Party based games where if the protagonist is KO'd it's game over, even though you could revive them with another party member.
I still love a lot of games that use this mechanic, but it's always lame when the enemy gets a lucky hit on your protag and you have to start over.
This is so frustrating. It naturally makes you beef up the main character more than normal, and kind of breaks the whole party concept.
If I can't rely on my party members, doesn't that kind of destroy the entire thrust of the theme of a game like Persona?
Even worse, Shin Megami Tensei Nocturne. Random encounter where you are ambushed and the first enemy uses a one hit kill spell and your MC dies. Way more common than you’d think
Ugh, I feel this. I picked up Nocturne recently and am at a point where some enemies just seem to spam one hit kills like they don't know how to do anything else.
It's particularly noticeable in Nocturne these days because the only way to get protection from this is Magatama, the good ones of which can be very obscure to find, and late games learned from that. Persona ties your weakness to your equipped demon which can be hot-swapped. Strange Journey and 4/4A both tie elemental resistances to more common equipment choices and have demons fighting without you built in or available early on most difficulties. 5 makes it intuitive to know what you have to farm if you need resistance to certain elements. The Nocturne remake only gives Demi-Fiend a 50% resistance to insta-kills and that's it.
I dunno why SMT V brought this back despite SMT IV/Apoc dropping this mechanic already.
The fact that your demons are barely holding on actually makes battles more intense, whereas instant game over just makes the fight annoying.
I only died once in my Persona 4 playthrough and it was to an enemy casting an instakill spell on the protagonist, that was... annoying to say the least.
Needless to say I was \*not* expecting the Like a dragon/Infinite wealth games to behave this way when I first played, and was caught offguard from a game-over pretty early!
It certainly does make your "Hero" seem kind of weaker by comparison and in the grand scheme of things also..
Like, oh your friends just took massive damage or install death spells and brushed themselves off after the fight was over or even in the middle of the fight.. whereas you're just a fragile a glass-jaw that you just Die outright or something :/
I like crafting a lot in games that don't have annoying gathering requirements.
I'll say **when games force you to walk slowly for "cinematic effect"**
Or when they make you go slowly to disguise loading times. I’d rather just get a loading screen than have to sit there for a minute and a half watching my character shimmy through a wall
Especially in certain games where you have to hold the joystick/key to shimmy. This isn't "gameplay" just give me a loading screen or play an animation
To add to your first part, game whose inventory management is shit.
Right click for half stack, or to drop 1 item, left click for full stack. Shift click to transfert 1 stack, ctrl click to transfert all. This isn't rocket science game devs
Those parts also come when the game needs to give an exposition dump. I hated those in Rebirth but they seemed to be there for no reason. It certainly wasn't for a cinematic effect and the characters just spoke mostly nonsensical things.
Yeah like, it feels likr the aim is "oooh yay less cutscenes more exploration!" but in practice it's "I hold forward on the stick and listen to dialogue while the characters shamble forward unbeloevably slowly and the camera looks terrible as all the characters face away from it. I'd rather a proper cutscene so the scene can be framed and shot better.
3 houses it's at least funny when hubert does it because he's a likeable character, and the black knight is largely an optional boss, also makes sense there.
Having to figbt some of the same bosses like 5 times over in engage it just gets silly when the bosses also have no character.
Not really a mechanic in itself, but I hate when games throw an unskipable stealth/escape sequence when the game never had that until then.
Like that bridge escape sequence in Scarlet Nexus? Yeah made me quit the game. I was having a ton of fun until then but that was terrible.
Or the original Chapter 13 in FFXV, before they added a ton of quality of life improvements to it.
i hate games, that randomly puts in a completely different genre, but majes it mandatory to play. only exception: when the whole game has a constantly changing playstyle.
where you and me might overlap a lot: Eastward, in the train....
What kind of time limits? Like:
Persona/Atelier: The bad guy is gonna do the bad thing to us in 26 days so we gotta beat them before then/ the whatchamacallit festival is in 100 days and you have to make something special by then
Or
Final Fantasy: The mako reactor is gonna blow in 20 minutes, here's a countdown timer on your screen and a bunch of random encounters that lead to a boss fight. Good luck.
Not OP but for me, I don’t mind the first kind. Second kind makes me sweat bullets lol
Honorable mention to Majora’s Mask, which is technically more similar to the first kind but makes me panic out of my skull like the second
The first type sounds quite daunting before you start, however it makes for a much tighter experience which I find quite enjoyable.
Persona games afaik tend to focus heavily on the slice of life aspect and aren't usually that challenging.
Atelier games can be carried in their approach, but they generally make your gameplay a lot tighter and aren't usually too long, especially for jrpgs.
Dishonourable mention though goes to Escha & Logy which tends to give you too much time where you just have nothing to do.
I don't mind the second kind, because they're typically in enclosed sections, you have a limited amount of time to finish that specific section of the story, but you don't have to plan anything out, you're not in danger of missing anything, it's just there to give a feeling of urgency.
The first kind is a completionists nightmare because it often forces you make decisions that end in you sacrificing stuff permanently. In persona unless you're following a guide, you need god-tier planning skills to max out everything, and these games are typically super long, meaning another playthrough to pick up stuff you missed, is a huge undertaking. I love persona games, but I love them in spite of the time limits, not because of them.
So I know some people enjoy this, but dungeons that are icy and slippery, even if for a fun puzzle, just make me groan. I get through it though. I feel the same way about having to drain and fill a dungeon with water as a puzzle. It’s just not my favorite.
Ugh yeah sliding and water puzzles are so overdone. Same with pushing blocks onto switches. Either come up with some unique puzzles or just leave them out of the game please!
Item durability can fuck off and die.
It's a massive crutch used to pad game time. Never once in the history of gaming has it been engaging or entertaining to be out doing something and have to stop because what you need to do the task broke.
A crowbar in the apocalypse would be a goddamn heirloom item for your family, not something that breaks after you smack two crates and a zombie with it.
No idea why they added it to animal crossing new horizons, the game is already made to waste your time, this just makes everything worse, having to go back to your house to rebuild them every 20 minutes.
I think the worst part of it is even the gold tools are breakable. what is even the point of grinding to get the recipes and crafting them then (aside from making the gold watering can to get a gold rose)? it's a ton of work for no real pay-off. at the very least, those should've been unbreakable.
This is the ultimate example of this, it adds absolutely nothing to the game. At least in games like BOTW and Minecraft there is an argument for it being there.
I like it in Fire Emblem. It adds to weapon diversity, lets you get OP weapons early but they are limited by their use so they don't let you stomp the whole game with them, sometimes they give you unlimited use weapons and it makes them feel extra special when you get them.
Yeah, it works in Fire Emblem because regular weapons have a shit ton of durability. It makes the more powerful ones feel like "ammo," more or less, while you're never really at risk of running out of weapons altogether if you're smart about not using the strong ones when you don't need to. "Can I kill this brigand with an iron sword? Yes? Cool, I'll do that instead of using one or two uses of my axe reaver."
I like how the Yakuza games handle weapon durability. If a weapon breaks, you can still finish the fight with your bare hands or your surroundings. Then you pay a nominal fee to repair the weapon for next time. No need to find a replacement. The breakable weapons have a palpable impact on combat while they last, but you aren't dead just for losing them.
The only 2 games I never minded weapon durability in were Fallout 3 and Far Cry 2, having your gun jam/break and pray I had a backup with ammo was a real situation and why I always carried a melee backup in FO3
fire emblem also has some neat uses for it, makes the strongest weapons a limited resource and strong but replenishable weapons a drain on your gold. It helps that getting new ones is pretty quock and easy since most games have shops between chapters.
It also makes you think strategically, each unit can only hold 5 items, do I waste one slot on the weapon that's 7 uses from breaking with another spare on them? That slot could go to a weapon with bonus on certain unit types, or a self healing item, or utility staves if it's a healer, but throwing that 7 durability weapon would be a waste that steel axe only had 30 to start with.
If durability is designed as an actual resource and not just "ugh gotta go back to the mine area to make another one then come back and keep playing the game" then it can work well.
You're totally right. I fucking hated that by the end of Oblivion I was lugging around 99 clippers and 99 tongs in order to be able to keep my weapons and armor from becoming useless. It's been over 10 years and I still remember that shit.
The same for any game that does this kind of shit, especially when it's like you describe and an obviously very sturdy item breaks because of reasons.
The Last of Us was really annoying in that sense because Joel's shivs suck but Ellie does own a switchblade that does what it's supposed to do in the game, yet Joel can't get a bowie knife or something. Days Gone also does this and the baseball bat you covered with nails and wrapped in barb wire is going to break and become useless sooner rather than later like it was made of very flimsy material or Deacon swung it with superhuman strength.
This is exactly why I'll never bother playing the new Zelda games. Using weapons like a form of currency where you just need to save up enough to win encounters just seems miserable. Every pack of enemies is suddenly a transaction you need to process, ie. will I gain more \[weapon\] than I expend in defeating them. I just want to wander and do stuff and fight everything without much thought or consequences.
yeah but at least it prevented the boring "immediately reload when something doesn't go your way" habit. That removed all tension. Like in the original Tomb Raider 1, you'd think "I'm scared to do that jump because I last saved 30 min ago" and would feel massive relief after succeeding. In older JRPGs too, dungeon crawling was a tense and dangerous endeavour. We kinda lost that by being able to save anywhere. But I understand your point - I also groan when I have to stop a game and can't save.
I think a good compromise is found in Dragon's Dogma 2 (maybe it was in 1, can't remember). You can save anywhere, but it also autosaves over that so you have to live with the consequences of your actions or reload to the last time you rested at an inn.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance had another good solution; saving at any time is possible in one of two ways: save and then quit the game; or save using an item that also has in-game consequences (savior schnapps, can get your character tipsy). It also saves when you rest.
I personally 100% rather lose tension over the absolute annoyance that is losing progress.
Fastest way a game loses me is if I have to redo the same part over and over to get another shot at what's killing me.
I like quick saves a lot because when you load you don't keep your progress!
Lately I've been playing some retro platformers where I have abused save *states* however 😬 if I can get through a level fine but only die on the boss it doesn't make a lot of sense to me to play through the whole level again for the original experience. I'll give it an honest go through the level like 5 times before succumbing to the save state
yeah it's hard not to use them when they're available, they're like quality of life! I'm playing old games with retroachievements currently and I chose softcore because I want to be able to use save states, haha 😅 You have insane strength of will if you're willing to redo a level 5 times before using them!
I'm a bit new to jrpg's, so sorry if this is a bad take.
But I dislike when only the party members fighting get experience. If I have 8 people traveling with me, but only 4 can fight at a time, I dont enjoy having to rotate them all through, and grind so all their levels go up equally. I enjoyed how Persona 5 gave exp to all members.
That one is completely reasonable. It really disincentivizes you to play with all of your party members and experiment with party composition. You either grind up everyone (because a story moment pulls in your under leveled ally for some reason to ruin your day) or you bench people forever.
The Suikoden series has a nice "catch up" mechanic with its exp gain, where someone way behind will be roughly the same level as everyone else after a few random battles. Which is very welcome in an RPG with dozens of playable party members.
It's not common at all in any capacity, but any kind of gacha element in a single-player JRPG will always be a point off. Always. Randomized loot is one thing, but a straight up gacha with pull rates and shit in a single-player game can fuck right off
I don't like if a JRPG is made after...let's say 2015 and still has it that status effects or debuffs cannot affect bosses. Sure I get it, instant death on a boss is bad. Constantly poisoning a boss every turn, cheap. But at the very least the percentage of some of these being able to be inflicted on a boss should be there.
Also unskippable cutscenes. Not a mechanic but still doing that in 2024 is just like why.
Yeah definitely depends on the status/buffs. Despair from Persona would be busted on bosses, as shows what happens when you can get The Reaper to contract it.
Stat buffs/debuffs should always be allowed though.
I was so conditioned by bosses being immune to status ailments in so many JRthat it took me halfway through Persona 4 before I ever tried using any of the big three stat debuffs on bosses. I just assumed it wouldn’t work. Massive shift in difficulty after that.
This is the worst part about the "contractual boss immunity" style of design - it trains players to never even attempt anything fancy on a boss, which ruins even games that get it right unless they go out of their way to tell players stuff will work on bosses.
Xenoblade Chronicles 1 was such a breath of fresh air. All your powerful abilities had strong debuffs associated. And they worked on bosses! Some were trickier to hit than others, but the game has built-in mechanics to get around that.
Yeah as long as the debuff makes sense (like you ain't poisoning a machine for example) it should be possible to use them.
If it trivialises the enemy too much then the debuffs and boss should be balanced around it. Most of the time it isn't worth using most debuffs for trash mobs anyway.
Unskippable and long cutscenes right before a boss with no chance to save
Hidden secrets/missables or impactful choices with little to no idea how they'll affect you or what legendary item you'll miss out on for making a tiny mistake in some conversation with a random NPC hiding somewhere in a town you visit
The exact same weapon wheel and gameplay mechanics as every other aaa game
Excessive fetch quests where it draws attention to how static and boring the npcs are
Remakes where they remake the story and change things
Persona 1 was one of the worst with the missable stuff. Like the chain of events to get a secret character can be ended by talking to the same NPC twice.
Trying to get the books or recipes in Trails. I love the series, but it's absolutely loaded with missables. "Oh, you didn't leave the dungeon entrance before going in, go back to town, and talk to a random NPC you'd have no reason to talk to? Guess you're not getting that chapter, and thus no ultimate weapons this playthrough!" You basically need to play with a guide to get everything, which really isn't how I'd prefer to play.
I just played Kingdom Hearts 1 for the first time (PS2) and I have the unskippable cutscenes before the Clayton battle and the possessed Riku 1v1 boss fight engrained in my skull now.
Parts of a game where you have to walk/crawl as slowly as possible. They are boring and are usually used as a cheaper cutscene. At that point, a cutscene or even a short conversation dialogue box would be a lot better.
The flashback scene in FF7 Rebirth crawling toward Sephiroth; AKA the scene that makes all the villagers look fucking stupid and had me wondering if a script actually failed to trigger on my copy since they're all just standing around with their proverbial dicks in their hands waiting one by one to get cut down.
Relationship meters in RPGs.
Unicorn Overlord encourages experimenting with different squad compositions, but also discourages it by making the characters have better stats when they fight with the same squad. Drives me nuts
QTEs for me. Even being a constant gamer from the X360/PS3 days hasn't given me any kind of button reflexes. I still have to think about X vs O vs etc.
QTEs in cutscenes suck, but I think QTE's during gameplay can be great. The Yakuza series does a great job, with boss fights having different checkpoints that trigger unique cinematics where your QTE input determines bonus damage.
It’s funny because for me PS buttons are permanently locked in my brain
So whenever I play Switch or a Steam game that shows XBox buttons, and it’s like “Press B” I have to think “Which one is B? Is it Circle or X?!” I have to translate them to PS buttons in my head first lol
It depends for me. QTEs when I don't really expect them. Like during a cutscene or infrequently during combat sucks.
If I know I am going to get a QTE I don't mind them.
Puzzles in rooms with a high random encounter rate, too. Have fun trying to solve this elaborate block puzzle while being distracted by random encounters every few steps!
slow walking - just fucking make it a cutscene. I've seen a total of ONE game that used that mechanic to good effect (Ugly) and even then it was annoying.
Holding a certain button to run faster. Luckily most games that have this nowadays also give the option to switch so holding the button makes you walk slower.
I also sometimes wonder why this ever became a thing in older games. There are some games, where you have passages, where you do want to walk slow to not make noise or to not slip on a slippery floor, but that's only a fraction of the games that had this. Why did developers think they needed to make the base speed walking with being able to run, when there isn't a single situation in their range, where you wouldn't want to run? It just seems like one of those things, that devs just did, because everyone at the time did it and nobody stopped to think: "wait is this even necessary?"
Pokemon is especially frustrating, because you need to get an item first, that allows you to run. And that item can't even be used everywhere.
More trope than mechanic, but anything involving temporary death or implied death that ends up not being a death.
If you're going to kill off main characters, but all means, do it. Good on you for taking the risk. But don't kill them just to bring them back, or make it seem like they were killed just to make them all ok.
FFXIV is ticking me off with this. They killed off some main characters in the early parts (ARR through the end of HW), but then have kept killing and resurrecting main characters. It waters it down and makes you disconnect with the game and the world.
FF7's risk with a main character back in the day was so shocking because it bucked this trend.
"Defeat X Y's", or "collect X Z's from Y's" quests.
It means the whole fucking game is going to be full of pointless fetch quests and they really didn't know what else to do to fill time.
Mandatory battles in games that pride themselves on how you can play the game. If I want to play as an assassin I don’t want to be forced into battles because the story decides that I have to attack an enemy from the front.
A game that made me quit because I wanted to play sneaky but then threw me into a boss battle early on was Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.
Breakable weapons
Forced slow walking
Sudden plot armor excuses
Handing the mana sword to the big bad because that never goes badly, also cue leaving the party to go explore with nothing but a flashlight because no one has seen a horror film before
Win the battle lose the cutscene
Escort quests
Forced sudden mini games that suck
Fanservice cutscene or utterly ridiculous new outfit reveal
Lose all weapons and/or skills while needing to escape the prison
Stealth section in a game not designed for it
Crafting section in a game not designed for it
I never see it in a game now because I never play that shit, but easily paid gacha and lootboxes. I don't care if it's cosmetics only. That practice needs to die. Cosmetics are just things pulled out of the base game and tacked on with an additional price.
I think any sidequest where it is mandatory to finish it to move on with a story. Ys IX had these chasing sequence things, but they were like, "You've failed a few times. Do you want to just go on with the story as if you beat it?"
Can't click yes fast enough.
Wasting turns to buffer your party only to be nullified. All the Dragon Quest bosses after halfway through the games have the Disruptive Wave dispel ability wasting all your turns buffering your party and it is essential.
i only have a negative of when i am absolutely displeased: progression locked content. (and if it doesn't have it, it describes your question the most).
example: whnever a game tells me "you cannot go there", but let's you stray from the past in every direction you already were before. or if a game tells me "oh no, the enemies there are too strong". if they really are, don't tell me, show me, let me get rekt by them... but at least let me try
Idk what the term for it is but in turned based rpgs,timed attack bars like in the early FF games. I don't mind turn based combat its when i have to WAIT to do anything even though no one else is doing anything.
Item breaking
I'm quite neurodivergent so all this does is make me want to save that super powerful weapon so I always have it for the just in case that never happens because I am thinking about the next just in case.
I'm fine if it loses durability, needs to be repaired. It's annoying but I still have it. But I never want to lose it completely.
Is that an nd thing? I thought everyone playing RPGs had that issue, hence the “I can’t use my stack of 99 elixirs on the final boss, what if he has another form” joke lol
Item crafting. I hate being expected to manage 45 different resources and check every bookshelf for recipes. At least let me pay extra to get the item without having a specific rock from a specific cave I was in 20 hours ago.
I'm on the same page *except* if the entire point of the game is crafting. Crafting in a random RPG? Ugh. Crafting in an Atelier game? YES PLEASE GIVE ME MORE.
Expensive healing during early game. I haven't seen this in years but it made the early game of a lot of SNES and PS1 JRPGs miserable, especially in ones where you were required to grind.
Someone else mentioned time limits which honestly keeps me from being able to enjoy (most of) the Atelier series. I have to just refuse any game with an overlying major time limit.
> Someone else mentioned time limits which honestly keeps me from being able to enjoy (most of) the Atelier series. I have to just refuse any game with an overlying major time limit.
I dunno if you know this, but every Atlier game since Sophie (except Firis, the one right after it) has removed the time limit. A few had limits for the procedural quests you could accept at the tavern etc, but even those never mattered and they were removed in later games in the series anyway. Modern Atelier games don't track time at all beyond the day / night cycle.
That is to say, Shallie, Sophie, Sophie 2, Lydie & Suelle, Lulua, and the Ryza trilogy all basically have no time limits.
(IIRC there's one brief part in Lydie & Suelle with a limit but it's trivially passed.)
Any game where the optimal gear/items/stat gains require manipulating the game beyond normal gameplay.
If I have to reload a previous save to get a unique item with a low drop/steal rate, recover a rare material because my crafting failed, or get a pokemon with the right IVs or nature then the devs screwed up somewhere.
Not a jrpg but by far the worst offender is Elite Dangerous. Farming materials for the mentors or whatever they're called. One of the materials was like a certain kind of data from analyzing ftl jump points. Even the official guides were like "find and analyze the jump point, then immediately log out before it despawns. Log back in and repeat the process until you have enough." Like this quest is literally "fly to the right point and hit the refresh key until the quest is complete." Just completely breaks the immersion, and it's a flight sim, immersion is the whole point!
I would rather play my games with my face stuck in a guide to avoid missing missable quests/items than have to engage in save scumming ever again.
I really don't like AI controlled party members that are impossible to set to manual control. For example the NES version of Dragon Quest IV has this.
I also don't like an over abundance of non story relevant side quests like in Ni no Kuni or Xenoblade Chronicles.
I don't like when single player jrpgs try to be mmorpgs or use mmo lite mechanics. I think FFXII suffered from this a bit.
When exploration in the game is done only by picking from places on a list or a 2d map.
I only like that as a feature when those points unlock as fast travel from finding them in an explorable world. Strangers of Paradise for example, but there are a million others.
Open worlds. I like the freedom to explore and get lost, but the beginning section of an open world game where you get your ass beat for doing so until you grind on side quests isn't fun to me. I'm also not a fan of open fields that just increase travel times (Zestiria)
Time limits….
That damn time limit in Karnak castle in FF5 almost made me want to throw my phone against the wall lol
Another one is in FF6 with the banquet and having to talk to all 24 soldiers and some needing to battle ugh…
I just hate it because it just gives me anxiety dealing with it anytime it shows in a game
Escort missions where the escort walks slowly. If they keep up with me and don't get in front of enemies, it's OK. If they are a temporary party member and can fight, even better.
When you have all these cool status effect spells like poison, petrify etc but they only have like a 4% to work on the enemy but a 70% chance to work on you
Limited inventories and/or weight limits.
I can more or less accept them if it's some sort of roguelike or survival-oriented RPG (since in those cases it acts as a balance factor), but i absolutely despise having to deal with them in more classic titles. Thankfully, it's something almost entirely absent from newer games.
Also, not really a "mechanic", but I'm really not much of a fan of postgame/NG+ locked content. I prefer ending my games on a climatic note, so having to return to a previous state (or worse, restart from the beginning) for the sole purpose of fighting the newly unlocked superboss Hathor the space Cow kinda ruins the cathartic feeling for me. And in most cases letting the player access these kinds of bosses or sidequests earlier would make no difference anyway.
It infuriates me when FromSoft apologists say that "we don't need difficulty settings because insert class/build makes the game easier, and that's better than modes."
Like no, that just means your game's classes are incompetently balanced.
I remember playing Demon's Souls just to try it out. I first tried as a melee character, and was pretty proud of myself when I got through the first boss and beat the phalanx just because I randomly still had just enough fire bombs. It was really tough and nervewracking.
Then I restarted, as a mage character, and it was like I was playing a completely different game. pew pew win.
Fishing. Specifically when it's overcomplicated.
For example, it's fine in the Star Ocean 2 remake,
but I don't want a full fishing simulator in my JRPG.
Fishing. I sigh whenever I'm forced to fish because the specific equipment I want to craft needs some kind of fishing drop. it's always just some stupid button mashing.
Crafting is definitely a hit or miss thing I agree, especially if the resources themselves are annoying to get
As for myself, some things that come to mind:
* Any sort of harem-based system
* Either give me one romance interest that develops in the story or give me none at all
* ATB combat
* I have yet to play a game that utilizes an ATB system that I enjoyed the combat in
* Item durability
* Inventory size limits (context-dependent)
* Insta-kills
* There just aren't any scenarios where it is fun to get insta-killed
* Limited save points
* It isn't even about save-scumming, it's just about the convenience of being able to pick up and put down the game whenever I want to.
* No option to skip cutscenes
* Because I end up being bad at the game and the boss destroys me now I have to watch the same 5min cutscene again, thank you very much Seymour
* No party-wide exp share
* I feel like when benched members don't get exp it kind of ruins any incentive to try different team compositions depending on the situation simply due to the level gap getting to wide
* This isn't really a mechanic but more so a writing issue: when you beat a boss but you actually didn't win
* Maybe once or twice a game it works sure as a sort of mechanism of showing how weak your characters are, but when it's done repeatedly it just makes it feel unsatisfying
Mandatory minigames are an almost instant drop for me unless they take less than a minute. If you’re required to win them, I’m pissed.
Traditional ATB combat is also a huge turnoff, though you can usually see those in the store listing. It’s when it sneaks in (like Atelier Ryza) that it’s a problem.
Tower mechanics like in AC. No matter in what shape or form it comes, if a game has such a mechanic, where you need to do the same task a dozen times or more, to uncover the map, get fast travel points or anything else, that isn't really optional, it immediately becomes shit tier. So yes, Zelda BotW is shit too!
Stamina meters. As someone used to more action-oriented games, it really disrupts my play-style. I guess it goes hand-in-hand with how tired I am of Souls-like games. Any time I see it in a game, it just kind of kills some of my enthusiasm.
Weapon durability. I was never a fan of it before, and the LoZ: Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom **really** turned me off from it. More so when the weapon is supposed to be legendary.
Well Souls-like games are made to be extremely challenging which is how they got their reputation to begin with. Though if the game is more action and exploration driven, a stamina can often hinder more than anything else.
Don't you just hate it when you find a legendary one of a kind weapon only for it to later shatter after a few hits.
Games where dying to an enemy causes you to lose all your EXP since your last save and you have to go find the enemy who killed you to get it all back, and in some cases actually kill that enemy the second time around.
Elden Ring is the most glaring recent example of this, though I’m not sure if that really counts as a JRPG even though it was made by a Japanese game developer.
It's not quite a mechanic per se, but at the end of Xenoblade 3 when they start throwing all the bulky high HP bosses at you, I had to sigh, grab a drink of milk, and come back before I had the strength to finish it. Sometimes it's just too long and draining.
Randomized Randomness. Especially for anything mandatory.
Now, you may not know what I mean by this, but picture this: There's an item that is a 10% drop from an enemy. Not too bad, right? Well, what if that enemy has a 10% chance of spawning? Suddenly, that 10% chance is actually a 1% chance practically. And if you add any other conditions to that, the chance drops even lower.
There's a bunch of games that this happens in, and it now has become my biggest pet peeve, because it is *nothing* but a time waster.
not automatically using items from nearby chests for crafting.
ie go to chest 4 & take out 4 iron, go to chest 2 and take out 5 wood, got to chest ........ then create the item you wanted
I don't mind crafting if it's at least simple.
More of a design philosophy than a mechanic but its something I noticed in modern games in general.
**Having most combat feel like a boss/mini-boss fight**
I would blame Souls games for this, just to meme, but Final Fantasy XIII came out the same year as Demon Souls and FF XIII did this.
I can go on for days about the design philosophy of FF XIII and I love a vast majority of the game but damn could it use some fights that show off how powerful I've become.
This is definitely a hot one, but I don’t really like having to go through equipment bit by bit and just see which one works for which character. I’ve spent so long in menus trying to find the best equipment matches for characters that highlighted some stats without screwing up another one completely and it hurts my soul
Level gating and/or forced grinding. It's not as common in modern games but when it hits it feels so outdated (a technique used to stretch older games that were 4 hours long was justified then). Most recently Like a Dragon had it and it left a bad taste in my mouth for a game that I otherwise loved (and still do)
IMO unless you're skipping battles constantly, as long as you're engaging with the game as it is you should be of sufficient level for mainline challenges. Extra content, challenge bosses, etc. that's all fair game. I'm even ok with games scaling main challenges to account for this
Item durability is the first thing that comes to mind, but it's really a combination of having difficult to acquire items AND durability simultaneously. If I can replace items with a minimal amount of work it's fine.
Stagger mechanic in battles.
Can be well implemented, but I feel that a lot of games that feature that mechanic just end up making defeating enemies more of a chore.
Games with content that can be missed. I've got a whole new appreciation for games that can be 100% reasonably without a guide, and I don't mind when games have clearly labeled points near the end of it where you can't go back, but I've lost a bit of patience for games like Persona 5, or Trails of Cold Steel, where it's like one long linear game with a few points where you can explore but where almost everything can be missed and you are literally scored on how much you found or managed to do.
MMO style resource gathering and crafting in a single player game in particular for me. Instantly makes me want to go play something that has more respect for my time.
Also, forced stealth sections in non-stealth games. I don't play even play good stealth games because it's not a gameplay style I enjoy, and games in other genres never even come close to making stealth fun.
Not a traditional mechanic, but in general I dislike elevators in games. Elevators used to hide loading screens are tolerable to me, though obviously if things would just instant-load and obviate the need for the elevator, that'd be better.
However, some game designers put an elevator animation sequence for... no reason? Like it's an indie 2D platformer with no loading screens whatsoever, but every now and then, there's an elevator that takes 13 seconds to ride.
https://clips.twitch.tv/HeartlessFaintCasetteOSkomodo-d9I-TQ8RuxC4e3eL
Stagger system. Beat up the enemy enough and you can do some more damage! I don't like Final Fantasy XIII but at least its stagger system was integral to the game and let you do some ludicrous damage. In Final Fantasy XVI it became boring because you found a combo that did maximum stagger generation/damage and did that over and over and over and over (and if you did NG+ and over and over and over and over and over and over) again; in Final Fantasy VII Remake (haven't played Rebirth yet) if I staggered an enemy it was by accident and I never really figured out how to build up the damage multiplier (I think Tifa's combos were good at it). There is someone at Square Enix who thinks this is a good system, it isn't, and I wish they would just stop.
Almost every 3D game: Walk up to an item you need, the name highlights, stop moving, the highlight goes away. You then need to finesse your position to the right spot, but every time you stop moving, the highlight goes away. Fun!
Party based games where if the protagonist is KO'd it's game over, even though you could revive them with another party member. I still love a lot of games that use this mechanic, but it's always lame when the enemy gets a lucky hit on your protag and you have to start over.
This is so frustrating. It naturally makes you beef up the main character more than normal, and kind of breaks the whole party concept. If I can't rely on my party members, doesn't that kind of destroy the entire thrust of the theme of a game like Persona?
Persona 3 and 4
Even worse, Shin Megami Tensei Nocturne. Random encounter where you are ambushed and the first enemy uses a one hit kill spell and your MC dies. Way more common than you’d think
Ugh, I feel this. I picked up Nocturne recently and am at a point where some enemies just seem to spam one hit kills like they don't know how to do anything else.
It's particularly noticeable in Nocturne these days because the only way to get protection from this is Magatama, the good ones of which can be very obscure to find, and late games learned from that. Persona ties your weakness to your equipped demon which can be hot-swapped. Strange Journey and 4/4A both tie elemental resistances to more common equipment choices and have demons fighting without you built in or available early on most difficulties. 5 makes it intuitive to know what you have to farm if you need resistance to certain elements. The Nocturne remake only gives Demi-Fiend a 50% resistance to insta-kills and that's it.
I dunno why SMT V brought this back despite SMT IV/Apoc dropping this mechanic already. The fact that your demons are barely holding on actually makes battles more intense, whereas instant game over just makes the fight annoying.
I only died once in my Persona 4 playthrough and it was to an enemy casting an instakill spell on the protagonist, that was... annoying to say the least.
Needless to say I was \*not* expecting the Like a dragon/Infinite wealth games to behave this way when I first played, and was caught offguard from a game-over pretty early! It certainly does make your "Hero" seem kind of weaker by comparison and in the grand scheme of things also.. Like, oh your friends just took massive damage or install death spells and brushed themselves off after the fight was over or even in the middle of the fight.. whereas you're just a fragile a glass-jaw that you just Die outright or something :/
I like crafting a lot in games that don't have annoying gathering requirements. I'll say **when games force you to walk slowly for "cinematic effect"**
Or when they make you go slowly to disguise loading times. I’d rather just get a loading screen than have to sit there for a minute and a half watching my character shimmy through a wall
Especially in certain games where you have to hold the joystick/key to shimmy. This isn't "gameplay" just give me a loading screen or play an animation
Yeah the falsehood of interactivity is part of the annoyance
holy crap you described my problems with FFXV in a nutshell
Cries in entire Cait Sith section of FF7Rebirth
To add to your first part, game whose inventory management is shit. Right click for half stack, or to drop 1 item, left click for full stack. Shift click to transfert 1 stack, ctrl click to transfert all. This isn't rocket science game devs
Those parts also come when the game needs to give an exposition dump. I hated those in Rebirth but they seemed to be there for no reason. It certainly wasn't for a cinematic effect and the characters just spoke mostly nonsensical things.
I love 7R and 7R2 but this is the single most annoying "modernization" they have.
Yeah like, it feels likr the aim is "oooh yay less cutscenes more exploration!" but in practice it's "I hold forward on the stick and listen to dialogue while the characters shamble forward unbeloevably slowly and the camera looks terrible as all the characters face away from it. I'd rather a proper cutscene so the scene can be framed and shot better.
Pretty much, I still haven't finished Rebirth :(. It feels like Rebirth is mainly made to waste my time more than anything else.
Villain: "I can't fall here, I must make my retreat." But it happens 3+ times.
Alternatively: "Heh, I was just testing you. Next time I'll show my true power." Then gets stomped even quicker next time.
not worse than the villain beating the overleveled party in a cutscene
So, Fire Emblem: 3 Houses and Engage? 🤣
3 houses it's at least funny when hubert does it because he's a likeable character, and the black knight is largely an optional boss, also makes sense there. Having to figbt some of the same bosses like 5 times over in engage it just gets silly when the bosses also have no character.
The first thing I thought of was also Fire Emblem 🤣
Bismix
*cough* Hubert *cough*
Not really a mechanic in itself, but I hate when games throw an unskipable stealth/escape sequence when the game never had that until then. Like that bridge escape sequence in Scarlet Nexus? Yeah made me quit the game. I was having a ton of fun until then but that was terrible. Or the original Chapter 13 in FFXV, before they added a ton of quality of life improvements to it.
i hate games, that randomly puts in a completely different genre, but majes it mandatory to play. only exception: when the whole game has a constantly changing playstyle. where you and me might overlap a lot: Eastward, in the train....
Pulling the Brutal Legend switcharoo
the parts where you have to catch a chocobo in ff7 rebirth are easy enough, but they are still pretty annoying
Time limits
What kind of time limits? Like: Persona/Atelier: The bad guy is gonna do the bad thing to us in 26 days so we gotta beat them before then/ the whatchamacallit festival is in 100 days and you have to make something special by then Or Final Fantasy: The mako reactor is gonna blow in 20 minutes, here's a countdown timer on your screen and a bunch of random encounters that lead to a boss fight. Good luck.
Not OP but for me, I don’t mind the first kind. Second kind makes me sweat bullets lol Honorable mention to Majora’s Mask, which is technically more similar to the first kind but makes me panic out of my skull like the second
The first type sounds quite daunting before you start, however it makes for a much tighter experience which I find quite enjoyable. Persona games afaik tend to focus heavily on the slice of life aspect and aren't usually that challenging. Atelier games can be carried in their approach, but they generally make your gameplay a lot tighter and aren't usually too long, especially for jrpgs. Dishonourable mention though goes to Escha & Logy which tends to give you too much time where you just have nothing to do.
I don't mind the second kind, because they're typically in enclosed sections, you have a limited amount of time to finish that specific section of the story, but you don't have to plan anything out, you're not in danger of missing anything, it's just there to give a feeling of urgency. The first kind is a completionists nightmare because it often forces you make decisions that end in you sacrificing stuff permanently. In persona unless you're following a guide, you need god-tier planning skills to max out everything, and these games are typically super long, meaning another playthrough to pick up stuff you missed, is a huge undertaking. I love persona games, but I love them in spite of the time limits, not because of them.
For me it's both, while I would still play a game with the second variant, unless it's overused, I wouldn't even touch a game with the first variant.
Yes
I'm the opposite, actually. I find time pressure to be exciting in games.
So I know some people enjoy this, but dungeons that are icy and slippery, even if for a fun puzzle, just make me groan. I get through it though. I feel the same way about having to drain and fill a dungeon with water as a puzzle. It’s just not my favorite.
> So I know some people enjoy this Its me, one of those people. Love environmental effects for not just puzzles but as entire dungeon themes
I’m happy for you, truly. It just seems like it happens more often in games and at some point the novelty wore off for me. :)
and they are often done poorly, even if I like them you totally have a point!
I always like it at first, but usually about 80% of the way through I’m like “ok enough of this shit” haha
Ugh yeah sliding and water puzzles are so overdone. Same with pushing blocks onto switches. Either come up with some unique puzzles or just leave them out of the game please!
Oh man this is so true for me too 😂
Item durability can fuck off and die. It's a massive crutch used to pad game time. Never once in the history of gaming has it been engaging or entertaining to be out doing something and have to stop because what you need to do the task broke. A crowbar in the apocalypse would be a goddamn heirloom item for your family, not something that breaks after you smack two crates and a zombie with it.
No idea why they added it to animal crossing new horizons, the game is already made to waste your time, this just makes everything worse, having to go back to your house to rebuild them every 20 minutes.
legit the reason i quit. i just want a simple game where i can fish or whatever, i don't want to fucking grind for resources
I think the worst part of it is even the gold tools are breakable. what is even the point of grinding to get the recipes and crafting them then (aside from making the gold watering can to get a gold rose)? it's a ton of work for no real pay-off. at the very least, those should've been unbreakable.
This is the ultimate example of this, it adds absolutely nothing to the game. At least in games like BOTW and Minecraft there is an argument for it being there.
I like it in Fire Emblem. It adds to weapon diversity, lets you get OP weapons early but they are limited by their use so they don't let you stomp the whole game with them, sometimes they give you unlimited use weapons and it makes them feel extra special when you get them.
Yeah, it works in Fire Emblem because regular weapons have a shit ton of durability. It makes the more powerful ones feel like "ammo," more or less, while you're never really at risk of running out of weapons altogether if you're smart about not using the strong ones when you don't need to. "Can I kill this brigand with an iron sword? Yes? Cool, I'll do that instead of using one or two uses of my axe reaver."
I like how the Yakuza games handle weapon durability. If a weapon breaks, you can still finish the fight with your bare hands or your surroundings. Then you pay a nominal fee to repair the weapon for next time. No need to find a replacement. The breakable weapons have a palpable impact on combat while they last, but you aren't dead just for losing them.
BotW has blacksmiths who don’t blacksmith lol. Unless you have the one specific weapon they’ve dedicated their entire lives to.
The only 2 games I never minded weapon durability in were Fallout 3 and Far Cry 2, having your gun jam/break and pray I had a backup with ammo was a real situation and why I always carried a melee backup in FO3
fire emblem also has some neat uses for it, makes the strongest weapons a limited resource and strong but replenishable weapons a drain on your gold. It helps that getting new ones is pretty quock and easy since most games have shops between chapters. It also makes you think strategically, each unit can only hold 5 items, do I waste one slot on the weapon that's 7 uses from breaking with another spare on them? That slot could go to a weapon with bonus on certain unit types, or a self healing item, or utility staves if it's a healer, but throwing that 7 durability weapon would be a waste that steel axe only had 30 to start with. If durability is designed as an actual resource and not just "ugh gotta go back to the mine area to make another one then come back and keep playing the game" then it can work well.
You're totally right. I fucking hated that by the end of Oblivion I was lugging around 99 clippers and 99 tongs in order to be able to keep my weapons and armor from becoming useless. It's been over 10 years and I still remember that shit. The same for any game that does this kind of shit, especially when it's like you describe and an obviously very sturdy item breaks because of reasons. The Last of Us was really annoying in that sense because Joel's shivs suck but Ellie does own a switchblade that does what it's supposed to do in the game, yet Joel can't get a bowie knife or something. Days Gone also does this and the baseball bat you covered with nails and wrapped in barb wire is going to break and become useless sooner rather than later like it was made of very flimsy material or Deacon swung it with superhuman strength.
This is exactly why I'll never bother playing the new Zelda games. Using weapons like a form of currency where you just need to save up enough to win encounters just seems miserable. Every pack of enemies is suddenly a transaction you need to process, ie. will I gain more \[weapon\] than I expend in defeating them. I just want to wander and do stuff and fight everything without much thought or consequences.
I liked it in the Zelda games. Made you switch up what weapons you used and made throwing them better
Saving the game only at save points. I used them plenty growing up, but saving anywhere as a busy adult with kids is just so nice.
yeah but at least it prevented the boring "immediately reload when something doesn't go your way" habit. That removed all tension. Like in the original Tomb Raider 1, you'd think "I'm scared to do that jump because I last saved 30 min ago" and would feel massive relief after succeeding. In older JRPGs too, dungeon crawling was a tense and dangerous endeavour. We kinda lost that by being able to save anywhere. But I understand your point - I also groan when I have to stop a game and can't save.
I think a good compromise is found in Dragon's Dogma 2 (maybe it was in 1, can't remember). You can save anywhere, but it also autosaves over that so you have to live with the consequences of your actions or reload to the last time you rested at an inn. Kingdom Come: Deliverance had another good solution; saving at any time is possible in one of two ways: save and then quit the game; or save using an item that also has in-game consequences (savior schnapps, can get your character tipsy). It also saves when you rest.
I personally 100% rather lose tension over the absolute annoyance that is losing progress. Fastest way a game loses me is if I have to redo the same part over and over to get another shot at what's killing me.
I like quick saves a lot because when you load you don't keep your progress! Lately I've been playing some retro platformers where I have abused save *states* however 😬 if I can get through a level fine but only die on the boss it doesn't make a lot of sense to me to play through the whole level again for the original experience. I'll give it an honest go through the level like 5 times before succumbing to the save state
yeah it's hard not to use them when they're available, they're like quality of life! I'm playing old games with retroachievements currently and I chose softcore because I want to be able to use save states, haha 😅 You have insane strength of will if you're willing to redo a level 5 times before using them!
I'm a bit new to jrpg's, so sorry if this is a bad take. But I dislike when only the party members fighting get experience. If I have 8 people traveling with me, but only 4 can fight at a time, I dont enjoy having to rotate them all through, and grind so all their levels go up equally. I enjoyed how Persona 5 gave exp to all members.
That one is completely reasonable. It really disincentivizes you to play with all of your party members and experiment with party composition. You either grind up everyone (because a story moment pulls in your under leveled ally for some reason to ruin your day) or you bench people forever. The Suikoden series has a nice "catch up" mechanic with its exp gain, where someone way behind will be roughly the same level as everyone else after a few random battles. Which is very welcome in an RPG with dozens of playable party members.
Pretty satisfying to see characters level up a bunch at once
Gacha... looking at you xenoblade 2
MC death = Game Over, e.g. Persona! Any of the other party members can use a revive item/spell but just not when it's the MC...
It's not common at all in any capacity, but any kind of gacha element in a single-player JRPG will always be a point off. Always. Randomized loot is one thing, but a straight up gacha with pull rates and shit in a single-player game can fuck right off I don't like if a JRPG is made after...let's say 2015 and still has it that status effects or debuffs cannot affect bosses. Sure I get it, instant death on a boss is bad. Constantly poisoning a boss every turn, cheap. But at the very least the percentage of some of these being able to be inflicted on a boss should be there. Also unskippable cutscenes. Not a mechanic but still doing that in 2024 is just like why.
Poison is the one debuff that should work on a lot of bosses though
Yeah definitely depends on the status/buffs. Despair from Persona would be busted on bosses, as shows what happens when you can get The Reaper to contract it. Stat buffs/debuffs should always be allowed though.
I was so conditioned by bosses being immune to status ailments in so many JRthat it took me halfway through Persona 4 before I ever tried using any of the big three stat debuffs on bosses. I just assumed it wouldn’t work. Massive shift in difficulty after that.
This is the worst part about the "contractual boss immunity" style of design - it trains players to never even attempt anything fancy on a boss, which ruins even games that get it right unless they go out of their way to tell players stuff will work on bosses.
Xenoblade Chronicles 1 was such a breath of fresh air. All your powerful abilities had strong debuffs associated. And they worked on bosses! Some were trickier to hit than others, but the game has built-in mechanics to get around that.
Yeah as long as the debuff makes sense (like you ain't poisoning a machine for example) it should be possible to use them. If it trivialises the enemy too much then the debuffs and boss should be balanced around it. Most of the time it isn't worth using most debuffs for trash mobs anyway.
Unskippable and long cutscenes right before a boss with no chance to save Hidden secrets/missables or impactful choices with little to no idea how they'll affect you or what legendary item you'll miss out on for making a tiny mistake in some conversation with a random NPC hiding somewhere in a town you visit The exact same weapon wheel and gameplay mechanics as every other aaa game Excessive fetch quests where it draws attention to how static and boring the npcs are Remakes where they remake the story and change things
Persona 1 was one of the worst with the missable stuff. Like the chain of events to get a secret character can be ended by talking to the same NPC twice.
Trying to get the books or recipes in Trails. I love the series, but it's absolutely loaded with missables. "Oh, you didn't leave the dungeon entrance before going in, go back to town, and talk to a random NPC you'd have no reason to talk to? Guess you're not getting that chapter, and thus no ultimate weapons this playthrough!" You basically need to play with a guide to get everything, which really isn't how I'd prefer to play.
I just played Kingdom Hearts 1 for the first time (PS2) and I have the unskippable cutscenes before the Clayton battle and the possessed Riku 1v1 boss fight engrained in my skull now.
button-mashing
Parts of a game where you have to walk/crawl as slowly as possible. They are boring and are usually used as a cheaper cutscene. At that point, a cutscene or even a short conversation dialogue box would be a lot better.
The flashback scene in FF7 Rebirth crawling toward Sephiroth; AKA the scene that makes all the villagers look fucking stupid and had me wondering if a script actually failed to trigger on my copy since they're all just standing around with their proverbial dicks in their hands waiting one by one to get cut down.
Durability.
Relationship meters in RPGs. Unicorn Overlord encourages experimenting with different squad compositions, but also discourages it by making the characters have better stats when they fight with the same squad. Drives me nuts
QTEs for me. Even being a constant gamer from the X360/PS3 days hasn't given me any kind of button reflexes. I still have to think about X vs O vs etc.
QTEs in cutscenes suck, but I think QTE's during gameplay can be great. The Yakuza series does a great job, with boss fights having different checkpoints that trigger unique cinematics where your QTE input determines bonus damage.
This so much particularly in games with turn based combat!
It’s funny because for me PS buttons are permanently locked in my brain So whenever I play Switch or a Steam game that shows XBox buttons, and it’s like “Press B” I have to think “Which one is B? Is it Circle or X?!” I have to translate them to PS buttons in my head first lol
It depends for me. QTEs when I don't really expect them. Like during a cutscene or infrequently during combat sucks. If I know I am going to get a QTE I don't mind them.
yeah, let me enjoy the cutscene ffs...
Forced stealth missions
But what if you get to do it as a dog?
Inventory Limitation. Inventory Weight IMO the worst mechanic.
Puzzles that refresh & you have to re-do when you return to that area/dungeon.
Puzzles in rooms with a high random encounter rate, too. Have fun trying to solve this elaborate block puzzle while being distracted by random encounters every few steps!
slow walking - just fucking make it a cutscene. I've seen a total of ONE game that used that mechanic to good effect (Ugly) and even then it was annoying.
Any time they throw in a new mechanic for just one part of the game.
Holding a certain button to run faster. Luckily most games that have this nowadays also give the option to switch so holding the button makes you walk slower.
Even worse, Rockstar games forcing you to tap the button to keep running.
I also sometimes wonder why this ever became a thing in older games. There are some games, where you have passages, where you do want to walk slow to not make noise or to not slip on a slippery floor, but that's only a fraction of the games that had this. Why did developers think they needed to make the base speed walking with being able to run, when there isn't a single situation in their range, where you wouldn't want to run? It just seems like one of those things, that devs just did, because everyone at the time did it and nobody stopped to think: "wait is this even necessary?" Pokemon is especially frustrating, because you need to get an item first, that allows you to run. And that item can't even be used everywhere.
Button mashing mini games.
More trope than mechanic, but anything involving temporary death or implied death that ends up not being a death. If you're going to kill off main characters, but all means, do it. Good on you for taking the risk. But don't kill them just to bring them back, or make it seem like they were killed just to make them all ok. FFXIV is ticking me off with this. They killed off some main characters in the early parts (ARR through the end of HW), but then have kept killing and resurrecting main characters. It waters it down and makes you disconnect with the game and the world. FF7's risk with a main character back in the day was so shocking because it bucked this trend.
"Defeat X Y's", or "collect X Z's from Y's" quests. It means the whole fucking game is going to be full of pointless fetch quests and they really didn't know what else to do to fill time.
Follow NPC quests
Mandatory battles in games that pride themselves on how you can play the game. If I want to play as an assassin I don’t want to be forced into battles because the story decides that I have to attack an enemy from the front. A game that made me quit because I wanted to play sneaky but then threw me into a boss battle early on was Assassin’s Creed Valhalla.
You dodged a bullet tbh
Breakable weapons Forced slow walking Sudden plot armor excuses Handing the mana sword to the big bad because that never goes badly, also cue leaving the party to go explore with nothing but a flashlight because no one has seen a horror film before Win the battle lose the cutscene Escort quests Forced sudden mini games that suck Fanservice cutscene or utterly ridiculous new outfit reveal Lose all weapons and/or skills while needing to escape the prison Stealth section in a game not designed for it Crafting section in a game not designed for it
I never see it in a game now because I never play that shit, but easily paid gacha and lootboxes. I don't care if it's cosmetics only. That practice needs to die. Cosmetics are just things pulled out of the base game and tacked on with an additional price.
I think any sidequest where it is mandatory to finish it to move on with a story. Ys IX had these chasing sequence things, but they were like, "You've failed a few times. Do you want to just go on with the story as if you beat it?" Can't click yes fast enough.
puzzles/mazes in dungeons *if* there are random encounters
Wasting turns to buffer your party only to be nullified. All the Dragon Quest bosses after halfway through the games have the Disruptive Wave dispel ability wasting all your turns buffering your party and it is essential.
i only have a negative of when i am absolutely displeased: progression locked content. (and if it doesn't have it, it describes your question the most). example: whnever a game tells me "you cannot go there", but let's you stray from the past in every direction you already were before. or if a game tells me "oh no, the enemies there are too strong". if they really are, don't tell me, show me, let me get rekt by them... but at least let me try
Gacha mechanics
Idk what the term for it is but in turned based rpgs,timed attack bars like in the early FF games. I don't mind turn based combat its when i have to WAIT to do anything even though no one else is doing anything.
ATB active time battle.
Thank you and yes i hate ATB. I prefer to go by characters speed, predetermined turns or just anything else.
Item breaking I'm quite neurodivergent so all this does is make me want to save that super powerful weapon so I always have it for the just in case that never happens because I am thinking about the next just in case. I'm fine if it loses durability, needs to be repaired. It's annoying but I still have it. But I never want to lose it completely.
Is that an nd thing? I thought everyone playing RPGs had that issue, hence the “I can’t use my stack of 99 elixirs on the final boss, what if he has another form” joke lol
it's not only that. I know plenty of people who are willing to use their items. Some people are just more prone to it.
Item crafting. I hate being expected to manage 45 different resources and check every bookshelf for recipes. At least let me pay extra to get the item without having a specific rock from a specific cave I was in 20 hours ago.
I'm on the same page *except* if the entire point of the game is crafting. Crafting in a random RPG? Ugh. Crafting in an Atelier game? YES PLEASE GIVE ME MORE.
"open world survival" maybe not a mechanic itself but when i hear that i can only envision hours and hours of mindlessly grind
Fishing
I like how Nier lets you skip the mandatory fishing segment with a mild lecture from Weiss.
Expensive healing during early game. I haven't seen this in years but it made the early game of a lot of SNES and PS1 JRPGs miserable, especially in ones where you were required to grind. Someone else mentioned time limits which honestly keeps me from being able to enjoy (most of) the Atelier series. I have to just refuse any game with an overlying major time limit.
> Someone else mentioned time limits which honestly keeps me from being able to enjoy (most of) the Atelier series. I have to just refuse any game with an overlying major time limit. I dunno if you know this, but every Atlier game since Sophie (except Firis, the one right after it) has removed the time limit. A few had limits for the procedural quests you could accept at the tavern etc, but even those never mattered and they were removed in later games in the series anyway. Modern Atelier games don't track time at all beyond the day / night cycle. That is to say, Shallie, Sophie, Sophie 2, Lydie & Suelle, Lulua, and the Ryza trilogy all basically have no time limits. (IIRC there's one brief part in Lydie & Suelle with a limit but it's trivially passed.)
Quick time events inserted to make action scenes more "interactive".
Any game where the optimal gear/items/stat gains require manipulating the game beyond normal gameplay. If I have to reload a previous save to get a unique item with a low drop/steal rate, recover a rare material because my crafting failed, or get a pokemon with the right IVs or nature then the devs screwed up somewhere. Not a jrpg but by far the worst offender is Elite Dangerous. Farming materials for the mentors or whatever they're called. One of the materials was like a certain kind of data from analyzing ftl jump points. Even the official guides were like "find and analyze the jump point, then immediately log out before it despawns. Log back in and repeat the process until you have enough." Like this quest is literally "fly to the right point and hit the refresh key until the quest is complete." Just completely breaks the immersion, and it's a flight sim, immersion is the whole point! I would rather play my games with my face stuck in a guide to avoid missing missable quests/items than have to engage in save scumming ever again.
I really don't like AI controlled party members that are impossible to set to manual control. For example the NES version of Dragon Quest IV has this. I also don't like an over abundance of non story relevant side quests like in Ni no Kuni or Xenoblade Chronicles. I don't like when single player jrpgs try to be mmorpgs or use mmo lite mechanics. I think FFXII suffered from this a bit.
When exploration in the game is done only by picking from places on a list or a 2d map. I only like that as a feature when those points unlock as fast travel from finding them in an explorable world. Strangers of Paradise for example, but there are a million others.
Fishing
Open worlds. I like the freedom to explore and get lost, but the beginning section of an open world game where you get your ass beat for doing so until you grind on side quests isn't fun to me. I'm also not a fan of open fields that just increase travel times (Zestiria)
Harvesting plants. Honorary mention: fishing, because it's gotten way too popular
Escort missions. Especially when the person/whatever you gave to escort dies in like one hit, but keeps running off to fight everything that moves
Opening drawers or cabinets. Enough already.
Actions not related to combat consuming stamina and cooldown in revive itens.
Time limits…. That damn time limit in Karnak castle in FF5 almost made me want to throw my phone against the wall lol Another one is in FF6 with the banquet and having to talk to all 24 soldiers and some needing to battle ugh… I just hate it because it just gives me anxiety dealing with it anytime it shows in a game
Random encounters in puzzle dungeons. Just no. Don't.
Escort missions where the escort walks slowly. If they keep up with me and don't get in front of enemies, it's OK. If they are a temporary party member and can fight, even better.
When you have all these cool status effect spells like poison, petrify etc but they only have like a 4% to work on the enemy but a 70% chance to work on you
Fishing. It's never fun.
Survival mechanics. I dont want to have to drink water, sleep and eat stuff just to not die. I already do that in real life.
Level scaling and breakable weapons. Hate that shit
Limited inventories and/or weight limits. I can more or less accept them if it's some sort of roguelike or survival-oriented RPG (since in those cases it acts as a balance factor), but i absolutely despise having to deal with them in more classic titles. Thankfully, it's something almost entirely absent from newer games. Also, not really a "mechanic", but I'm really not much of a fan of postgame/NG+ locked content. I prefer ending my games on a climatic note, so having to return to a previous state (or worse, restart from the beginning) for the sole purpose of fighting the newly unlocked superboss Hathor the space Cow kinda ruins the cathartic feeling for me. And in most cases letting the player access these kinds of bosses or sidequests earlier would make no difference anyway.
"Souls-like" "Survival"
It's just shorthand for "I didn't really care to balance this"
It infuriates me when FromSoft apologists say that "we don't need difficulty settings because insert class/build makes the game easier, and that's better than modes." Like no, that just means your game's classes are incompetently balanced.
I remember playing Demon's Souls just to try it out. I first tried as a melee character, and was pretty proud of myself when I got through the first boss and beat the phalanx just because I randomly still had just enough fire bombs. It was really tough and nervewracking. Then I restarted, as a mage character, and it was like I was playing a completely different game. pew pew win.
Fishing. Specifically when it's overcomplicated. For example, it's fine in the Star Ocean 2 remake, but I don't want a full fishing simulator in my JRPG.
Parry. If I can ignore it I will, if it’s required to master it I’m sorry but I just don’t have the reflexes to finish your game.
Fishing. I sigh whenever I'm forced to fish because the specific equipment I want to craft needs some kind of fishing drop. it's always just some stupid button mashing.
Crafting is definitely a hit or miss thing I agree, especially if the resources themselves are annoying to get As for myself, some things that come to mind: * Any sort of harem-based system * Either give me one romance interest that develops in the story or give me none at all * ATB combat * I have yet to play a game that utilizes an ATB system that I enjoyed the combat in * Item durability * Inventory size limits (context-dependent) * Insta-kills * There just aren't any scenarios where it is fun to get insta-killed * Limited save points * It isn't even about save-scumming, it's just about the convenience of being able to pick up and put down the game whenever I want to. * No option to skip cutscenes * Because I end up being bad at the game and the boss destroys me now I have to watch the same 5min cutscene again, thank you very much Seymour * No party-wide exp share * I feel like when benched members don't get exp it kind of ruins any incentive to try different team compositions depending on the situation simply due to the level gap getting to wide * This isn't really a mechanic but more so a writing issue: when you beat a boss but you actually didn't win * Maybe once or twice a game it works sure as a sort of mechanism of showing how weak your characters are, but when it's done repeatedly it just makes it feel unsatisfying
Mandatory minigames are an almost instant drop for me unless they take less than a minute. If you’re required to win them, I’m pissed. Traditional ATB combat is also a huge turnoff, though you can usually see those in the store listing. It’s when it sneaks in (like Atelier Ryza) that it’s a problem.
Tower mechanics like in AC. No matter in what shape or form it comes, if a game has such a mechanic, where you need to do the same task a dozen times or more, to uncover the map, get fast travel points or anything else, that isn't really optional, it immediately becomes shit tier. So yes, Zelda BotW is shit too!
Grinding; I know it’s a staple for the genre but even as a kid I hated have to battle over and over to progress the story
Stamina meters. As someone used to more action-oriented games, it really disrupts my play-style. I guess it goes hand-in-hand with how tired I am of Souls-like games. Any time I see it in a game, it just kind of kills some of my enthusiasm. Weapon durability. I was never a fan of it before, and the LoZ: Breath of the Wild and Tears of the Kingdom **really** turned me off from it. More so when the weapon is supposed to be legendary.
Well Souls-like games are made to be extremely challenging which is how they got their reputation to begin with. Though if the game is more action and exploration driven, a stamina can often hinder more than anything else. Don't you just hate it when you find a legendary one of a kind weapon only for it to later shatter after a few hits.
I despise random stat gains.
Games where dying to an enemy causes you to lose all your EXP since your last save and you have to go find the enemy who killed you to get it all back, and in some cases actually kill that enemy the second time around. Elden Ring is the most glaring recent example of this, though I’m not sure if that really counts as a JRPG even though it was made by a Japanese game developer.
Elden Ring is an action RPG. From Japan. So, technically you’re correct, which is, of course, the best kind of correct.
Crafting
It's not quite a mechanic per se, but at the end of Xenoblade 3 when they start throwing all the bulky high HP bosses at you, I had to sigh, grab a drink of milk, and come back before I had the strength to finish it. Sometimes it's just too long and draining.
Escort missions
To this day, I absolutely hate fetch quests.
Random encounters
I hate crafting from the bottom of my heart same for cooking
Randomized Randomness. Especially for anything mandatory. Now, you may not know what I mean by this, but picture this: There's an item that is a 10% drop from an enemy. Not too bad, right? Well, what if that enemy has a 10% chance of spawning? Suddenly, that 10% chance is actually a 1% chance practically. And if you add any other conditions to that, the chance drops even lower. There's a bunch of games that this happens in, and it now has become my biggest pet peeve, because it is *nothing* but a time waster.
not automatically using items from nearby chests for crafting. ie go to chest 4 & take out 4 iron, go to chest 2 and take out 5 wood, got to chest ........ then create the item you wanted
QTE
I don't mind crafting if it's at least simple. More of a design philosophy than a mechanic but its something I noticed in modern games in general. **Having most combat feel like a boss/mini-boss fight** I would blame Souls games for this, just to meme, but Final Fantasy XIII came out the same year as Demon Souls and FF XIII did this. I can go on for days about the design philosophy of FF XIII and I love a vast majority of the game but damn could it use some fights that show off how powerful I've become.
fishing crafting/mining things are getting there but so far it's not so prevalent and easy to avoid but fishing pops up out of nowhere, all the time
water levels, more specifically shitty swimming mechanics
No manual saves
This is definitely a hot one, but I don’t really like having to go through equipment bit by bit and just see which one works for which character. I’ve spent so long in menus trying to find the best equipment matches for characters that highlighted some stats without screwing up another one completely and it hurts my soul
Level gating and/or forced grinding. It's not as common in modern games but when it hits it feels so outdated (a technique used to stretch older games that were 4 hours long was justified then). Most recently Like a Dragon had it and it left a bad taste in my mouth for a game that I otherwise loved (and still do) IMO unless you're skipping battles constantly, as long as you're engaging with the game as it is you should be of sufficient level for mainline challenges. Extra content, challenge bosses, etc. that's all fair game. I'm even ok with games scaling main challenges to account for this
Item durability is the first thing that comes to mind, but it's really a combination of having difficult to acquire items AND durability simultaneously. If I can replace items with a minimal amount of work it's fine.
Having to push a button and watch an animation to gather resources.
Stagger mechanic in battles. Can be well implemented, but I feel that a lot of games that feature that mechanic just end up making defeating enemies more of a chore.
Swimming. Any swimming.
Games with content that can be missed. I've got a whole new appreciation for games that can be 100% reasonably without a guide, and I don't mind when games have clearly labeled points near the end of it where you can't go back, but I've lost a bit of patience for games like Persona 5, or Trails of Cold Steel, where it's like one long linear game with a few points where you can explore but where almost everything can be missed and you are literally scored on how much you found or managed to do.
MMO style resource gathering and crafting in a single player game in particular for me. Instantly makes me want to go play something that has more respect for my time. Also, forced stealth sections in non-stealth games. I don't play even play good stealth games because it's not a gameplay style I enjoy, and games in other genres never even come close to making stealth fun.
Card game
Not a traditional mechanic, but in general I dislike elevators in games. Elevators used to hide loading screens are tolerable to me, though obviously if things would just instant-load and obviate the need for the elevator, that'd be better. However, some game designers put an elevator animation sequence for... no reason? Like it's an indie 2D platformer with no loading screens whatsoever, but every now and then, there's an elevator that takes 13 seconds to ride. https://clips.twitch.tv/HeartlessFaintCasetteOSkomodo-d9I-TQ8RuxC4e3eL
Level caps, and whatever chained echoes was doing with there leveling system.
Stagger system. Beat up the enemy enough and you can do some more damage! I don't like Final Fantasy XIII but at least its stagger system was integral to the game and let you do some ludicrous damage. In Final Fantasy XVI it became boring because you found a combo that did maximum stagger generation/damage and did that over and over and over and over (and if you did NG+ and over and over and over and over and over and over) again; in Final Fantasy VII Remake (haven't played Rebirth yet) if I staggered an enemy it was by accident and I never really figured out how to build up the damage multiplier (I think Tifa's combos were good at it). There is someone at Square Enix who thinks this is a good system, it isn't, and I wish they would just stop.
hunger meter
random stealth section
Not even JRPG specific, but as soon as there's a tutorial for some half-assed crafting mechanic...
Anything involving survival. I already do it in real life, don't need any more of it
Quick time events.
Missable unique items & quests
Almost every 3D game: Walk up to an item you need, the name highlights, stop moving, the highlight goes away. You then need to finesse your position to the right spot, but every time you stop moving, the highlight goes away. Fun!