This!  Lost Odysseys haunted mansion on disk 2 was pure hell!!

I loooooove them.

It´s depends on concrete game. If a game has some "No Encounters" option, like FFX, or FFVIII, then I don´t mind. If I want to solve puzzle, "No Encounters" and no creatures jump at you. If I want to level a bit, strip "No Encounters" item or skill off and run in the circle...

they got very annoying in LO around the temple of enlightenment

I'm not much of a JRPGer outside of the FF series but in FF, I dang well prefer it.

Infact it felt like in FFXII that they made it so you actually had to go out of your way to goto the next enemy and kill it to gain anything and made it feel more repetative, drawn out and a waste of my time more then any random battle is in any of the other FF games.

I can't really comment elsewhere really other then Star Ocean 3 and Valykrie Profile 2 except it works differently, I guess. But they still felt like I had to do them.

not all the time. In some of the early jrpgs, I think the random encounters can become a "zen like experience" after you've been playing for awhile like in some shooters you just get into killing the aliens and forget all else.

But if you have other stuff you need to think about doing theat are taking away from your full absorption in the game, then they can start to be a bother.

The worse thing about them is they can lead you to level up your characters too soon relative to where they are supposed to be in a rpg's storyline.

The first two RPGs that I played were Mario RPG and Chrono Trigger. Neither of these had random encounters.

I next tried to play FF II and FF III (US version numbers) -- both of which had random encounters. I could not get through either of these.

Mike from Morgantown

Yes, but I'm glad that their being fazed out of the genre now: the only reason the kept them was to mimic Dragon quest and now that even that "true to our archaic roots" series has ditched them, what excuse will other developers have?

If there's some way to counteract the random encounters, then I don't really mind. In Pokémon, if you want to avoid battles you just don't walk through the grass. If you are in the grass and don't want encounters, you use repels. If you get in a random battle against your will anyway, you run.

But yes, I prefer monsters being visible on the map at the very least, but having realtime battles, preferably on the main map itself(like in FFXII and Kingdom Hearts), is the best.

That's why FF12 is the best FF ever.

Sad they had to give in and go back to archaic gameplay.