the game and still getting interrupted with tutorials? Need to RUclips the game just to understand the intricacies of the mechanics? Need spreadsheets to itemize? No thanks.
6. Stiff Writing: This usually isn't a problem. But when it is, it's a deal-breaker. I'll put up with almost anything for characters / a story I care about. Lose me there, and you lose altogether.
7. *Hot Take* Sim mechanics / Excessive Player Choice on Story: Multiple Endings! Branching Paths! Major story Beats Gated Behind Obscure Choices! Yeah, pass. Honestly, I don't *want* to have to beat the game more than once to experience all it has to offer. And I don't want to have to follow a guide to do it either. I always say this is probably why Sky sits ahead of all the others for me in trails. The lack of Sim mechanics and *too much* player choice allows the Falcom story writers do what they do best and *tell a story*. This is to say nothing about the annoyingness of Harem mechanics. How basically there is almost no peripheral romance in Steel because every woman on the continent is reserved for Rean. -_-
Anyways, fun video!
The Reverie Corridor in CS2 had puzzles?? I remember getting through it easily my first playthrough
I think Bravely Default has my favorite random encounter system. The sliding bar that goes between "farm stuff here" and "let's get somewhere". Would be super easy to implement in most games dead set on random encounters.
There are only two things that I generally hate on jrpg: 1- timer mechanics like the ones on the atelier series, man I just wanna play the game and relax a little bit, jesus christ. 2- missable achievements/scenes/fights/content that require you to either do another playthrough or suck it up and just ignore it, I mean I get the fact that these are either meant for second playthroughs or for those who just wander around 30 hours in between chapters grinding but when we're talking about a game that runs for about 80+ hours I just cant bother anymore
Tales of Zestria is bad for a party member leaving and never coming back but you run into them through out the story.
tbh... not a problem for me with random encounters. If you can evade monsters on the map then it sometimes makes it way to easy to go to the end. Sometimes you need that tension of battling through a horde of monsters to get to the end. I mean if you step like 1 meter and then there is a random encounter or rooms with puzzles full of'em then I get it. But yeah.. got no problems if they implement them in a non annoying way or at least make it like Wild arms where you can avoid with a button, which cannot be spammed all the time or a sign which lets you know that there will be an encounter like legends of dragoon.
so thing on random encounters. random encounters have vastly lost their point in later JRPGs. if you ever play stuff like say dragon quest 1. the random encounters id go as far to say carry the entire game. in DQ1 typical fashion of random encounters you get swarmed by mobs and they hit your health piece of piece. the thing is when your say pushing a dungeon you do have to make the active choice of pushing onwards vs risking dying and losing half your money which can be a pretty (IMO reasonable) punishment for dying forcing you to grind out that lost cash. the active choice making of assesses or assuming you have enough resources to push onwards vs hightailing it back and keeping your spoils made it a lot of fun.
that said i think overworld encounters are a mixed bag to most games dont really do them all that well. i think cold steel having the super meter in CS3/4 was a great addition to encourage players to not skip fights. trails games also have the EXP scaling if your underleveled to force you back into a range to deal with whatever issues. but i find more often then not most other games
i just end up overly skipping fights and not really getting enough XP and being forced to grind (DQ11 this absolutely happened to me). having influences to actually fight things is a really big thing.
i liked the romancing saga 3 approach where enemies scale to some degree based on various factors so if you run into to many they will start to brutalize you but on the flip side its free stats if they are weak to so you gotta be a bit choosy with how many you want to do. granted that game gives no craps about murdering you so it works in that context lol.
also semi related but i think the ability to "turn off random encounters" is a trash idea of game design cause its missing the entire point of what random encounters could be as far as resource management. at that point just do overworld encounters.
The friends stigma iterally the power of friendship 😭 in general no matter how strong the villian is protagonist friendship overpowers all
I enjoy random encounters, if done well. That is a knives edge though and a moving target, every player will have different preferences.
For me, the intro can't be too long. I kinda love FF7-9 epic camera moves that start each fight, that whoosh and the transition when the battle starts, the celebration and loot and everything, but all of that needs the option to be fast forwarded. If you have no control over when to fight and are forced into it, time becomes important, lest you feel like nails on chalkboard when the music starts.
random encounters have a couple unique qualities. You are on edge. It harkens back to games that focused on resource management, where time spend in a dungeon offered the potential for great loot and balanced that with the risk of being overwhelmed. Though I agree, that most games don't utilise them like that at all, making random encounters a bad fit.
I like that you can't predict the combat. I recall moments where I was surprised that battle started, or the type of enemy in it. It's a neat way to hide secrets and diversify the experience.
I like that it makes the world seem larger. Sprites on the level screen kinda take me out of it if done poorly. If everything is a bit abstract my mind just comes up with why and how this makes sense. But sprites just aimlessly moving about often feels silly to my brain, like a low effort puppet show.
btw, I'd be interested in a video on combat mechanics. You seem to have a lot of experience and likely seen all sorts of styles. What do you like, what works best, hidden gems, bad habits, all of that.
I don't mind random encounters when you first enter a new area, but once you've hit the effective level cap for that zone, there really should be an option to turn them off. Get there, fight new enemies, level up? That parts fine. When the xp slows to a crawl and the fights are just annoying roadblocks...? Yeah, then they can get in the bin.
And I don't mind the final dungeons so much normally, but yeah, I've got to agree with you on Tales of Arise's. My God was that tedious. Which is a shame because the rest of the game was actually really good!
Random encounters drive me nuts. Especially running through a dungeon and being spammed with random enemies. JRPGs are my favourite game genre but I just cant stand these random encounters!!!
The encounter rate for random battles is why I won’t ever beat Octopath 1. I had so much fun the first 30 hours but the random battles and the lack of turbo mode is just such a slog.
I got the true ending in Persona 5 Royal just because I prioritized new Confidants that I had never seen before, as opposed to the ones I had already seen in the original Persona 5, I feel like that's what Atlus was expecting us to do. Especially because one of the confidants thats mandatory only has 5 ranks as opposed to everyone else's 10
That's the issue, I never played the original and went in completely blind. So I got caught out.
@GameDesignAndy the game literally tells you, it's a good idea to hang out with said confidant because he's leaving soon...
There's a reason why RNG Manipulation destroying random encounters is one of the most satisfying technique I've ever seen in games.
I like random encounters. I enjoy the challenge, the feeling of exploring a trully dangerous place, and the ressource management that comes from them. If your encounters are optional you often end up not fighting enough leading to a lack of XP that is arbitrary and ultimately the need to grind flares up as a new problem.
I think that's the real argument 'for' random encounters. They force you to fight and keep up with the curve. But I look at Trails for example, especially Cold Steel which did a very solid job of just keeping me up to speed at every point, and that had visible sprites all the way through.
Great video and 100% agree with you, especially random encounters and final dungeons.
I never really noticed how annoying random encounters can be until I played games that actually did not have them - now going back to older games with that feature I always get that "oh no, not that mechanic" melancholy. It disrupts the flow so hard and especially without speed up options, its just so slow.
And final dungeons: I do understand how they should build up to the epic finale, but most of the time they do fail in doing that. If I have the feeling of "today i finish that game" and 3 hours later I am still walking through the same dungeon - that can literally destroy the whole game/experience and leave you with bad memories for that game.
Just watched your Retro JRPGs vids and you literally hit on the thing that takes Valkyrie Profile down a notch for me. The obscurity in getting the best ending. Because after I beat it... I looked it up and somehow I was only one criteria away from best ending. I still love VP but man... Seeing I was missing that one thing made me a little frustrated
One thing i didn't like about Trails was their Forceful Romance Matchmaking and their restricted bonding events. Like Sky was totally fine, Joshua was the main bf and all and its established that theres romance between them so sure, its nice and sweet to see them together. BUT COLD STEEL ...... how dare they bar my way with these bonding events and still have a canon love interest. THEN proceeds to add even more love interests in the rest of the quartet and have all of them pursuable. Its just so jarring. Don't give players a choice if the canon is still gonna be Alisa. And don't restrict the no. of bonding points i have and force me to play a second time for max bonding points.
Instead of bonding points for romance give me bonding points for the character development and make it max bonding point from the start so that none of these developments are locked behind New game +.
Yep, I was nodding at all these. Resonance of Fate combined 2, 6 and 7 into one for me: hope you can make it through the final dungeon in one go and take on a boss gauntlet for good measure! Oh and the enemies reset in most rooms and will require backtracking too!
I'd like to add a couple more: the thou-must-lose boss, especially when it isnt obvious at first and you exhaust good items for no reason. Or take a game over when you think it's an impossible fight but isn't. Second is the boss that "barely used 10% of its power" after a usually very tough fight. I love Trails, but it does this too much. I get a party needs time to grow, but it feels to over the top and cheapens the mood for me.
For your 1st offense (which I agree with) Octopath Traveler 1 & 2 does a great job handling this. When they’re about to do a 1hit KO the enemy goes into a new stance & powers up thus giving you 1 or 2 turns to prepare.
Do not think of random encounters as a thing that should add up something they should define how the battle system works.
There are a bunch of things that random encounters do that are unachieveable without them:
- they ensure balance, especially if the run/avoid system is properly tuned to work with them. If properly implemented, they ensure that the party would not be underlevelled. At least for me they pacify my mind that I would not need to design the game instead of the designers
- they create a sense of dread. People share dreading the random the encouter in games (and thus not liking it). Well, dreading it is what should happen. If you need to be on the edge and not wanting to be faced by the enemy, then the random encouter is the way to go. For a proper implementation of it, see Darkest Dungeons. Had it not had random encounters, it would have been hurt by the lack of them
- they ensure that you would not overstay in a certain dungeon, if they are implemented like that - when the encounter rate rises while you are in a certain dungeon. That creates incentive to move on if done properly and the encounters are properly challenging while your resources are limited
Random encouters are not a problem in and out of their own, their bad implementation is. They are easily scapegoated which is unfair imho. If random encounter does not feel in place, it is almost exclusively due to bad implementation.
To your point: "How is giving the player more control ever a bad thing?" Well, it is if it is not how the game should feel. Random encounters shine when tension is needed, when you need to feel unsafe and when you need to properly manage your resources in order to finish a dungeon.
I myself love their implementantion in numerous games and dislike it in others. I would even go as far as saying that I would love to see them in games like the Tales dungeon crawl spinoff (where your items are capped out at 15) for example.
TKN: *Goes on a long tantrum about the final dungeon in Arise*
Also TKN: *Shows literally nothing about the final dungeon in Arise*
Gotta be honest, the final moments in Arise, I really did not mind. Might just be me loving the idea of trampling titanic enemies with my super bois and gals, I dunno. Honestly, I was more annoyed by the fact that to gain new game plus benefits, you literally have to do most of the post-game. You know...the thing that New Game Plus benefits would work more or less the best with?!
I do agree to a certain point though. Final Dungeons are a real hit-or-miss area for me. I can name a fair few on both ends. The characters just up and splitting from your gang...FUCK that noise though, easily the dumbest thing in an rpg.
I still like to keep these videos somewhat spoiler free, wasn't even contemplating putting in the still image but that won out in the end. I go in with the mindset that no-one has played the games I mention, and thus keep it general for that reason.
@@TheKisekiNut Oh, don't worry I get ya. I was mainly just joking around, sorry if I came of as rude. Literally never was my intention, and I can see how my comment mighta been a little on the cocky side XD
@@Crashfan97879 Nah I didn't care nor did I take it as a slight, but was worth explaining for the sake of clarity.
The only series I am okay with having random encounters is Pokémon. The surprise is an aspect to entice the player to explore and see what new thing you can catch. And because the encounter area was noticeable (Tall Grass), it's avoidable. Plus repels exist to lower the encounter rate or stop it entirely. Otherwise I think they're annoying and I don't trust anyone who likes them
The GRINDING! I don’t mind it, however Grandia Extreme and Grandia 3 were the games that grinding was wild thus I dropped them.
My main gripe, is that almost every single JRPG keeps referring to powerful enemies as "gods". Even after ~30 years of playing JRPGs, I STILL roll my eyes every single time this comes up. No, having lots of fun superpowers does not, in any way, make you a "god".
In fact, party members, attack that guy. Did your attack do anything? If so, you have proven that he's not a "god".
I feel like they think they have to make the stakes as high as possible, by making the enemy as powerful as possible. But, all it does is make it nonsensical and/or make the characters seem like morons. If it was really a "god", then game over, you lose, and there's is absolutely nothing you could do about it. He could blink you out of existence, and then yawn.
Sounds like you wish for a world with no Gods. Shulk agrees
@@Ronjonbify Not at all. I'm Christian. That part of Xenoblade also made me roll my eyes.
I immediately thought, "A world with no gods..? Well, you asked for it..."
**sudden and complete non-existence of everything**
@@guruthosamarthruin4459 Ha, no worries. I was trying to be funny (not offensive). Thx for the clarity in your response
@@Ronjonbify As someone who, almost exclusively, plays JRPGS, this stuff is the bane of my existence. Lol.
This may have to do with to Shintoism in Japan in Shinto mythology there are hundreds of gods quite a few of them gets killed and not to mention Japan has not had a good history with Christianity might have also been a factor two am not defending it or saying i like it just different countries have different outlook on Gods not to mention different mythologies and religions
Love this video. One additional pet hate of mine is poor maps. Ys8 I'm looking at you! 70 hours of a fab game let down by a map so pish it nearly drove me to despair. And I didn't quite finish the game - I gave up. Years later it still grinds my gears. 😡
I hate when games force you into back to back battles with no chance to heal or save and make you rdo the whole set if you get taken down.
I actally like Random battles though. Its nice to be surprised and I think there are many more ways to mess up a viable encounter system compared to random battles. They can have enemies appear so close you can't react before getting into battle which renders making the enemies visible meaningless, they can have either too high or too low respawn rates, or bad placement for enemy groups. Random encounters can only have two of those four problems.
Agreed, all very fair points. I don't doubt that some of these are just a natural lack of polish due to how the development cycle works. multiple endings, artificial difficulty, random encounter rates.
Bosses with HP restoration moves are at the top of my list. No, you're not allowed to heal the HP I just spent the last twenty minutes chipping away at, that's cheating. If it's draining your health to restore its own that's even worse. I don't like this in scripted fights where the boss restores it health for a second phase either, it's demoralising. Just...have it keep the HP bar and transition to the next phase, don't restore it to full health and make it worse!
Also, RNG for item drops. I don't like leaving sidequests undone, but nor do I like farming enemies for items for fetch quests. There's got to be a better way to do this...or just, don't do it at all. Make sidequests meaningful and engaging, not mindless drivel designed solely to pad the game out further and infuriate completionists or people who just want the rewards.
Bosses being able to heal is not really cheating, if you can do it, why cant they? Most games that have that kind of thing, you can mitigate it anyway, either with a status ailment, or just straight up preventing them from doing so.
I think the bigger issue with what you're describing is the bloated health that some bosses have. Yes, they're supposed to be much tougher than regular enemies, but if you can survive a couple minutes, you've obviously got the chops to win, and anything beyond that is just dragging it out unnecessarily. It's a lack of respect for player time.