If You are a Fan of Traditional Final Fantsay... GET TYPE-0!

[Areym]

The Fury said:

Areym said:

It makes a hell of a lot more sense than randomly fighting two deformed lions or mech soldiers or goblins (or whatever else you fight in a final fantasy game)
Giving a player the choice to go into battle or avoid it is the optimum choice, rather than making travel a pain in the ass when you gotta go into a fight with all the low level riffraff.

So instead of randomly fighting 2 deformed lions, you are fine with 2 deformed lions just hanging around an area, waiting for you to attack? If it made true sense, you would shoot the lions from 100 meters away with a rifle and they'd be dead in one hit, or be injured enough to run away and die slowly from lead poisoning. No numbers just falling off them or anything.

Random battles allows you to gain XP, gather resources and money over time/progression as opposed to purposely seeking enemies. This allows you level steadily, instead of being underleveled and you have to go back and grind to get to the right level. 

... wait, low level riffraff? You have to do that whether you can see them or not, you level by killing the low level riffraff to make you strong and experienced enough to take on the bosses. I'd much prefer not to have to seek the low level riffraff and for it to come to me.

Any person who has ever touched an JRPG would know better than to simply ignore all small fights and not grind for a while.  Granted, it gives the player the ability to play however he wants, overleved or underleveled. This is more important if the player is playing on a lower difficulty or just for the story. Take for example Star Ocean: Till the end of time (i'm gonna ssume you are familiar with its battle system) You get to see the type of monster which you will face off, which allows the player to pick the type of monster he/she wants to train on, as oppose to just running around, hoping you will find a battle with monsters that will give decent exp. 

In Star Ocean, you can fill up a bonus battle gauge that can let the player gain bonuses in battles, the most desired for me being triple exp. The rate to fill up the bar goes down as the fight drags on and it is lower as the party gets stronger in level. Thus, a player can seek out the right monster to fight, that give the best experience and that make raising the gauge much easier. This is a battle system which I have always loved because it is so versatile and rewarding. Also, the monsters in the game are generally aggressive and will engage combat if you get within range (which is the case for a lot of games in recent memory)

And by low level riffraff, i mean the monsters you do not want to fight when you are backtracking or have reached a sufficient level. I honestly don't see how having the choice to fight or not is worse than having no choice at all (There are ways to circumvent random fights but you get my point) but do your thing.

I, personally, don't tell to hang on to older concepts in gaming. The transition from turn-based, random battles to action-oriented combat is the natural evolution of any game involving combat (aside from specifically strategy based games like FF tactics), in my honest opinion.