The Most Annoying Parts of JRPGs

[Bofferbrauer2]

Cerebralbore101 said:

What parts of JRPGs really annoy you? Here's mine in no real order...



3. A random battle every three steps

Yep. I am not a fan of this. Maybe having one every 5 to 10 steps is fine. Every three though? That's grind. 


5. Windy confusing dungeons, with no map HUD. 

Oh, man I really hate it when I'm in a dungeon with a thousand forks in the road. Only one of them leads to the boss, and the others lead to dead ends or treasure. Combine this with frequent fights, and you can just get lost for ages. 

6. Not knowing where to go next. 

Some older JRPGs give you almost no real direction. You have to go to a certain area to trigger a cutscene, and before you do the game is just locked down. 

I love the Etrian Odyssey series, because it skips all of this and more. There's always a point to fights, even if it's to kill enemies in a certain manner to get good item drops. Attack animations are fast, and to the point. Random battles are once every ten or so steps, which is a nice pace. Your entire party is always accessible. No plot raisins needed. A customizable HUD map on the bottom screen, so you never get lost. Where do you go next? To the next stratum of course! 

Those are part of their heritage they took from early western RPG like Ultima (6) and Wizardry (3+5)

In Ultima you had to talk to people to find out what to do and where to go. Oh, and they wouldn't just spurt out the answer at random, you had to ask each one specific questions.

Early Wizardry titles were Dungeon Crawlers, and pretty difficult ones at that. Not only was there a battle at every corner, the battles were very deadly, too. Etrian Odyssey are spiritual successors to them. But those dungeons often had some tricks to their sleeves like dark tiles, spinners and random teleports to throw you off. Or more specifically, to throw your maps off, since you were expected to make maps yourself if you wanted to know where you're going. Some titles of the time even came with graph paper for you to make those maps.

While we're at it, what annoys me most of today's RPG (both western and JRPG) are the useless useful spells, like poison, criticals or debuffs. These are so ingrained nowadays that RPGs of the 80's and early 90's seem impossible to master because everybody leaves out those spells. But back in the days those were actually far from useless, and in fact more like your nukes since high damage spells (the nukes nowadays) were often avoided or totally resisted, making them much less useful as they are today.