'Broken' or 'Tired' RPG gamelplay elements?

[Dincrest]

Xenodurr makes Tower of Babel less painful.  http://www.rpgfan.com/boards/index.php?topic=7533.0

EDIT: And why can't battle encounters, while in vehicles, be like those in Phantasy Star 4 where you're in the cockpit of the vehicle using its weapon options.  When I'm driving in a vehicle and get into a battle a "normal" battle with everyone on foot kills the immersion. 

[Aeolus]

Boss fights that are only different from regular enemies by virtue of having higher HP/Stats and different music.

[Lard]

Random encounters while flying on a ship.

Fuck you Skies of Arcadia and Suikoden IV

[Summoner Yuna]

As much as I love FFXII, I have to agree that the chest system and drop rates were beyond atrocious. Another thing that bothers me is not being able to escape battles. Sometimes I want to escape a battle to avoid damage but the game decides that my characters can't escape. And I have to try several times until I succesfully escape and in the meantime I'm getting beaten up. I really hate that. I'm gonna present two examples to explain my point further. In Valkyrie Profile, the Tower of Lezard Valeth has monsters that are quite strong for that point in the game, so you try to escape but you're characters are already getting beaten up left and right. Thankfully in that game monsters don't respawn. Another example and which is even worse is in Suikoden V. In the first three Suikodens, if you fought every single battle in dungeons you would quickly gain sufficient levels to being able to let monsters go without any risk. I never had a problem with these games in this respect. But in Suikoden V it seemed like no matter how many levels you gained you could rarely let monsters go. It took forever and sometimes it wasn't worth it to stay and gring for hours just for being able to escape battles without risk. You were just better off fighting. And there were one or two instances in this game in which you couldn't escape at all. The game forced you to fight every random battle that appeared and there were lots of them. I dreaded thos sections of the game because of that.

In short, a game should let you decide when you want to fight or not and also inhuman drop rates should be banished from the face of gaming, like some of you have so eloquently argued.

[ShadowLaguna]

Point and Click World Maps. Used in so many games in a series which is after one with a proper world map!! They're so lazy, and stupid!

Which series are you talking about?


[/quote]

Breath of Fire IV (which was still a great RPG), Legaia 2, Lost Odyssey (after Blue Dragon having a proper map, not the same series, but same creators) and Tales of Symphonia 2. Another game that have one would be The Last Remnant from the top of my head.

[MeshGearFox]

World maps hardly ever present meaningful content, though. They SHOULD but typically they don't.

[insertnamehere]

1) Random encounters in puzzle rooms.  When I'm trying to concentrate on a puzzle, I shouldn't get into battles because it breaks my concentration. An offshoot of that is Tower of Babel in Xenogears where I would get into a random encounter MID-JUMP in one of the most horrifically broken and twiddly platforming sections in a traditional RPG.

I actually finally got to that part of xenodurr today

i feel like those things in games that charge up by doing damage or getting damaged (like overdrive in ff10) are worn out
and I didn't really notice it while i played it, but someone recently mentioned in one of these threads that enemies in ff8 level up with party members (inconveniently making unused characters almost impossible to survive against that final boss)
and that's something else i hate about some games, not all inactive members get experience and they become too weak
too frequently random battles, respawning enemies (especially in persona 3 and ff12) and massive amounts of enemies in one area all really suck
some games, ff12 in particular, make me wait to long for things like summons and magic to take effect even if it should be already done once it starts and by that time I may be dead
I hate that most games have way too many npc's and don't let me know if they something new to tell me
and also weapons that break are slightly annoying but I liked that dark cloud 2 used that and actually made it fun in a way
edit: I also hate those thing that force me to work on a puzzle for hours to move on or get a crappy prize and and games that have too many battles and always give too little experience, such as legend of dragoon

[Dincrest]

Didn't someone once say in another thread that overworlds use smoke and mirrors to make a linear progression seem nonlinear, thus fooling most of us?

[Sagacious-T]

Didn't someone once say in another thread that overworlds use smoke and mirrors to make a linear progression seem nonlinear, thus fooling most of us?

Yeah they should remove all the fluff and smoke and mirrors and just leave us with what's important: The Gameplay and the Story.

[Starmongoose]

I like my smoke and mirrors. What is a stage magician without his smoke and mirrors? It would be pretty boring if he just stood their producing flowers and bunnies without any commentary or fireworks.

I don't think there is anything wrong with decorating some framework.

Though I am one of those horrible people who like overworld maps. Mostly because it puts some perspective into the world I am currently inhabiting. FFXIII had no overworld map, or any world map to speak of. Thus I was very confused about how a lot of the places in the game were interconnected and how you reached one place to the next, or what is next to that place or how far one place is from another place.


However I knew that Wutai was far away from Junon in FF7 cause I had a nice overworld to traverse and I could appreciate how difficult it was getting from one place to another. Of course the map is scaled down but it's better than nothing.

[Sagacious-T]

I was making a FF13 jab :T

[Starmongoose]

I was making a FF13 jab :T

My ineptitude for noticing subtly has once again reared it's ugly head.

[Dincrest]

Oh don't get me wrong, I like my world maps too.  Even with all the smoke and mirrors making linear progression seem more expansive and wide open, I like it and willingly buy into it in many of my RPGs. 

[Darilon]

Buffs and status affecting abilities are generally useless in most rpgs. You rarely if ever need to use them.

Also for some reason I find it very difficult to like final dungeons. You get the feeling you have seen a similar place in many other rpgs while the huge size of the place means that feeling only grows worse.

The game has over thirty endings (although this technically may be true, you will probably only see two or three different endings at most)

[Dincrest]

Shin Megami Tensei games are the only ones I can think of where I pretty much had to use buffs/debuffs and make sure my defense was tighter than my offense.  Normally the "defend" command is pretty useless, but not in something like Nocturne.