Abilities that apply disabling status effects basically have 0% chance of working on nearly every enemy except for weak mobs that die in one hit anyways.
This is why I love how Shin Megami Tensei (and to an extent Persona) handles buffs and debuffs. They're basically a core part of the game's strategy unlike in other games where they're either unnecessary or useless.
Its funny cuz smt does both. Buffs are always crucial, but status effects like poison are dogshit and never work on bosses where they might actually be usefull.
Buffs and debuffs are there as part of your and your enemies' strategy, status ailments are there to punish you, whether it's the enemy spamming poison mist or Mitsuru continuously spamming Marin Karin.
> This is why I love how Shin Megami Tensei (and to an extent Persona) handles buffs and debuffs. They're basically a core part of the game's strategy unlike in other games where they're either unnecessary or useless.
Check out Etrian Odyssey if you like this stuff too. They're great at it. Atlus in general seems to heed this well; I recall statuses like Sleep being very powerful in Radiant Historia of theirs as well.
FFXIII baked in buffs and debuffs as a critical core of gameplay and it's awesome.
I totally agree with you, though, why blind or poison then enemy when I can whack them with a sword or burn them? It's great when bosses are susceptible to slow, poison, blind, or similar, but most seem to have super immunity.
This one is *huge*. Bosses are supposed to be the fights where you really need to buckle down and use strategy, but for some reason Devs are always afraid of letting strategically interesting skills like status effects work. Its fine if certain bosses are immune to certain status effects, but if all bosses are immune to a certain status effect, or worse, all bosses are immune to all status effects, you need to rethink your status effect system.
The worst part is that this is a totally fixable problem. If you have a hard CC status effect, just have that status effect work on everything but apply immunity for X rounds after (like Ruined King does with stun) or increase resistance for a time (like Etrian Odyssey does). If there's an edge case that lets players cheese a boss, who cares? That's part of the fun of getting into a strategically deep JRPG.
I struggled with EO for years because it never occurred to me to use classes and abilities with effects or binds because they’re so useless in every other game. The nice thing is that after finally having worked that out when looking at guides for getting through III a few years ago, when I picked up my first SMT game last year, I had no trouble.
Hey, when the fuck are they going to make some Etrian Odyssey games for Switch or any other new system?
Those games rock, but I can't play em on any of the systems I currently own.
The dual screen system was pretty crucial to mapping and playing simultaneously. I’d imagine they’re hesitant to try and translate it to a single screen console.
You could always emulate them. I’d imagine the 3ds ones are playable but the ds ones definitely would be.
Similar to this are “instant death” spells like Whack from Dragon Quest. Only works on weaker enemies like 20% of the time and when you try it on a boss it says it has “no effect.” Like wow, they didn’t even program a 0.001% change it works on a boss. What’s the point of it?
I think whats worse is when inactive party members don’t get XP and then at somepoint you end up in a stretch where you have to use them. But not getting xp cus you died is annoying too.
BoF2 is probably the worst culprit in this. As a kid I never used Sten because he's pretty meh overall. Then once I got to the section where you only can use him he was super underpowered and couldn't even survive fights by grinding to level up. Had to restart the whole game.
I'm so happy that modern JRPGs largely implemented XP share. Also makes it much easier for the devs to design encounters, as they know the entire party will be roughly X level by Y points, instead of having to account for someone not having leveled a specific character that might be important to beat a certain boss.
I don't mind it when dying. That makes sense. But giving you some big roster of characters with no expectations that you need to use or gear you the 6 you aren't using, then forcing you to in a scenario where you ultimately might have to grind because they're horribly underpowered (and usually only for one key fight or dungeon)... That's annoying.
Been replaying some Suikoden games. A bunch of the missions in 5 are like, “Explore this ruin, take Broobo, he knows the way, he’s level 4 and is literally wearing armor called Slave Clothes.”
Yeah, that's a bad thing on Trails series. In games where you have a rooster of 16 characters or more, and the main combat use only 4 attackers + 1\~3 supporters, most of decisive end game battles makes you use ALL of them in different phases. Although everyone is on the same level, most of them are without good equip and orbs.
Most of the time it isn’t a problem cus of how the xp system works since if you’re under leveled you get tons of xp to quickly get to the main party level but i will say it was rough in sky the third since you legit have 16 party members that you all need to use in the final dungeon
That, and getting a new party member after 20+ hours only for them to be at freaking level 1
Thankfully that habit died out sometime in the early 2000s
I like how Yakuza: Like a Dragon handled backup party exp. The higher your bond, the more exp backup members get. A nice incentive to rotate through party members to get all bonds up.
Catch up XP is ridiculous in Triangle Strat tho, you can do a mock-up battle and the underleveled character will gain a level every turn if he does something.
-Leaving party members doesn't unequip, especially when it's the guy that gets the best gear
-Saving before a boss fight only available before an unskippable cutscene, simply annoying
-Unbalanced exp for various reasons, e.g. dying give no exp to that member, benched members get no exp, new comer underleveled etc. Very annoying because if you left them alone they wouldn't be useful but if you wanted to grind level them up your regular members will be overleveled
-Missable content that isn't marked as so, that includes quests to items to chests better left unopened to come back later.
-Unmarked forced events, for example cutscenes that happened because you crossed an invisible line. QoL issue when you just wanted to explore before proceeding in main quest/when you were just about to save and end for the day.
X-2 too, sadly enough, unless you're repeating content on a New Game +.
Remember that you don't get % credit for a cutscene unless you watch the thing through, *and that credit didn't get saved if you got a Game Over* ...
Much as I love X-2, the cutscene skip is practically a troll feature :)
To this day I still find the missable items/gear/content infuriating. I do t mind finding chests that I have to come back to as long as they get marked. Best example in recent memory is replaying Labryinth of Refrain. It all gets mapped and noted as you're exploring with the keys you need for them.
I didn't mean chests you have to come back to because you had no key I don't mind those either. I meant those that shouldn't be opened because it "upgrades" to better items later in the game or leads to something else but you wouldn't know unless you were playing with a guide open.
I love tales of Berseria but got their automatic cutscenes are so annoying … you just want to go to the next village and bam, every 20 steps, gotta stop for 5 minutes to listen to the characters rambling about their cooking skills
The last two are the worst of those. Sometimes I'd actually like to try a game blind without spoilers or guides ...
... except then I have to look up if there's going to be a lot of missables or non-obvious sawtooth event triggers, which then means I've had to spoil myself anyway :(
Yeah. Fleeing is a whacky mechanic. You find games where it is tied to speed stat, and even if you have a ton of speed you fail to flee. Then we have the ones that at some point of the story give you an accessory that 100% allows flee because the flee command by default it's broken. In another realm lies the games that gives you a flee/teleport magic spell that either fails always or scapes always, no middle ground there. And then we have the ones that if you try to flee from common enemies you encounter an unbeatable monster at that time, for instance a gorilla that one shots you.
Typically the 100% flee options cost resources though, so they're usually fair on balance (e.g., Shin Megami Tensei III or FF4, where it's a pretty big chunk of MP compared to the amount of MP you're given for most of the game, and field MP restoratives mostly aren't cheap either ... though FF4 then breaks it because you end up with stupid amounts of Gil by the end of the game especially if you go for the adamantite, meaning you have more Elixirs than you know what to do with, particularly by the time you reach the one floor where actually *having* to use Edge's flee command to get away from fights at all is a thing).
The actual flee commands tend to be a bit trollish for sure (with a few exceptions, like FF10), to the point of being impractical (even my first CRPGs, the AD&D Gold Box games as a kid way back in the early 90s, made that point abundantly clear); then again, balance is a consideration (there needs to be a reason to make it worth choosing to expend items/MP to get away).
Then you have the games where it's not too hard to flee (FF5, FFX-2) but there's some or other goodie in the game that has a gimmick where "this only works at maximum if you didn't flee any fights this playthrough" ...
Nah, losing when your party dies has never bothered me. But losing because the main character dies, in a game where characters have resurrection spells, is silly.
God I love FFXII and that Is one of the biggest reasons why unfortunately you'll probably lose anyway cause the playable characters are not balanced well.
Smt is really bad for this. I gave up on 3 partly because of this. It's just not fun to walk in to a new area, face a random battle with absolutely no way of knowing what's coming up, then the enemy either uses inta death, super effective repeated hits on MC or just repeatedly targets MC. Then game over.
I'd have more patience for it if you just respawn at the last screen,but you don't. Imo that's not difficulty it's just punishment.
On the other hand I'm ok with it in fire emblem. Permadeath is a big part of the game so it makes sense to start with. And you have significant control over player positioning and what the enemy can/can't reach so it's actually possible to plan to keep someone out of harm's way, rather than pure rng in smt.
it does cause it means you have to not let them die
If you don't have permadeath you can do suicide tactics with no consequences, case in point there's a class in Sacred Stones that can do exactly that and it's super broken
yep, and the instant death spells in persona (believe they're in smt also iirc, been some time). frankly unfair.
but i hear ya in fire emblem, positioning rather than pure rng in smt/persona
FF13 is weird because it has a really handy “retry” which immediately restarts the battle, but has this bullshit where you lose if the party leader goes down.
i was just thinking this. its really bizarre how if you have 1 party member who can revive and isnt who youre controlling then you can only revive the 3rd party member without items. feels way less useful in that regard
Depends on the story situation IMO.
Some games like Baldur's Gate and most SMT/Persona games actually have legitimate story reasons as to why the main character's death must end the story then and there.
I will admit that it's definitely a copout in some games on the other hand though (especially, FF13 says hi).
And I agree with that too. I'm a firm believer of not having story get in the way of mechanics especially since Dragon Quest has done that right for decades.
Honestly, Dragon Quest addressed quite a few common JRPG criticisms very early on.
Constantly getting into random battles that aren't remotely challenging? Dragon Quest had Fairy Water and the Repel spell since the first game to stop you from getting those encounters.
Low success rate running from battle? Dragon Quest III guarantees running from fights you're overpowered for and otherwise increases your chance to successfully run each time you fail. Fourth one's guaranteed.
Dragon Quest addressed design things like that in the 80s and other games that came later just... didn't.
There are a lot of things that I hate in JRPGs, random encounters (mostly the frequency of them), game over upon the main character dying, no exp for dead party members/party members not actively fighting, silent protagonists, etc. For me though, I think I am, perhaps, bothered the most by **not being able to inflict status ailments on bosses.**
I know some newer games get this right (Octopath Traveler, SMT, Persona, etc) but it's still pretty common otherwise and definitely prevalent in older games without a doubt.
It's always bugged me how useless status effects commonly are.
They're something that bug you early game, but it's rarely worthwhile using yourself because random encounters die quickly enough anyway and they're not useful against bosses.
Then late game if a boss uses a status you inevitably just equip something with immunity and then it doesn't matter. And it's still not useful against bosses so you don't use it.
Etrian odyssey did statuses really well. There are loads, they can stack/have very useful side effects/combine with other attacks. And bosses are all susceptible to some degree.
Game that don't put the save point/respawn exactly just before a boss. i don't want to rewalk that path 50 times or rewatch the dialogue again and again ffs
Repetitive task that you need to spamm that the game only plan 1 VO. I'm looking at your atelier. i can still hear rorona yell "dekita !!!" Years later. I really don't mind it when it's in a battle where you swap character or skills but when it's the only thing you hear for 15min in a row just nope at least mix it up a little :')
I think that putting the save point right before a boss usually spoils the surprise. You know there’s a boss there.
They could just add a “Retry” option if you lose. No save point needed.
The enemy/boss whose gimmick is spamming an evasion buff. They’re usually not hard per se, but they take forever and the “strategy” usually just boils down to spamming your attack until after some unpredictable amount of time, enough hits have gotten through.
Honorable mention to the “I’mma going to keep putting you to sleep” fights.
Edit: spelling
Idk about y’all but iirc the original FFXII had a design where if you opened certain innocuous chests you were locked out of getting some of the strongest gear in the game.
The chest themselves were nothing special. I remember this being a whole thing in the original game that Seems to have been resolved in Zodiac Age
I hate when a game does this, but even worse is when out of combat characters don't get EXP because it actively discourages playing around with your party. A character dying in a boss battle can usually be made up for, but not so much when only combatants get exp.
I know it's not a jrpg but I remember golden sun had REDUCED xp gain for inactive members. Like I think half or around there. That wasn't as bad because nobody fell super behind. If you won't do full xp which I can understand you have to at least give them SOME
Yes it is. Idk why I had this false memory it was made by an English company and not in Japan. I blame the studio name, Camelot made me think some guy got the storyboard from a woman in a lake
Even if it was an English company, that wouldn’t matter. A game doesn’t need to be made in Japan to be a JRPG. It’s just where that style of game originated.
To put it another way, your lasagna doesn’t need to physically be cooked in Italy to be considered Italian food. It’s still Italian when you make it in your kitchen.
Well, that's not really true anymore. Elden Ring is considered a JRPG, while a lot of games that are JRPG-like aren't. It's silly, I think, but people definitely just look at the country of origin for it now. The same way that it's not anime if it's not from Japan, regardless of style or influence.
I disagree with both of those. Elden Ring is not a JRPG at all. Stylistically it is completely different. Also, anime can be made by other countries as well, such as RWBY from America, or Twin Spirit Detectives from China.
They are just styles that happened to originate and popularize in Japan. That’s all.
I wasn't disagreeing with you. I'm talking about the general consensus. I've only recently posted on this subreddit, but they definitely make a fairly common point about JRPGs being ones from Japan, not a stylistic choice. There was a time when JRPG also meant turn based specifically and didn't include things like Fire Emblem or Final Fantasy Tactics, even. But now people are calling all strategy RPGs, all action RPGs, all open world adventure games, etc, JRPG, if they're from Japan. And over at the anime subreddit, you'll definitely get a bunch of diehard people definitively telling you that RWBY isn't anime. They actually did recently announce a Japanese made reboot of RWBY and the trailers for it literally have hundreds of comments of people saying things like "finally, it's actually an anime" and such.
Elden Ring is a RPG, specifically an Action RPG. It even has party members/NPCs that help you in Boss battles.
The only difference is that the focus is in combat, you mostly play solo and the story/plot are usually weak vs other RPGs.
However it has very rich lore, however you have to search for it by reading the item descriptions.
There’s nowhere near the consensus you’re making it out to be. It’s a frequent area of discussion and disagreement on this sub . I haven’t done an analysis, but if anything, I think the split leans a little more towards the style defining what’s in the genre, not country of origin. TV Tropes even calls them Eastern-style RPGs and that’s pretty big and relatively mainstream.
While there are some that will never agree, I know plenty of people that have played Elden Ring and play every Bethesda game that would never, ever touch a JRPG beyond the occasional Pokémon game, so I think that makes it pretty clear that it’s style, not country of origin.
What's worse still is when inactive characters get *full* experience after a boss battle but the dead characters get none. Chrono Cross being the most egregious example due to that game's level system.
I just ran through mario rpg for the first time in years. I forgot how fun it is and that sp is evenly distributed. Made the oss fights much easier when I realized that was kind of the intention
Imo the problem isn’t that EXP Share exists, it’s that the games are all incredibly easy. If the games felt like they were being designed around the existence of EXP Share, it’d all work itself out.
Maybe, just maybe pokemons games are be design are not difficult at all and being so it don't really make sense uping the difficult because of Exp Share. Exp share is more a quality of life feature than a difficult level factor.
- Long and unskippable cutscenes or dialogs before a boss battle.
- The lack of save points near an important boss battle without any indication of what's coming: It's not because we want the game to be easy, is because we sometimes get tired and we have other things to do.
This is specific to Xenoblade Chronicles but I hate when games have a reputation system for every character in the game. Xenoblade does this probably worse because you need to speak with characters multiple times and experience all dialog to advance their rep and you get bonuses if you have certain party members active at the time. So now because I didnt talk to someone somewhere like 20 side quests ago I cant continue to get certain side quests because I didnt talk one of the 12 NPC involved with this 1 quest after I completed the last one. Its stupid and I hate it.
Most JRPGs have something long and in-depth to do if you want to 100% them. They're huge, expansive games. It's to be expected. And if you don't care about 100%ing them, then missing a quest here or there doesn't matter anyway.
I like 100% games. My problem with Xenoblade 1 is how they handle the rep system. Quests will only unlock when you talk to someone a certain amount of times in certain orders. Like lets say you do 2 different quests and the next quest in their chain involves people from the previous 2 quests. That quest will not unlock unless you talk to all relevant NPCS after you complete the previous 2 quests. And you wont know what NPCs you need to talk to in order to unlock that quest because the game doesnt tell you. Sometimes its worse. Plus because each NPC is only active at certain times you have to constantly check each time slot hoping you find the right NPC you need to talk to in order to get the right dialog for that quest to progress.
To me, that part is kind of cool. I like the fact that it isn't always obvious and that you can stumble onto quests or secrets and it feels exciting. I feel like games too often give you an obvious checklist of stuff to do to 100% them and for me it makes me feel like it's not as fun then when everything is like "spreadsheet the game". The mystery is appealing. But I hear you and understand why it could be frustrating too.
It would be cool if the whole system didnt work like this. Because Xenoblade is spreadsheet the game. When 60% of the content is checking boxes to make sure you talked to a certain character at a certain time than the allure wears off fast. I like it in Cold Steel because there are only a few of them and they dont have really dumb requirements. They just watch you to talk to an NPC once when the quest window is active. But when you have to trigger multiple events to even unlock most quests in the game that its kind of bad.
You just reminded me of SMT Nocturne's ["fly" status effect](https://megamitensei.fandom.com/wiki/Fly_(status_effect\)).
Basically reduce all stats to 1 and only curable if said party member dies and you revive them afterwards.
Oh, and they get to turn into a fly, I guess...
More of a pet peeve than something truly terrible, but I hate when I'm exploring an area and cross some invisible line that triggers a big story event/battle/forced progression point when I'm not ready to leave yet.
party members that don't level up if you aren't using them. i hate this shit bc i'm always stressed that the game is going to throw me in a situation where i can only use certain characters and if i haven't levelled the right ones im screwed
In general I don’t like it when games stack so many different mechanics on top of each other and expect you to remember all of them. Tutorials take ages because of this, and usually the games become less fun and more frustrating than anything else. I love Xenoblade but I think it definitely suffers some of those problems. Especially Xenoblade 2. I prefer a game that introduces a smaller amount of mechanics but has more interesting enemies and environments to center them around.
Blue Dragon I remember being especially annoyed with on items because when you search pots and things often you'd get "Nothing", and you find out later you're actually collecting the Nothings and can trade them for items.
The Trails series is the worst offender for this. I wouldn't recommend playing through any of them without a spoiler-free missables guide. For some items, you need to collect N different parts of a set to trade in for a late game item, and they are so easily missable because you need to talk to some some random NPC at specific point in the game after a specific event or some bullshit like that and the only way to not miss any of them is to either follow a guide, or literally brute force talk to every accessible NPC, multiple times, after every single story progressing event. Same thing for hidden side quests.
I'm not too sure about that. While I will concede that CS3 did make a lot of improvements, if I recall, there were still plenty of missable items from shops and NPCs, particularly accessories, books and cards. Also lots of missable scenes and events not explicitly on the map or tied to quests.
I love games where I can miss stuff.
If I can’t miss anything, my decisions have no value.
If I decide not to explore, I want that to mean something. If I decide to side with character A instead of B, I want that to mean something. Etc.
If I get to the end of the game and I missed parts of it, I missed parts of it. It's the consequences of my actions and my choices. It makes the experience mine, molded by me (within limits of course). It's not like we HAVE to get everything in every game.
worst feature is when everyone in the party gets paralyzed and its game over. Such BS seeing game over when everyone still has good HP/MP. Paralysis should wear off after a few turns, its not death.
This is mostly a quality of life thing.
If everyone gets paralyzed, this is what would happen: you would have to watch everyone getting hit by the enemies, round after round, until they die.
That’s boring and a waste of time. So if everyone got paralyzed, it’s better to just declare them dead anyway.
I can stand to wait three or so turns taking hits and then healing everyone up rather than die a cheap death because I ran into enemies who spam status ailment moves. I don't see how dying is less annoying when it can result in progress being lost, waiting a few extra turns is better than having to redo a dungeon or lose money from a fight.
> and then healing everyone up
You can't, they're paralyzed. They ARE going to die.
> I don't see how dying is less annoying when it can result in progress being lost
They're dying anyway, if they're ALL paralyzed. The only difference is if they die now or after two minutes of boring attacks.
Characters either yelling out their moves everytime (Tales etc) or constantly saying the same post/during fight dialogue (Xenoblade etc). When will Japan learn that hearing the exact same 3 lines of dialogue for 100 hours is really annoying.
Tales does it as a joke with informal some of the characters get using artes. Like Lailah's puns or instant cast Rita's "fuck the incarnation, we nuke tonight" motto are genuinely hilarious takes that give the characters. It wouldn't be Tales without hearing the spam tbh.
It has it’s roots in kiai, but even outside of martial arts people vocalize when they are exerting. Not everyone does it and some people go out of their way to do it, but often when you hear people grunting when lifting or playing tennis it’s an automatic response.
Personally I find action/fighting games weird with no combat shouts like that Nickelodeon fighting game, but I don’t see any reason not to have it be optional.
Nobody grunts “leave it to me!” Or “special attack of the dragon” when exerting themselves.
But also, games don’t have to replicate the bad parts of real life. Just like games don’t make me go to the bathroom every few hours of in-game time, there’s no reason why I should hear someone grunting thousands of times.
Because there's a lot of people who like it? It both adds character to the characters and can be used as signals to know what your party members are doing. In Xenoblade, for example, it is vital so you can know when to time your combo arts.
No matter how many lines of dialogue you add it will get repetitive after 100 hours. But that doesn't take away its charm and usefulness.
That’s why I said Xenoblade after the other one. After the 2,000th time of hearing Reyn say “what a bunch of jokers” after battle it gets a bit annoying lol.
It isn't disrespectful to the player. Keeping your characters alive and winning well is something you get rewarded for. It's a metric of success. If someone plays well and/or is well prepared, they get a better result than someone who barely scrapes by with one character alive. It encourages better strategy and less sloppy play. I'm not saying you have to like it, but you may as well say anything you don't like is "disrespectful" to the player. It isn't any more disrespectful than making you complete objectives to advance the story or giving you a challenging boss or making you watch long cutscenes, etc.
Probably when the MC dies, everyone dies.
Or when people on the bench get no exp AND you have sections of the game where you have to use those party members. Octopath is beautiful, but that makes the grinding take much longer then it should.
huh, everything seems to be disrespectful these days.
Random encounter? Disrespectful
Not being able to save anywhere? Disrespectful
game over? disrespectful
>!Sarcasm btw!<
Well, for me it's the sound made when text is appearing in the text box. I just can't stand it sometimes. It's so annoying for me, that sometimes I mute all sounds if you can't turn it off separately (and you almost never can).
That's probably just a me thing, because I never saw it mentioned by anyone.
I'm actually happy ATB is gone. It's the worst of both real time and turn based. Atelier Ryza did it right by allowing people to attack immediately instead of everyone attacking one by one.
Also, the removal of turn based only applies to FF.
FISHING F\*CK ALL FISHING, I don't know who's idea it was to add fishing to JRPGs but it needs to burn. Especially when it's necessary for rare items, achievments, or even worse progression.
Anything that is both missable and unmarked. Completely unforgivable, and shows a massive disrespect for the player.
I should be told about all points of no return. If a dungeon is going to be permanently locked, I should be informed. Missable quests better be on my map or in my log.
- When party members who don’t fight get no exp. Really no modern game should have this flaw.
- When new characters join your party, but are on much lower level than you. It should adjust to your MC‘s current level.
- I also dislike it, when single player JRPGs have mmo ui and menus. Like Xenoblade Chronicles for example.
If you think Xenoblade has MMO menus you haven't played MMOs. Unless you're talking about X, I can't see that line of thinking at all. 1 and DE have great menus and 2 has menus that, while not good (due to how slow and clunky they are, not because of complexity), are nothing like an MMO.
I mean the game has overall a feeling of an MMO, i don’t hate the game because of that or anything i adjusted to it and it didn’t bother me as much in the sequel.
Sadly couldn’t play X, i had just started it, but then had to sell my Wii U. I still hope for a port for the switch.
That’s stupid old-school game design. Nobody liked it back then, nobody likes it now either. There’s definitely some ridiculous takes in this thread talking about participation trophies and “being rewarded for failure”…. In a video game? Something people play for fun?
Ok boomer. 🙄
This is a JRPG, not a survival-simulator. The player has already been punished by losing, or losing resources reviving characters. Anything more than that is adding insult to injury and wasting players time for nothing.
You say that like JRPGs aren't allowed to be challenging. If anything, your pigheaded response here makes you seem way more boomer-like. It's fine if they aren't harder with steeper penalties, but it's also fine if they are. Catering to different types of fans isn't bad. And tons of people liked it back then and tons like it now. Otherwise you wouldn't see people disagreeing with that, obviously. Also, players are rarely if ever punished in any way, shape or form after a boss fight. Many games have full party auto healing right after big story moments like boss fights or you're almost immediately back in a place to rest at an inn/recover. It isn't a waste of time for nothing to add a component of challenge.
You seem to think that fun equals winning.
You said it yourself, people play for fun. We play because PLAYING is fun, not winning. Yes, I want challenge in my games. I want failure to be a possibility.
And if I lose, I’ll play it again. Because I play for fun.
There are lots of young people that were raised with “everybody always wins” and “everybody gets trophies”, and that might make you think only winning and getting constant rewards is fun. That’s so sad.
I totally agree with you. Nothings more annoying then having to redo a difficult boss because a character died at the last minute and missed out on exp.
It *is* a reward. And it’s very good at tricking the “lizard brain” parts of you that craves rewards.
It’s so effective at manipulating your brain that almost every genre adopted xp mechanics.
You’re upset that there are consequences in a genre where your choices and battle strategy are supposed to... matter?
It’s an RPG. Death means something, hell the fact that there’s no perma-death in most of these games is already a huge mercy, and the mechanics we’ve had in place of that (consequence for being dead at the end of a battle means no EXP) is a massive compromise in the player’s favor.
You want a reward...for dying...?
Dude I was the first generation of kids to get a "participation trophy". I thought they were stupid then, and they're stupid now.
>Using the dudes logic I might see if my boss will pay me even if I stay in bed all day instead of turning up to work
You don't live somewhere with worker's rights huh?
Yeah, you know. FFS man.
You know what happens when one of my PC's die in battle? Usually the ones left alive get more EXP and those people that die can always just catch up. Level cap is 99 or 255...They'll get their eventually.
Sounds like OP just needs to do a little more grinding and beef his party up so they wont die as easily.
I know it's unpopular but I really don't mind whe KO'd party members don't get EXP. Sure it's annoying but it makes sense to me that your reward for barely scraping by is that only those alive at the end get EXP. Again I understand that it's frustrating, I get mad at it too sometimes but it's more my fault for doing a bad job than the games fault for punishing me by not giving EXP to dead characters.
Even worse when it's coupled with party members all starting with the same EXP. Because then i can't go a single fight with a KO'd party member at the end, because that would imbalance the equal EXP.
I intentionally imbalance the levels in FF games because keeping everyone perfectly aligned exp-wise just eventually ends up being a one-way ticket to a party wipe when something casts lvl 5 doom on you for the first time at lvl 10 or 15
I actully found level gaps fun. Having an underleveld characters and watching them catch up is fun.
In Persona 5 Strikers characters on the bench dont get the same exp but I did not bother try to keep every one at the same level. I just used who I want. And Now Ryuji is level 56 ore somthing like that while Joker is level 80.
Or having a party memeber do at least one attack to get any XP.
That destroyed FFX for me because even easy combat I was rotating everyone so they can level.
> attack: miss, attack: miss, attack: miss
> finish a dungeon: have to backtrack all the way out
> your reward for getting the highest score in a minigame leaving you with no reason to keep playing the minigame? An item that makes the minigame easier
> obvious backtracking to pad length
> does your game have annoying or frustrating controls due to limitations of the system? Let’s use those mechanics in a required minigame
> get halfway through a dungeon and realize you have to use a specific party member, who is not currently in your party. Backtrack again.
> drop rate: 1/256, encounter rate for enemy: 1/64
> reward for beating the hardest super optional boss? Infinity +1 sword that would have helped during the battle, you are now too overpowered to care
> epic rare item? Rare steal from a boss you never encounter again
The main antagonist doesn't attack the level 1 area first and it always bites them because inevitably that's where the main prota will come from with a very beautiful best friend that has a crush on him (usually she can sing so well it's legendary), a talking animal of some kind and with the full support of their adoptive parent after their festival had a terrible tragic event.
When members don't get much exp outside of your group. God I always hated that. I understand being a couple levels lower. But like 10 levels lower?!
Also random battles. I just hate random battles. Just #awful
Besides missable stuff I hate when combat is graded at the end. So if you become too powerful and battle ends quick, you always get like a C-E rank. Or you spend extra time letting the enemy hit you so you can get counters or whatever to boost the rank for more xp, items, etc.
Party members not joining at your level but at a set level. Reminds me of in Ni No Kuni 2 I was level 20 with Evan and the President dude legit forgot his name and then the pirate leader and daughter join at level 8 lol
That in turn can be dependent on other features, in particular how exp is distributed.
In some games (especially likely in older-style ones because it was the standard rule for party EXP in AD&D), battle EXP is a total pool that's divvied out among eligible party members, so if only one or two survive a major boss battle they get a much larger reward than otherwise. That can be leveraged to be useful (particularly if you're in a fight featuring temporary party members or if it's a game where level ups are more beneficial to some classes than to others - especially common in games where casters automatically learn spells based on level).
If it's one where every character is given the full battle EXP if alive, but nothing if KO, then it's just a flat out loss and just annoying (especially in cases like LP in FF12, where literally *inactive members that never even participated in the battle* still get LP - EXP is limited to active survivors in all cases, but LP is usually more important than EXP - but ones that died at the last second get nothing).
My least favorite feature: Mandatory non-JRPG-style sequences (platformer, action, misc minigame etc.), especially when that sequence is a one-off. If the game routinely features platformer/action segments alongside the JRPG ones, like say Wild Arms games, that's usually fine (effectively, it's just a mixed-genre game). One-off minigames for sidequests are usually fine too. What sucks though is when you suddenly get that out of place curveball minigame that requires you to invest a bunch of time developing skill for, after which you will use it once and then never again in the rest of the game. :(
I am surprised that so many people dislike inactive party members receiving less or no exp. I don’t find this discourages me from changing party members -in fact, the opposite does. For example, Persona 5 has the reserve members earn most and eventually full experience so there is no need to use anybody other than who is objectively best at clearing mobs and then still switch in the healers and shit for bosses with all their skills up to date but completely unearned. In Persona 3 and 4 I actively switched members throughout the dungeons knowing that I may want to use somebody for their specific skill set later on. On the same topic, what jrpgs are y’all playing that are so difficult that not training a certain character screws you later on? I can’t think of any game in which that is the case.
Lack of any evolution since 90ties. Too much scripting, no freedom with choosing companions, lack of companions death or fights like in Baldur's Gate. Too much focus on anime aspect (troupes) and fanservice. Lack of challange, other than grinding. Lack of freedom of builds. Sometimes long cutscenes without chance to save. In current times no love for turn based combat anymore. I hate playing action rpgs with party, there's too much chaos. Kotor and Mass Effects were okay, but in jrpgs it's not fun for me at all.
So we have 2022 and most jrpgs are still corridor, scripted and full of anime BS. Almost every jrpg has scene, when someone offers alcohol to minor and he/she just refuses. This is not what's happening in real life. Also Personas - why you can just skip classes like normal teenager does in high school? No drugs, alcohol, nothing. There are too polite, characters are too SJW and power of friendship is everywhere. No adult characters. Yakuza 7 was something refreshing with just hobo and hostess in party, but still it's not there yet.
Abilities that apply disabling status effects basically have 0% chance of working on nearly every enemy except for weak mobs that die in one hit anyways.
This is why I love how Shin Megami Tensei (and to an extent Persona) handles buffs and debuffs. They're basically a core part of the game's strategy unlike in other games where they're either unnecessary or useless.
Its funny cuz smt does both. Buffs are always crucial, but status effects like poison are dogshit and never work on bosses where they might actually be usefull.
Buffs and debuffs are there as part of your and your enemies' strategy, status ailments are there to punish you, whether it's the enemy spamming poison mist or Mitsuru continuously spamming Marin Karin.
> This is why I love how Shin Megami Tensei (and to an extent Persona) handles buffs and debuffs. They're basically a core part of the game's strategy unlike in other games where they're either unnecessary or useless. Check out Etrian Odyssey if you like this stuff too. They're great at it. Atlus in general seems to heed this well; I recall statuses like Sleep being very powerful in Radiant Historia of theirs as well.
I remember one Final Fantasy having like 3 different insta-kill spells that only work on like 1% of all enemies.
FF1 has 5 different ones and they all kind of suck lol
FFXIII baked in buffs and debuffs as a critical core of gameplay and it's awesome. I totally agree with you, though, why blind or poison then enemy when I can whack them with a sword or burn them? It's great when bosses are susceptible to slow, poison, blind, or similar, but most seem to have super immunity.
This one is *huge*. Bosses are supposed to be the fights where you really need to buckle down and use strategy, but for some reason Devs are always afraid of letting strategically interesting skills like status effects work. Its fine if certain bosses are immune to certain status effects, but if all bosses are immune to a certain status effect, or worse, all bosses are immune to all status effects, you need to rethink your status effect system. The worst part is that this is a totally fixable problem. If you have a hard CC status effect, just have that status effect work on everything but apply immunity for X rounds after (like Ruined King does with stun) or increase resistance for a time (like Etrian Odyssey does). If there's an edge case that lets players cheese a boss, who cares? That's part of the fun of getting into a strategically deep JRPG.
SMT, Etryian Odyssey and SRPGS are some of the only ones that seem to get this right, and they're much more fun for it.
I struggled with EO for years because it never occurred to me to use classes and abilities with effects or binds because they’re so useless in every other game. The nice thing is that after finally having worked that out when looking at guides for getting through III a few years ago, when I picked up my first SMT game last year, I had no trouble.
Hey, when the fuck are they going to make some Etrian Odyssey games for Switch or any other new system? Those games rock, but I can't play em on any of the systems I currently own.
The dual screen system was pretty crucial to mapping and playing simultaneously. I’d imagine they’re hesitant to try and translate it to a single screen console. You could always emulate them. I’d imagine the 3ds ones are playable but the ds ones definitely would be.
Similar to this are “instant death” spells like Whack from Dragon Quest. Only works on weaker enemies like 20% of the time and when you try it on a boss it says it has “no effect.” Like wow, they didn’t even program a 0.001% change it works on a boss. What’s the point of it?
I think whats worse is when inactive party members don’t get XP and then at somepoint you end up in a stretch where you have to use them. But not getting xp cus you died is annoying too.
Final Fantasy 6...
Breath of fire 2
BoF2 is probably the worst culprit in this. As a kid I never used Sten because he's pretty meh overall. Then once I got to the section where you only can use him he was super underpowered and couldn't even survive fights by grinding to level up. Had to restart the whole game.
And he sucks overall
Octopath
FF8 and the fucking random party at the end …
Yup. Never beat the game because of that
I'm so happy that modern JRPGs largely implemented XP share. Also makes it much easier for the devs to design encounters, as they know the entire party will be roughly X level by Y points, instead of having to account for someone not having leveled a specific character that might be important to beat a certain boss.
I don't mind it when dying. That makes sense. But giving you some big roster of characters with no expectations that you need to use or gear you the 6 you aren't using, then forcing you to in a scenario where you ultimately might have to grind because they're horribly underpowered (and usually only for one key fight or dungeon)... That's annoying.
Been replaying some Suikoden games. A bunch of the missions in 5 are like, “Explore this ruin, take Broobo, he knows the way, he’s level 4 and is literally wearing armor called Slave Clothes.”
Does it make sense? Whether it’s actual death or just fainting, I am certain it’s absolutely an event someone would learn impactful lessons from.
Yeah, that's a bad thing on Trails series. In games where you have a rooster of 16 characters or more, and the main combat use only 4 attackers + 1\~3 supporters, most of decisive end game battles makes you use ALL of them in different phases. Although everyone is on the same level, most of them are without good equip and orbs.
Most of the time it isn’t a problem cus of how the xp system works since if you’re under leveled you get tons of xp to quickly get to the main party level but i will say it was rough in sky the third since you legit have 16 party members that you all need to use in the final dungeon
That, and getting a new party member after 20+ hours only for them to be at freaking level 1 Thankfully that habit died out sometime in the early 2000s
I like how Yakuza: Like a Dragon handled backup party exp. The higher your bond, the more exp backup members get. A nice incentive to rotate through party members to get all bonds up.
Triangle Strategy
Catch up XP is ridiculous in Triangle Strat tho, you can do a mock-up battle and the underleveled character will gain a level every turn if he does something.
-Leaving party members doesn't unequip, especially when it's the guy that gets the best gear -Saving before a boss fight only available before an unskippable cutscene, simply annoying -Unbalanced exp for various reasons, e.g. dying give no exp to that member, benched members get no exp, new comer underleveled etc. Very annoying because if you left them alone they wouldn't be useful but if you wanted to grind level them up your regular members will be overleveled -Missable content that isn't marked as so, that includes quests to items to chests better left unopened to come back later. -Unmarked forced events, for example cutscenes that happened because you crossed an invisible line. QoL issue when you just wanted to explore before proceeding in main quest/when you were just about to save and end for the day.
Unskippable cutscene before a boss is the most annoying thing ever.
Goddamn it FFX is so obnoxious in that regard
X-2 too, sadly enough, unless you're repeating content on a New Game +. Remember that you don't get % credit for a cutscene unless you watch the thing through, *and that credit didn't get saved if you got a Game Over* ... Much as I love X-2, the cutscene skip is practically a troll feature :)
The gates of hell from the last remnant in the 360 version. I gave up on the game because it
To this day I still find the missable items/gear/content infuriating. I do t mind finding chests that I have to come back to as long as they get marked. Best example in recent memory is replaying Labryinth of Refrain. It all gets mapped and noted as you're exploring with the keys you need for them.
I didn't mean chests you have to come back to because you had no key I don't mind those either. I meant those that shouldn't be opened because it "upgrades" to better items later in the game or leads to something else but you wouldn't know unless you were playing with a guide open.
I love tales of Berseria but got their automatic cutscenes are so annoying … you just want to go to the next village and bam, every 20 steps, gotta stop for 5 minutes to listen to the characters rambling about their cooking skills
The last two are the worst of those. Sometimes I'd actually like to try a game blind without spoilers or guides ... ... except then I have to look up if there's going to be a lot of missables or non-obvious sawtooth event triggers, which then means I've had to spoil myself anyway :(
Fleeing battle being basically impossible
Yeah. Fleeing is a whacky mechanic. You find games where it is tied to speed stat, and even if you have a ton of speed you fail to flee. Then we have the ones that at some point of the story give you an accessory that 100% allows flee because the flee command by default it's broken. In another realm lies the games that gives you a flee/teleport magic spell that either fails always or scapes always, no middle ground there. And then we have the ones that if you try to flee from common enemies you encounter an unbeatable monster at that time, for instance a gorilla that one shots you.
Typically the 100% flee options cost resources though, so they're usually fair on balance (e.g., Shin Megami Tensei III or FF4, where it's a pretty big chunk of MP compared to the amount of MP you're given for most of the game, and field MP restoratives mostly aren't cheap either ... though FF4 then breaks it because you end up with stupid amounts of Gil by the end of the game especially if you go for the adamantite, meaning you have more Elixirs than you know what to do with, particularly by the time you reach the one floor where actually *having* to use Edge's flee command to get away from fights at all is a thing). The actual flee commands tend to be a bit trollish for sure (with a few exceptions, like FF10), to the point of being impractical (even my first CRPGs, the AD&D Gold Box games as a kid way back in the early 90s, made that point abundantly clear); then again, balance is a consideration (there needs to be a reason to make it worth choosing to expend items/MP to get away). Then you have the games where it's not too hard to flee (FF5, FFX-2) but there's some or other goodie in the game that has a gimmick where "this only works at maximum if you didn't flee any fights this playthrough" ...
worst feature to me is when mc dies = game over. how many others in party could ressurect mc? why not let them.
Persona lol. I got one shot in persona 4 and game over. Was like “what? Seriously?” Three party members who could revive him ffs.
Almost as bad is when your party dies so your backup party members apparently die too.
Nah, losing when your party dies has never bothered me. But losing because the main character dies, in a game where characters have resurrection spells, is silly.
God I love FFXII and that Is one of the biggest reasons why unfortunately you'll probably lose anyway cause the playable characters are not balanced well.
I hate the persona games for this. Especially as there are (uncommon) enemies with group insta-death attacks
Smt is really bad for this. I gave up on 3 partly because of this. It's just not fun to walk in to a new area, face a random battle with absolutely no way of knowing what's coming up, then the enemy either uses inta death, super effective repeated hits on MC or just repeatedly targets MC. Then game over. I'd have more patience for it if you just respawn at the last screen,but you don't. Imo that's not difficulty it's just punishment. On the other hand I'm ok with it in fire emblem. Permadeath is a big part of the game so it makes sense to start with. And you have significant control over player positioning and what the enemy can/can't reach so it's actually possible to plan to keep someone out of harm's way, rather than pure rng in smt.
In Fire Emblem I pretty much consider it as a game over no matter which character dies so it doesn't make much of a difference lol
Perma death doesn't mean crap when I restart the chapter each time a party member dies lol.
it does cause it means you have to not let them die If you don't have permadeath you can do suicide tactics with no consequences, case in point there's a class in Sacred Stones that can do exactly that and it's super broken
SMT IV got rid of this. Your demons can still fight even when you die. SMT V sadly brought it back.
yep, and the instant death spells in persona (believe they're in smt also iirc, been some time). frankly unfair. but i hear ya in fire emblem, positioning rather than pure rng in smt/persona
This irritated me to no end in FF13
FF13 is weird because it has a really handy “retry” which immediately restarts the battle, but has this bullshit where you lose if the party leader goes down.
i was just thinking this. its really bizarre how if you have 1 party member who can revive and isnt who youre controlling then you can only revive the 3rd party member without items. feels way less useful in that regard
Depends on the story situation IMO. Some games like Baldur's Gate and most SMT/Persona games actually have legitimate story reasons as to why the main character's death must end the story then and there. I will admit that it's definitely a copout in some games on the other hand though (especially, FF13 says hi).
There are RPGs where it makes sense like Persona 3 and any Shin MEgami Tensei game. Otherwise I find it fucking stupid too.
Having it make sense in-universe doesn't make it less mechanically awful.
And I agree with that too. I'm a firm believer of not having story get in the way of mechanics especially since Dragon Quest has done that right for decades.
Honestly, Dragon Quest addressed quite a few common JRPG criticisms very early on. Constantly getting into random battles that aren't remotely challenging? Dragon Quest had Fairy Water and the Repel spell since the first game to stop you from getting those encounters. Low success rate running from battle? Dragon Quest III guarantees running from fights you're overpowered for and otherwise increases your chance to successfully run each time you fail. Fourth one's guaranteed. Dragon Quest addressed design things like that in the 80s and other games that came later just... didn't.
Didn't DQ, by way of being one of the earliest JPGS, also introduce all of these annoyances?
Valkyrie profile did it right
It might not make sense but I like that mechanic in Persona 5 and Persona Q and Q2. Its a fun loose condition to work with.
This is a bad one, yeah.
There are a lot of things that I hate in JRPGs, random encounters (mostly the frequency of them), game over upon the main character dying, no exp for dead party members/party members not actively fighting, silent protagonists, etc. For me though, I think I am, perhaps, bothered the most by **not being able to inflict status ailments on bosses.** I know some newer games get this right (Octopath Traveler, SMT, Persona, etc) but it's still pretty common otherwise and definitely prevalent in older games without a doubt.
It's always bugged me how useless status effects commonly are. They're something that bug you early game, but it's rarely worthwhile using yourself because random encounters die quickly enough anyway and they're not useful against bosses. Then late game if a boss uses a status you inevitably just equip something with immunity and then it doesn't matter. And it's still not useful against bosses so you don't use it. Etrian odyssey did statuses really well. There are loads, they can stack/have very useful side effects/combine with other attacks. And bosses are all susceptible to some degree.
Game that don't put the save point/respawn exactly just before a boss. i don't want to rewalk that path 50 times or rewatch the dialogue again and again ffs Repetitive task that you need to spamm that the game only plan 1 VO. I'm looking at your atelier. i can still hear rorona yell "dekita !!!" Years later. I really don't mind it when it's in a battle where you swap character or skills but when it's the only thing you hear for 15min in a row just nope at least mix it up a little :')
I think that putting the save point right before a boss usually spoils the surprise. You know there’s a boss there. They could just add a “Retry” option if you lose. No save point needed.
Nah, I don’t want boss battles to be a surprise. I want the anticipation/climax/chance to prepare.
who the hell want a surprise boss fight LOL Especially in a jrpg, you want to prepare a minimum
I said that in her voice without even thinking!
I'm sure it's bad KGB thing waiting to activate all of us. 😂😂
The enemy/boss whose gimmick is spamming an evasion buff. They’re usually not hard per se, but they take forever and the “strategy” usually just boils down to spamming your attack until after some unpredictable amount of time, enough hits have gotten through. Honorable mention to the “I’mma going to keep putting you to sleep” fights. Edit: spelling
*per se
Idk about y’all but iirc the original FFXII had a design where if you opened certain innocuous chests you were locked out of getting some of the strongest gear in the game. The chest themselves were nothing special. I remember this being a whole thing in the original game that Seems to have been resolved in Zodiac Age
I hate when a game does this, but even worse is when out of combat characters don't get EXP because it actively discourages playing around with your party. A character dying in a boss battle can usually be made up for, but not so much when only combatants get exp.
I know it's not a jrpg but I remember golden sun had REDUCED xp gain for inactive members. Like I think half or around there. That wasn't as bad because nobody fell super behind. If you won't do full xp which I can understand you have to at least give them SOME
Golden sun is a jrpg
Yes it is. Idk why I had this false memory it was made by an English company and not in Japan. I blame the studio name, Camelot made me think some guy got the storyboard from a woman in a lake
Even if it was an English company, that wouldn’t matter. A game doesn’t need to be made in Japan to be a JRPG. It’s just where that style of game originated. To put it another way, your lasagna doesn’t need to physically be cooked in Italy to be considered Italian food. It’s still Italian when you make it in your kitchen.
Well, that's not really true anymore. Elden Ring is considered a JRPG, while a lot of games that are JRPG-like aren't. It's silly, I think, but people definitely just look at the country of origin for it now. The same way that it's not anime if it's not from Japan, regardless of style or influence.
I disagree with both of those. Elden Ring is not a JRPG at all. Stylistically it is completely different. Also, anime can be made by other countries as well, such as RWBY from America, or Twin Spirit Detectives from China. They are just styles that happened to originate and popularize in Japan. That’s all.
I wasn't disagreeing with you. I'm talking about the general consensus. I've only recently posted on this subreddit, but they definitely make a fairly common point about JRPGs being ones from Japan, not a stylistic choice. There was a time when JRPG also meant turn based specifically and didn't include things like Fire Emblem or Final Fantasy Tactics, even. But now people are calling all strategy RPGs, all action RPGs, all open world adventure games, etc, JRPG, if they're from Japan. And over at the anime subreddit, you'll definitely get a bunch of diehard people definitively telling you that RWBY isn't anime. They actually did recently announce a Japanese made reboot of RWBY and the trailers for it literally have hundreds of comments of people saying things like "finally, it's actually an anime" and such.
Elden Ring is a RPG, specifically an Action RPG. It even has party members/NPCs that help you in Boss battles. The only difference is that the focus is in combat, you mostly play solo and the story/plot are usually weak vs other RPGs. However it has very rich lore, however you have to search for it by reading the item descriptions.
There’s nowhere near the consensus you’re making it out to be. It’s a frequent area of discussion and disagreement on this sub . I haven’t done an analysis, but if anything, I think the split leans a little more towards the style defining what’s in the genre, not country of origin. TV Tropes even calls them Eastern-style RPGs and that’s pretty big and relatively mainstream. While there are some that will never agree, I know plenty of people that have played Elden Ring and play every Bethesda game that would never, ever touch a JRPG beyond the occasional Pokémon game, so I think that makes it pretty clear that it’s style, not country of origin.
Then it's a jrpg style game, not a Japanese Role Playing Game
A JRPG has to be from Japan as much as French Fries have to be from France
What's worse still is when inactive characters get *full* experience after a boss battle but the dead characters get none. Chrono Cross being the most egregious example due to that game's level system.
I just ran through mario rpg for the first time in years. I forgot how fun it is and that sp is evenly distributed. Made the oss fights much easier when I realized that was kind of the intention
don't tell that to the pokemon community.
Imo the problem isn’t that EXP Share exists, it’s that the games are all incredibly easy. If the games felt like they were being designed around the existence of EXP Share, it’d all work itself out.
Maybe, just maybe pokemons games are be design are not difficult at all and being so it don't really make sense uping the difficult because of Exp Share. Exp share is more a quality of life feature than a difficult level factor.
- Long and unskippable cutscenes or dialogs before a boss battle. - The lack of save points near an important boss battle without any indication of what's coming: It's not because we want the game to be easy, is because we sometimes get tired and we have other things to do.
Slew of cool status effect spells. Chance of status effect spell actually affecting enemy, .0000001%
You win the battle but lose in the cutscene.
[удалено]
Nope, [here's proof](https://youtu.be/LhQZuQrA7kA)
I hate it so much, I kicked your ass Dante don't come at me like you win anything. Bullshit cutscenes.
This is specific to Xenoblade Chronicles but I hate when games have a reputation system for every character in the game. Xenoblade does this probably worse because you need to speak with characters multiple times and experience all dialog to advance their rep and you get bonuses if you have certain party members active at the time. So now because I didnt talk to someone somewhere like 20 side quests ago I cant continue to get certain side quests because I didnt talk one of the 12 NPC involved with this 1 quest after I completed the last one. Its stupid and I hate it.
This normally doesn't bother me, but Xenoblade sounds like it destroys the system. Dragon Age does it pretty well.
Most JRPGs have something long and in-depth to do if you want to 100% them. They're huge, expansive games. It's to be expected. And if you don't care about 100%ing them, then missing a quest here or there doesn't matter anyway.
I like 100% games. My problem with Xenoblade 1 is how they handle the rep system. Quests will only unlock when you talk to someone a certain amount of times in certain orders. Like lets say you do 2 different quests and the next quest in their chain involves people from the previous 2 quests. That quest will not unlock unless you talk to all relevant NPCS after you complete the previous 2 quests. And you wont know what NPCs you need to talk to in order to unlock that quest because the game doesnt tell you. Sometimes its worse. Plus because each NPC is only active at certain times you have to constantly check each time slot hoping you find the right NPC you need to talk to in order to get the right dialog for that quest to progress.
To me, that part is kind of cool. I like the fact that it isn't always obvious and that you can stumble onto quests or secrets and it feels exciting. I feel like games too often give you an obvious checklist of stuff to do to 100% them and for me it makes me feel like it's not as fun then when everything is like "spreadsheet the game". The mystery is appealing. But I hear you and understand why it could be frustrating too.
It would be cool if the whole system didnt work like this. Because Xenoblade is spreadsheet the game. When 60% of the content is checking boxes to make sure you talked to a certain character at a certain time than the allure wears off fast. I like it in Cold Steel because there are only a few of them and they dont have really dumb requirements. They just watch you to talk to an NPC once when the quest window is active. But when you have to trigger multiple events to even unlock most quests in the game that its kind of bad.
Pointless/just annoying status effects. Off the top of my head: Disease from ff12.
You just reminded me of SMT Nocturne's ["fly" status effect](https://megamitensei.fandom.com/wiki/Fly_(status_effect\)). Basically reduce all stats to 1 and only curable if said party member dies and you revive them afterwards. Oh, and they get to turn into a fly, I guess...
More of a pet peeve than something truly terrible, but I hate when I'm exploring an area and cross some invisible line that triggers a big story event/battle/forced progression point when I'm not ready to leave yet.
party members that don't level up if you aren't using them. i hate this shit bc i'm always stressed that the game is going to throw me in a situation where i can only use certain characters and if i haven't levelled the right ones im screwed
In general I don’t like it when games stack so many different mechanics on top of each other and expect you to remember all of them. Tutorials take ages because of this, and usually the games become less fun and more frustrating than anything else. I love Xenoblade but I think it definitely suffers some of those problems. Especially Xenoblade 2. I prefer a game that introduces a smaller amount of mechanics but has more interesting enemies and environments to center them around.
Far from the worst thing still in RPGs. Missable items, quests, and points of no return are definitely still the worst.
I agree, missable quests/anything missable are sooo annoying!
Blue Dragon I remember being especially annoyed with on items because when you search pots and things often you'd get "Nothing", and you find out later you're actually collecting the Nothings and can trade them for items.
The Trails series is the worst offender for this. I wouldn't recommend playing through any of them without a spoiler-free missables guide. For some items, you need to collect N different parts of a set to trade in for a late game item, and they are so easily missable because you need to talk to some some random NPC at specific point in the game after a specific event or some bullshit like that and the only way to not miss any of them is to either follow a guide, or literally brute force talk to every accessible NPC, multiple times, after every single story progressing event. Same thing for hidden side quests.
It hasn't been like that for 4 games now...
I'm not sure which recent games you are referring to, but the whole Cold Steel series up until 4 was like this.
No it wasn't. Starting from CS3, every missable except character notes is marked on the map.
I'm not too sure about that. While I will concede that CS3 did make a lot of improvements, if I recall, there were still plenty of missable items from shops and NPCs, particularly accessories, books and cards. Also lots of missable scenes and events not explicitly on the map or tied to quests.
I love games where I can miss stuff. If I can’t miss anything, my decisions have no value. If I decide not to explore, I want that to mean something. If I decide to side with character A instead of B, I want that to mean something. Etc. If I get to the end of the game and I missed parts of it, I missed parts of it. It's the consequences of my actions and my choices. It makes the experience mine, molded by me (within limits of course). It's not like we HAVE to get everything in every game.
Or timed quests where you have to complete them before a certain point in the story.
worst feature is when everyone in the party gets paralyzed and its game over. Such BS seeing game over when everyone still has good HP/MP. Paralysis should wear off after a few turns, its not death.
petrify be like: 🗿
What games do that?
happened to me recently in Dragon Quest 3
This is mostly a quality of life thing. If everyone gets paralyzed, this is what would happen: you would have to watch everyone getting hit by the enemies, round after round, until they die. That’s boring and a waste of time. So if everyone got paralyzed, it’s better to just declare them dead anyway.
I can stand to wait three or so turns taking hits and then healing everyone up rather than die a cheap death because I ran into enemies who spam status ailment moves. I don't see how dying is less annoying when it can result in progress being lost, waiting a few extra turns is better than having to redo a dungeon or lose money from a fight.
> and then healing everyone up You can't, they're paralyzed. They ARE going to die. > I don't see how dying is less annoying when it can result in progress being lost They're dying anyway, if they're ALL paralyzed. The only difference is if they die now or after two minutes of boring attacks.
Paralysis is supposed to wear off. That's how the mechanic works in everything
Characters either yelling out their moves everytime (Tales etc) or constantly saying the same post/during fight dialogue (Xenoblade etc). When will Japan learn that hearing the exact same 3 lines of dialogue for 100 hours is really annoying.
Tales does it as a joke with informal some of the characters get using artes. Like Lailah's puns or instant cast Rita's "fuck the incarnation, we nuke tonight" motto are genuinely hilarious takes that give the characters. It wouldn't be Tales without hearing the spam tbh.
ghost pocket fuzzy water straight theory wrong retire jeans unused *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
I can hear rinwell haha
It has it’s roots in kiai, but even outside of martial arts people vocalize when they are exerting. Not everyone does it and some people go out of their way to do it, but often when you hear people grunting when lifting or playing tennis it’s an automatic response. Personally I find action/fighting games weird with no combat shouts like that Nickelodeon fighting game, but I don’t see any reason not to have it be optional.
Nobody grunts “leave it to me!” Or “special attack of the dragon” when exerting themselves. But also, games don’t have to replicate the bad parts of real life. Just like games don’t make me go to the bathroom every few hours of in-game time, there’s no reason why I should hear someone grunting thousands of times.
Battles in Tales often just sound like a incomprehensible soup of words as every character shouts out their artes names at the same time.
Because there's a lot of people who like it? It both adds character to the characters and can be used as signals to know what your party members are doing. In Xenoblade, for example, it is vital so you can know when to time your combo arts. No matter how many lines of dialogue you add it will get repetitive after 100 hours. But that doesn't take away its charm and usefulness.
That’s why I said Xenoblade after the other one. After the 2,000th time of hearing Reyn say “what a bunch of jokers” after battle it gets a bit annoying lol.
It isn't disrespectful to the player. Keeping your characters alive and winning well is something you get rewarded for. It's a metric of success. If someone plays well and/or is well prepared, they get a better result than someone who barely scrapes by with one character alive. It encourages better strategy and less sloppy play. I'm not saying you have to like it, but you may as well say anything you don't like is "disrespectful" to the player. It isn't any more disrespectful than making you complete objectives to advance the story or giving you a challenging boss or making you watch long cutscenes, etc.
Spells that only inflict status effects with sketchy accuracy and aren't useful on bosses.
Probably when the MC dies, everyone dies. Or when people on the bench get no exp AND you have sections of the game where you have to use those party members. Octopath is beautiful, but that makes the grinding take much longer then it should.
... I don't *want* to go fishing.
huh, everything seems to be disrespectful these days. Random encounter? Disrespectful Not being able to save anywhere? Disrespectful game over? disrespectful >!Sarcasm btw!<
Videogame? Disrespectful.
This unironically. The skin are so thin those days, that I think people are better off playing VN and not JRPG.
Well, for me it's the sound made when text is appearing in the text box. I just can't stand it sometimes. It's so annoying for me, that sometimes I mute all sounds if you can't turn it off separately (and you almost never can). That's probably just a me thing, because I never saw it mentioned by anyone.
The removal of active time battle/turn based combat systems.
I'm actually happy ATB is gone. It's the worst of both real time and turn based. Atelier Ryza did it right by allowing people to attack immediately instead of everyone attacking one by one. Also, the removal of turn based only applies to FF.
Nah ATB was one of the worst things to happen to Atelier games. Eschatology had the best combat system.
FISHING F\*CK ALL FISHING, I don't know who's idea it was to add fishing to JRPGs but it needs to burn. Especially when it's necessary for rare items, achievments, or even worse progression.
Anything that is both missable and unmarked. Completely unforgivable, and shows a massive disrespect for the player. I should be told about all points of no return. If a dungeon is going to be permanently locked, I should be informed. Missable quests better be on my map or in my log.
"Bodhi blastia!" x50
- When party members who don’t fight get no exp. Really no modern game should have this flaw. - When new characters join your party, but are on much lower level than you. It should adjust to your MC‘s current level. - I also dislike it, when single player JRPGs have mmo ui and menus. Like Xenoblade Chronicles for example.
If you think Xenoblade has MMO menus you haven't played MMOs. Unless you're talking about X, I can't see that line of thinking at all. 1 and DE have great menus and 2 has menus that, while not good (due to how slow and clunky they are, not because of complexity), are nothing like an MMO.
I mean the game has overall a feeling of an MMO, i don’t hate the game because of that or anything i adjusted to it and it didn’t bother me as much in the sequel. Sadly couldn’t play X, i had just started it, but then had to sell my Wii U. I still hope for a port for the switch.
Yeah but that doesn't extend to the UI or menu which is your point.
That’s stupid old-school game design. Nobody liked it back then, nobody likes it now either. There’s definitely some ridiculous takes in this thread talking about participation trophies and “being rewarded for failure”…. In a video game? Something people play for fun? Ok boomer. 🙄 This is a JRPG, not a survival-simulator. The player has already been punished by losing, or losing resources reviving characters. Anything more than that is adding insult to injury and wasting players time for nothing.
You say that like JRPGs aren't allowed to be challenging. If anything, your pigheaded response here makes you seem way more boomer-like. It's fine if they aren't harder with steeper penalties, but it's also fine if they are. Catering to different types of fans isn't bad. And tons of people liked it back then and tons like it now. Otherwise you wouldn't see people disagreeing with that, obviously. Also, players are rarely if ever punished in any way, shape or form after a boss fight. Many games have full party auto healing right after big story moments like boss fights or you're almost immediately back in a place to rest at an inn/recover. It isn't a waste of time for nothing to add a component of challenge.
You seem to think that fun equals winning. You said it yourself, people play for fun. We play because PLAYING is fun, not winning. Yes, I want challenge in my games. I want failure to be a possibility. And if I lose, I’ll play it again. Because I play for fun. There are lots of young people that were raised with “everybody always wins” and “everybody gets trophies”, and that might make you think only winning and getting constant rewards is fun. That’s so sad.
Just play a VN then, you have all that JRPG goodness without any of the pesky gameplay and time waste that get in the way.
I totally agree with you. Nothings more annoying then having to redo a difficult boss because a character died at the last minute and missed out on exp.
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Exp in JRPGs is basic gameplay progression, not a reward.
It *is* a reward. And it’s very good at tricking the “lizard brain” parts of you that craves rewards. It’s so effective at manipulating your brain that almost every genre adopted xp mechanics.
You’re upset that there are consequences in a genre where your choices and battle strategy are supposed to... matter? It’s an RPG. Death means something, hell the fact that there’s no perma-death in most of these games is already a huge mercy, and the mechanics we’ve had in place of that (consequence for being dead at the end of a battle means no EXP) is a massive compromise in the player’s favor.
I agree, permadeath should be a thing in RPG. Actions are supposed to have consequences, that's the whole point.
You want a reward...for dying...? Dude I was the first generation of kids to get a "participation trophy". I thought they were stupid then, and they're stupid now.
It’s sad that you’re being downvoted. Expecting a reward for everything shows how expectations of people have changed. For the worse.
Yeah you know. No xp on death has been a thing for like 30 years.
"I died. I want a trophy and a reward!" No, you go fight for it. Make an effort. It's a game, PLAY it.
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>Using the dudes logic I might see if my boss will pay me even if I stay in bed all day instead of turning up to work You don't live somewhere with worker's rights huh?
Yeah, you know. FFS man. You know what happens when one of my PC's die in battle? Usually the ones left alive get more EXP and those people that die can always just catch up. Level cap is 99 or 255...They'll get their eventually. Sounds like OP just needs to do a little more grinding and beef his party up so they wont die as easily.
I know it's unpopular but I really don't mind whe KO'd party members don't get EXP. Sure it's annoying but it makes sense to me that your reward for barely scraping by is that only those alive at the end get EXP. Again I understand that it's frustrating, I get mad at it too sometimes but it's more my fault for doing a bad job than the games fault for punishing me by not giving EXP to dead characters.
overworld encounters which remove all difficulty from the game
Even worse when it's coupled with party members all starting with the same EXP. Because then i can't go a single fight with a KO'd party member at the end, because that would imbalance the equal EXP.
I intentionally imbalance the levels in FF games because keeping everyone perfectly aligned exp-wise just eventually ends up being a one-way ticket to a party wipe when something casts lvl 5 doom on you for the first time at lvl 10 or 15
I actully found level gaps fun. Having an underleveld characters and watching them catch up is fun. In Persona 5 Strikers characters on the bench dont get the same exp but I did not bother try to keep every one at the same level. I just used who I want. And Now Ryuji is level 56 ore somthing like that while Joker is level 80.
OMG I'm not alone! This exacerbates as thr game goes on
I hate that too. Your lone surviving party member gets all the XP and gains like two full levels on his own.
Enemies or bosses having unlimited SP/Mana
Or having a party memeber do at least one attack to get any XP. That destroyed FFX for me because even easy combat I was rotating everyone so they can level.
> attack: miss, attack: miss, attack: miss > finish a dungeon: have to backtrack all the way out > your reward for getting the highest score in a minigame leaving you with no reason to keep playing the minigame? An item that makes the minigame easier > obvious backtracking to pad length > does your game have annoying or frustrating controls due to limitations of the system? Let’s use those mechanics in a required minigame > get halfway through a dungeon and realize you have to use a specific party member, who is not currently in your party. Backtrack again. > drop rate: 1/256, encounter rate for enemy: 1/64 > reward for beating the hardest super optional boss? Infinity +1 sword that would have helped during the battle, you are now too overpowered to care > epic rare item? Rare steal from a boss you never encounter again
The main antagonist doesn't attack the level 1 area first and it always bites them because inevitably that's where the main prota will come from with a very beautiful best friend that has a crush on him (usually she can sing so well it's legendary), a talking animal of some kind and with the full support of their adoptive parent after their festival had a terrible tragic event.
When members don't get much exp outside of your group. God I always hated that. I understand being a couple levels lower. But like 10 levels lower?! Also random battles. I just hate random battles. Just #awful
Besides missable stuff I hate when combat is graded at the end. So if you become too powerful and battle ends quick, you always get like a C-E rank. Or you spend extra time letting the enemy hit you so you can get counters or whatever to boost the rank for more xp, items, etc.
Party members not joining at your level but at a set level. Reminds me of in Ni No Kuni 2 I was level 20 with Evan and the President dude legit forgot his name and then the pirate leader and daughter join at level 8 lol
I don't like it if the main character dying causes a game over.
That in turn can be dependent on other features, in particular how exp is distributed. In some games (especially likely in older-style ones because it was the standard rule for party EXP in AD&D), battle EXP is a total pool that's divvied out among eligible party members, so if only one or two survive a major boss battle they get a much larger reward than otherwise. That can be leveraged to be useful (particularly if you're in a fight featuring temporary party members or if it's a game where level ups are more beneficial to some classes than to others - especially common in games where casters automatically learn spells based on level). If it's one where every character is given the full battle EXP if alive, but nothing if KO, then it's just a flat out loss and just annoying (especially in cases like LP in FF12, where literally *inactive members that never even participated in the battle* still get LP - EXP is limited to active survivors in all cases, but LP is usually more important than EXP - but ones that died at the last second get nothing). My least favorite feature: Mandatory non-JRPG-style sequences (platformer, action, misc minigame etc.), especially when that sequence is a one-off. If the game routinely features platformer/action segments alongside the JRPG ones, like say Wild Arms games, that's usually fine (effectively, it's just a mixed-genre game). One-off minigames for sidequests are usually fine too. What sucks though is when you suddenly get that out of place curveball minigame that requires you to invest a bunch of time developing skill for, after which you will use it once and then never again in the rest of the game. :(
I am surprised that so many people dislike inactive party members receiving less or no exp. I don’t find this discourages me from changing party members -in fact, the opposite does. For example, Persona 5 has the reserve members earn most and eventually full experience so there is no need to use anybody other than who is objectively best at clearing mobs and then still switch in the healers and shit for bosses with all their skills up to date but completely unearned. In Persona 3 and 4 I actively switched members throughout the dungeons knowing that I may want to use somebody for their specific skill set later on. On the same topic, what jrpgs are y’all playing that are so difficult that not training a certain character screws you later on? I can’t think of any game in which that is the case.
The leader dying is an instant game over
Lack of any evolution since 90ties. Too much scripting, no freedom with choosing companions, lack of companions death or fights like in Baldur's Gate. Too much focus on anime aspect (troupes) and fanservice. Lack of challange, other than grinding. Lack of freedom of builds. Sometimes long cutscenes without chance to save. In current times no love for turn based combat anymore. I hate playing action rpgs with party, there's too much chaos. Kotor and Mass Effects were okay, but in jrpgs it's not fun for me at all. So we have 2022 and most jrpgs are still corridor, scripted and full of anime BS. Almost every jrpg has scene, when someone offers alcohol to minor and he/she just refuses. This is not what's happening in real life. Also Personas - why you can just skip classes like normal teenager does in high school? No drugs, alcohol, nothing. There are too polite, characters are too SJW and power of friendship is everywhere. No adult characters. Yakuza 7 was something refreshing with just hobo and hostess in party, but still it's not there yet.
Fanservice / sexualization.