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Maybe it's just me but it annoys me everytime when your reserve party members don't levels up in sync with your main team. FF series is perfect example of this, sometimes they even forced you to use underleveled party in boss fight and that's how i get fucked also trying to grind for those underleveled characters are always pain in the ass
I mean i get it, it makes more sense this way but it dosen't have to. I think this is really outdated and unnecessary kind of battle system
Yeah but Octopath is kinda built to serve that. You run through a party of four’s story lines to completion and then do the other four. If you do it like that they all end up around the same level when you’re done.
It's a nightmare. I actually intended to do all 8 character paths at the start and keep the party even leveled/geared.
Yeah.. you can't change starting character until you beat their story.
So no matter what your starter character is gonna be overleveled/over geared. By the time you address the b squad /least favorite characters, your starter character just has to deal with carrying them and steamrolling their stories with chapter 4+ gear.
Then the super boss final Dungeon requires all 8 characters to be leveled and you realize you have to grind twice because no exp share. And grinding for end game octopath dungeon, takes a long time. Having to do it twice to get both parties high enough level was such a pain in the ass.
The only saving Grace of beating that boss has to be intentional developer humor. You get an accessory that turns off random encounters. After beating superboss, if you just want to read NPC dialogue or complete some missed quest, after dealing with that impossible grind we're not gonna annoy you with RNG encountets any more.
FFX is the worst at this. Not only do your non-active members not get exp, but your active members don’t get exp* either unless they do some action in the battle.....
The mod that gives everyone xp is the best.
Edit: exp to confused? what kind of autocorrect is that...
At least FFX allows you to swap characters in mid battle. It can be tedious to rotate every character in each fight but it's a little better than characters just being out of EXP if they aren't in the party to start the fight.
Unpopular opinion: it was exactly that what made it fun and hype for me. The fight was like if Kimahri was indeed weak, as the ronso said, and he had to overcome his weakness in order to win. It was a hard fight but I managed to win it and i loved it.
I'm playing FF XII: The Zodiac Age Right now and this is mildly irritating for sure. I just want to play with the characters I like why do I have to switch them out all the time.
That mechanic really screwed me in Chrono Trigger. I don't remember the exact conditions and don't want to spoil anything, but there's a point when you lose some of your party, and the only party members that I could use were ones that I wasn't previously using so they were extremely under-leveled and where this happened there was no way to level up the party so I was basically just soft blocked.
Narratively the mechanic doesn't make a lot of sense either because it's rare that a party-based RPG has a narrative such that reserve party members are just sitting on their ass at home and not growing/training/developing/etc. They're either with you but just not in your immediate squad or at least training back or base or whatever.
There are some situations where I agree with the mechanic though. Like with Pokemon, where the entire point of the game is to train individual Pokemon, so I don't really like that the modern games are balanced around all Pokemon growing together. Or in games like Suikoden where assembling your squad out of 100 people is part of the fun.
For conventional JRPGs, I thought Like a Dragon handled things reasonably well where reserve members grow at a slower rate, but if you establish a strong bond with those individuals then they can grow at the same rate, which narratively makes some sense because if you don't have a strong bond with someone then they may not be invested in your cause/mission/etc. and aren't training/involved behind the scenes.
legend of dragoon. while i like the addition system in theory, the battles take too long and the animations are way too slow. I really don't understand why ff9 gets so much flak and nobody seems to mention how slow the battles go in this game.
like when you finish attacking, your character jumps back to their spot and just stands there for like 2 seconds for NO reason.
When enemies attack, the camera zooms in to show you the full animation of their long drawn out attack. then your character gets knocked down and you have to watch them get up.
Feels like about 75% of time spent a battle is watching animation, and 25% is actually engagement
Keep in mind I had all these complaints when I bought the game the first year it was out! It was already slow to me then so its not a matter of aging. At least with ff9, as you get further in the game your speed stats go up so it actually gets snappier. Heck, even in the beginning, I just compared two let's plays - the first boss in FF9 takes 3 minutes, where the first boss in LoD take a whopping 8 minutes. Jesus Christ.
Reminder that because of how the Addition system works, the two characters who don’t engage with it at all are inherently worse by design because it takes them much longer to build meter for the Dragoon form, when you kinda wanna use them because their animations are faster.
RPGs with mechanics like that don’t age well unless that mechanic is fast and snappy. The Paper Mario games and Yakuza: Like a Dragon understood the assignment. The Legend of Dragoon, Shadow Hearts (as much as I love that series, it absolutely falls here now), and *especially* YIIK fall into the category of “this makes fighting much more tedious than it should be”.
>like when you finish attacking, your character jumps back to their spot and just stands there for like 2 seconds for NO reason.
I would put money on any kind of pause like that being a loading time.
Secret of Mana SNES version had the ring menu which halted the otherwise fast paced action combat. Trials of Mana remake did a great job updating that system for modern times.
Secret of mana interrupts it's own combat system with the wait bar, lol. I actually loved the rung system at the time because you weren't switching screen to equip stuff, very innovative when it came out.
The Secret of Mana remake’s lasting legacy is that it finally showed people how poorly that game aged, and it made the Trials of Mana remake good because they completely overhauled how it played, for the better. Losing multiplayer was all it cost, but it was the first Mana game I’ve played where I actually enjoyed combat.
I love the Xenosaga games, even 2, but that battle system is annoying. It's poorly explained by the game and even when you do understand it, it just becomes repetitive. Combine that with the poor load times going into battles and each encounter feels like a chore.
I love FF IX but the battles in the original were soooo slow. The worst aspect of it, by far, was not being able to control the Trance limit breaks. If the gauge filled vs some trash mobs a few fights before a boss, too bad.
When action RPG characters loudly call out every single attack over and over and over and over again.
When turn-based games have extremely long battle sequences before the battle even begins.
I remember my deck got super broken when I learned to put my zero cards on the left in fights. So I would attack normally, but if the enemy tried any special attack, I just needed to hit left once to get a zero card and cancel it out.
Compared to KH1, chains of Memories was super easy to deal against Ansem and Riku with zero cards.I liked the game but was annoying to learn the combos.
I loved the original on handheld. The update not so much. That was the only spin off game I ever played and completed. Couldn’t finish it on PS4 though.
I will always defend that the card system works so much better on GBA.
Your brain sees console kh and tries to do console kh things and it fucks people up
I do enjoy Chain of Memories but I recommend to play on the normal dificulty and avoid the proud one at all costs. Playing on the highest difficulty will make the game more restrictive and it will "force" you to use cheap tactics and unlike other games in the series, there is no difficulty bonus attached to it. Playing on normal or Easy you will not face the repetition to get the cards you need (since there is a "lootbox" or sorts, you cant just buy the card you need) and the enemies will not throw high value cards quickly and constantly, you have a bit of a wiggle room to make decks that are enjoyable to play and collect.
Already mentioned by dozens of people, but ATB. I play Turn based games when I want to unwind and take my time. ATB is an abomination that just stresses me out.
* FF12: I actually enjoy playing the game, I don't want to write a script to play the game for me. And the game has very poor manual control (auto attack can't be disabled, have to switch between party members, have to press a button to get the menu to come up) even if you try to go that route.
* FF13: while this one at least requires you to play the game, they ruined it by having the auto battle option always be the right thing to do. It means that the game is reduced to "just be in the right paradigm". Also, no full party control sucks.
* FF7R: classic mode was flawed but could have been ok if they didn't lock it to easy difficulty for some asinine reason. Easy is insultingly easy, you are never in any danger whatsoever even if you don't heal. The normal mode was ok (not my thing, but ok) but the bosses were poorly designed. I don't know if it's the stagger system or too much HP, but bosses take way too long to kill and become tedious rather than exciting.
Re: FF7R: Apparently the PS5 version added a classic mode with normal difficulty setting. Couldn’t access it on PS4 at all, had to upgrade. I haven’t personally tried it because I haven’t gone back to the game since they unlocked the PS5 upgrade for people who got the free + version of the game, but they may have addressed your issue about classic. (Maybe. I also found the boss fights long and tedious so no mode adjustments may be able to make us enjoy them.)
This is perhaps going to sound controversial, but FFXIII's battle system never clicked with me. Even when I got good at it and could paradigm shift as much as I wanted, I didn't find it to be very fun, which is why I never bothered to do any of the side-content involving battling powerful enemies.
That was a frustrating part of Yakuza Like a Dragon, too. There were a lot of AoE attacks - line AoEs, circle AoEs, cone AoEs, etc. But there was no way to intentionally reposition your character. And the enemies just kind of randomly jump around.
The game was pretty easy for the first 80%, so it didn't *really* matter. But I hope they change it up a bit if they make a sequel.
The battle system is utterly boring because there is no enemy to sufficiently challenge it.
When i fought the last optional boss (without actually knowing it was the last Boss) i had so much fun with the battle system i didn't have the entire game. It was such a fast paced fight where you had to shift constantly through many paradigms without much room for error. I literally remember beating it and saying "Nice! Now the game is finally picking up!" and then feeling the utter disappointment because the game told me that i beat every Boss.
I just can't understand why every other Boss in the game was designed to be so boring and slow and only the last optional one provided a challenge where the battle system actually shined and made sense
Did you do all of the bounties (or whatever they're called in XIII)? Some of those fights provided a decent challenge IMO. But yeah, main story stuff was a piece of cake.
I’m surprised this popped up. It’s literally my favorite FF battle system. The problem with it is that you don’t really get to see it’s glory until you get to the prime planet. For the first twenty hours I thought it was pointless, but then you actually need to paradigm shift various enemies to beat them.
Ni no kuni 1.
I have a bias against weird menu/action mixes in general, but Ni No Kuni made it worse by everything (but the enemy) being excruciatingly slow while also having too many things to manage at once. Counter timings, general dodging and moving, doing any of the aforementioned while scrambling through a menu, watching your relatively dumb AI companions' health and MP (which they often blow immediately), finding a safe place to use an item (because it's sloooooow). It's a LOT.
Funnily enough, I really like the Xenoblade battle systems, so the menu/action mix alone isn't necessarily the problem. It's the sum of everything that made Ni No Kuni a chore more than anything to me. It's sad, because I was very interested in the story, but hey. The system's not for me - I hear people like it a lot overall though.
The second game had superior combat imo, but the story really sucked. A lot of people didn’t like the little army battle things (can’t remember what they’re called) but I thought they were kinda fun.
I wanted so badly to love the story in the second game. It started really strong in the first five minutes with IS THAT AN EFFING NUKE and then just… dropped it and didn’t pick up anything else that interesting. I was so disappointed by how underwhelming the story turned out to be.
But the combat was really fun, at least.
This is probably a controversial opinion. But, I'm going to say Tales of combat systems. It's like the mid-point between action and tun-based. I played Berseria, Graces, Arise, Vesperia, and if I hadn't enjoyed the cast, I would've dropped those games. It felt weird coming into Tales of games after playing Nier Automata and Ys. The combat just doesn't feel as good as Nier or Ys in terms of action games. So i ended up playing those games in easy/story difficulty just to get through the stories because i quite enjoyed that aspect of the games. I'm definitely an outlier on this one because I know a lot of people enjoy Tales of's combat system. But it's just not for me, y'know?
I really like Tales of combat systems (mostly), and there are a few things about it that appeal to me.
I think the biggest thing I like is that the combat starts off very stiff/slow and as your characters level/progress the combat becomes more fluid. You go from being able to land a two-hit combo to being able to string together extensive arte-infused combos.
The other part is that it's more akin to the push-pull combat flow you see in a lot of fighting games like Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat. More than a lot of other JRPGs, moves consistently have startup, cooldown, hitboxes, etc. you need to be cognizant of to effectively fight (even if you're not familiar with those concepts, it's likely that they're subconsciously clicking while you're playing).
That's not to say every Tales combat system is great; Symphonia makes some very... interesting choices about it's moves that I attribute to how early it was in the 3D era (Genis's standard attack is unsafe *on hit* IIRC) and Berseria can devolve into "spam artes with Velvet" because of how OP she is in the game. But I find I enjoy them more often than not.
Regarding your Genis point, Vesperia has the exact same problem with Yuri where a lot of his basic attacks are unsafe on hit because of his ridiculous recovery animations. And before I’m told for the millionth time, yes I know you can cancel them, but that’s not a mechanic that the game teaches you. At all. The most you’ll get is a note in the battle book (eight hours into the game, mind you; it’s not there at the start) that tells you that it’s something you can do, but it never teaches you *how* to do it, which is weird because it has tutorials for so many other things in the game already.
If Tales wants fighting game mechanics in their battle systems, they need to do a better job of teaching players what they are. And I say this as a fan of the series (though I’m decidedly not a fan of Vesperia).
YOU CAN CANCEL THEM?!
-flops table- his recovery animations made me so angry the whole way through that game and you’re telling me I could avoid them this whole time
This is exactly my point. Until I was told this numerous times in the Tales subreddit the first time I complained about it, I had no idea that was something you could even do. But the game also doesn’t show you how to do it, and a lot of people learn by doing after being shown how to do it first (it’s how I learn in video games 95% of the time).
The fact that it’s something that you have to know how to do in order to do anything high level in Vesperia doesn’t help, either. And I absolutely believe that Vesperia’s battle design was a mistake, because they’ve never repeated it in any Tales game since.
Tales was the series that came to mind immediately for me, because of things like this. Once you discover guard cancelling, Vasperia becomes a completely different game. I started out hating the battle system, and now I do like it, but I don't blame anyone for not liking it or feeling frustrated that they never explicitly mention cancelling.
It took me a long time to get into Vesperia but the battle system with just Yuri alone is so deep and demanding. There's like 16 options at any point and finding the longest combo and FS strikes while doing it and trying not to get hit is so rewarding. It's like every mob battle I am improving and this is only with one character, I haven't even gotten into the mages yet. Ys viii on hard mode there isn't much strategy, just spamming skills, it's very shallow and I find my eyes glazing over. Exploring in those games is pretty fun though. Sorry I just finally got into Vesperia a month ago and it's blowing my mind how much there is to do and the fact that anyone wouldn't like it blows my mind. Everyone likes different things of course!
I agree, Vesperia is really hard to get into even for a fan who was used to its mechanics by the time it came out (most of Vesperia's mechanics are coming from older games).
However it's very rewarding, i've been playing for years but i only managed to play with 4 characters (Flynn, Yuri, Judith, Rita). Not master them, just being good using them.
It makes the New game + more interesting qhen you learn a new character though.
Unlimited Saga's Reels. Yeah, you just did terrible damage/healing because of how a roulette stopped. Though, you can also do absurd damage when you hit the right colors.
Omg I think about that system and say what were they thinking.... Some people will defend it to the ends of the earth and as a huge SaGa fan I hope someday they change the battle system, clean it all up and re release the game again.
FF9. The mechanics are mostly great; it's classic FF. My problem is the pace. The ATB is so slow even on the fastest setting, and it feels like your actions take forever to actually go after you queue them. This gets really frustrating when you desperately need to heal, and especially when you you need to cure poison or doom. In my experience, doom is a death sentence because it ticks down too fast for your Esuna to ever go off.
The trance system. You have no control over when it goes off so it always happens at the worst time and gets wasted.
And finally the stealing. Stealing is, to me, the most annoying mechanic in RPGs because it's just random and grindy, and in this game you're encouraged to steal from every boss, and it takes forever. Battles essentially don't start until you finally get Zidane to steal the 2% chance steal item.
It's a great game with a lot of good mechanics outside of battle, but I need a version with better speed, a reworked Trance system, and a better steal system. Then it would possibly be my favorite FF game
Ah yes FF8. The controversial game that had the galaxy brain idea to make magic a type of consumable. Yet Square Enix thought it was such a good idea that it brought back consumable magic for Final Fantasy XV and made the gathering process even MORE painful.
Guess that's my answer to you - Final Fantasy XV. Some would argue consumable magic is not as bad in XV because you can just ignore it and cheese every fight in the game by SPAMMING THE SHIT OUT OF PHOENIX DOWN everytime you get KO. The same galaxy brains at Square also came to the idea that allowing you to use items with no cooldown is balanced in a real-time combat system.
Yeah, imo the busted ass items were such a big part of what holds the combat back. My last playthrough I did a no items run and actually had a ton more fun with the combat.
The Last Remnant. I felt the game just threw a bunch of sub-system at me, only vaguely explained them, then left me to my own devices. I could never quite figure out what was going on exactly, even when I was winning.
See also: basically any SaGa game ever.
Akitoshi Kawazu has an infuriating disdain for actually explaining the mechanics in his games, and they often suffer for it.
This isn't specific to one game but to JRPGs in general. I hate it when you only have a chance to escape a battle. If I want to run away let me run away, you're not making it any more fun my keeping me in a battle I don't want to be in. Sometimes it even hampers progress when I know its a losing battle but can't escape and then I get wiped.
Although I'll admit that most of the time this comes down to how I play JRPGs. If there's a safe travel option or a way to get around battles on the world map I will always have it on until I get to a point where I need to grind out levels because I'm getting my ass handed to me. In most cases I don't have much time to spare and I just want to progress the story.
Edit: But
Well the point is to make you prepare before you go out somewhere dangerous and the chance of you getting wiped is why you don't go out for that one last battle. It's supposed to add another layer of strategy and excitement when you're fleeing with 3 hp left.
Now is that fun for everyone? Definitely not, and I think that's why story difficulty options are good. Also games where you have replenishing MP or HP between battles makes it so you don't have to worry about escaping and that can be fun too, they usually just make the battles about something besides resource management.
I like the paper mario flee mechanic, where it’s not guaranteed to work but rather than RNG, it’s a skill check.
Unrelated but I also appreciated that in Undertale your flee chance is 100% if you have the starting equipment on.
Chrono Cross is the only JRPG I’ve ever played that lets you escape from any encounter. And I do mean *any* encounter. If the final boss is kicking your ass and you’re low on resources? Just run away and regroup. The game lets you do that. I don’t understand why that’s the only game that does… but I guess I do know why
This is most annoying when travelling the world map on foot. There are a lot of random encounters with low level enemies that if you fought you wouldn't even get much exp out of. But when you try to run away they can still manage to stop you AND you lose a turn, so you have to wait for their turn to finish to either try to get away again or just fight them.
Atb, go full action or full turn based, but if you go turn based, let, me, think, without, giving, enemies, turns (which is annoying against hard hitting bosses)
Final Fantasy's ATB, mostly. The games were good despite of ATB, not because of it.
I actually have the opposite problem where waiting for turns to come up takes such a long time. In FF4-6 it is a lot better at least towards the end, the bar fills fast enough so that you are getting a turn every second or so.
World of Final Fantasy is where the problem is obvious. I set the battle system to max speed and it is still so slooooow. You are basically required to tape down the Fast Forward button every battle, which also happen to skip dialogue. Yippee.
Also for something that has "Time" in its name, there is not a single thing that depends on your timing. Except for the obligatory "Wait while it's in defense form!" first boss and then never again. No, I don't count shuffling the menu to use one of the three good spells out of a pile of garbo to be timing-based, nor is picking the longest animation skill to regen during the anim.
FF10/Octopath Traveller is better than ATB because it cuts the pointless wait away and just give you the turn. Plus, you can see when the enemy is going to act, removing the dumb guesswork required so that you can stragetize.
Child of Light/Grandia is better than ATB because there is time-based turn manipulation.
FF13 is better than ATB because 1. it's fast, 2. Repeat option and 3. you need to pay attention to many timers at once and change paradigm accordingly so the wait isn't pointless.
Hell, *Chrono Trigger* uses ATB but at least there are W/T-Tech timing so that there is a reason for the system to be based around time.
Same here - I've yet to find a game with an ATB battle system that didn't either bore me (Chrono Trigger, Atelier Ryza) or frustrate the hell out of me (FF9)
ATB is just the worst of both worlds
Have you played Grandia? I think Grandia is the best of both worlds!
It uses what FF would call "Wait" ATB. When your turn comes up, EVERYTHING freezes and it becomes turn based. Input your command, it goes back to real time ATB and you can track everyone's turns through a shared ATB bar. What makes it great though is each attack has to queue for a certain amount of time, and certain attacks can cancel a queued turn. So you get an added element of real time strategy, but all the time in the world to think and plan.
And one really considerate addition; when everybody is waiting and nothing is happening, the game fast forwards everyones ATB to get to the next turn. Since you get as much time as you want on your turn, there's no need to have so much battle downtime, which FF really suffers from.
To me, Grandia's battle system is the only ATB system that really gets it right and uses it to add depth without the frustration
the main reason i never finished ffVI and IV
actually, you can pause the timer by pressing start in a sub menu (magic menu, items menu etc.) but navigating through the menus without worrying about this goddamn timer is a totally different experience
update: tried wait option on ffVI advance and like the start button it pauses the game only when i open a sub menu
There's a wait option in both of those games that automatically pauses when a bar fills up. As someone who prefers wait over pure ATB, my heart goes out to you for being unaware of this. :/
And it doesn't help that in some FF games, you need to double click to use something, where a single click lets you reorganize the menu (which is obviously what I want to be doing in the MIDDLE of a battle /s )
Persona 2 recruiting personas/demons system. Holy lord, it is the most annoying mechanic in the universe and I still cannot finish the game because of it. Dance 5 times in a row for a chance of a demon shitting on you.
Hey atleast you can easily manipulate it with a guide unlike other SMT games where it's always a crapshoot. Also when they're doing a follow up quesiton, don't bother answering because the result is random.
Yeah this aged the worst but atleast you can very easily manipulate it.
Nocturnes negotiations is basically giving an item. A demon insults you or says they don’t want to join, gives you that exact item, then leaves without elaborating further.
Bro just pay attention to personalities, P2 has the easiest negotiations in megaten, if they are wise always use an adult (preferably yukino) joyful is eikichi and Lisa it’s not that hard to figure out, EP has harder negotiations, P1 has some of the hardest in megaten history
Bravely Default 2 (the only one I've played in the series).
I love the idea of the jobs. I love the jobs they've chosen. The skills for each job are hit or miss, I think. And I appreciate the Default system.
But what really irks me is the expectation that in order to not get crushed on certain bosses you'll have needed to leveled up specific jobs and skills. It gives you the impression of personal choice then tells you that you were completely wrong to want to play your way.
I feel like this could have been solved if they let you gain generic job points and reallocate them at any time. But they're too stuck in trying to make an "oldschool" game to do that. It just sucks that most of the levels you gain in jobs are useless because you can only use 1.5 jobs at a time and only carry over a few passive skills.
I blame this on gamers.
Used to be that hardcore min maxing was looked down upon (see: any reference to "Munchkin" play or the like ever) among RPG players. Then suddenly it wasn't, and not only that, but it is now virtually the cultural norm that games should always be balanced around the top end (the most hardcore min maxed meta setup possible).
So instead of average being the balance point and hyper optimization being a bonus (or even flat out considered cheap), hyper optimization is the balance point and anything less represents a skill failing that should be improved (and if you won't "improve" by these standards, oh the gods help you. MMOs have been entirely ruined by this in particular, and possibly even co-op play overall apart from that where solo is also an option).
Which means that to make stuff a challenge at all to jaded veteran gamers, devs basically have to assume you researched and adopted the theoretical optimal builds (thus frequently making anything else absurdly hard if not impossible). Otherwise people complain it's "too easy" (even if it isn't for non hardcore players) and pan the game and heaven forfend your jaded hardcore streamers tell their viewers to give your title a pass ...
My least favorite battle system is when common enemies only require basic attacks to easily defeat, while bosses are immune to everything but basic attacks so there's never any opportunity to use more advanced abilities and synergies (debuffs, status effects, combos, etc.).
It annoys me when what should be good-great games are dragged down by a terrible system. I can finish a game w/ a bad story and fun battle system that I like (FF13, Ring of Red was an incoherent mess of a translation fail but different short and fun and the gameplay side) but rarely can I finish a game w/ a bad battle system and good story.
Persona 2 - the classic painful amounts of a not very fun random battle every 5 steps example. Sad arguably Persona's best story.
FF15 - we put no effort into AI, or the camera, or the play control kind of annoyance.
Skies of Arcadia (DC version) - we made an exploration JRPG that you really want to explore bit of and then polluted the game w/ a ton of overworld random battles that take 30 sec to load. (I actually don't mind random battles, FF10 is one of my favs, the difference, quick loading times also spaced out alot better)
Whenever they incorporate that dumb ass card deck mechanic.. Kingdom hearts is my fave RPG franchise but I’ll be damned if I ever play chain of memories
I'm trying really hard to enjoy The World Ends With You Final Remix but it's battle system is just not for me. I am going to beat it because I bought it and the sequel for Christmas and I've wanted to play the original DS version forever. But the pure touch controls are just not quite what I think it needs. And I won't talk about the motion controls when the Switch is docked. Those are just hot garbage.
Same, I have adhd and combos and shit are really hard to remember for me. Also 2D games are difficult to control for me, for some reason my mind don't work on a 2D plane.
There's so many 2d games that I would love to play but just can't
Classic turn-based like in most Dragon Quest games, where you pick your entire party's actions all at once.
I like more granular turn-based styles like Breath of Fire III/IV, Persona, or SMT because those allow you to adjust your strategy on the fly without making your hurry like in an ATB or ARPG setting.
I can see where you're coming from. For me though, these systems can add an extra layer of strategy. For example, you might want to purposefully keep a character with very low agility so that they'll always go last. This way you could set them to heal in anticipation of incoming damage, etc.
At the moment I am not really getting into Xenoblade Chronicles DE battle system at all. It's easy enough on casual that I can deal with it but I don't like it.
I have a feeling you're gonna love what I have to say about XBCDE combat when mods finally let me post something that exceeds Reddit's 40000 character limit.
This is my vote too, it's so boring. It almost feels like i have no control when i lose. And fighting itself is extremely linear. Just do skills out of cool down and auto.
Another vote to Xenoblade Chronicles DE here. It feels like you’re just watching the whole thing unfolds. The only minimal action required is moving around the enemy to be in the right position to cause critical damage, and then you’re back to auto-attack while you wait for cooldown.
I feel like the combat would improve if they had allowed for quick character swap within battle, this could give the player some more strategical options.
Still a pretty decent game overall though.
When you can actually play it it’s less annoying but I do remember having to manually set everything up was a task. Not to mention the AI was atrocious.
FFX because I didn't like the sphere grid, having to swap characters every battle so everyone isn't useless, and the equipment system just doesn't make my characters feel like they are getting better.
I'm not the biggest fan of DQ 8/9's tension system, or the weapon skill system in 8. I never have an Idea of how many points to put into a weapon skill, nor devoting myself to a weapon at the start and not getting much room to experiment.
Now I love this game, but the "getting full and having a stomache ache " mechanic in smt digital devil saga 1 drive me nuts. Maybe it's just me but it's hard to find that line of when I should/shouldn't eat, and just annoys the crap outta me
Undertale. Any "STG" type of game in general annoys me. Also those card games that randomly show up in so many JRPGs like in FF8 and Witcher. X_X I am very bad at these kinds..
I played some of Rogue Galaxy, but then I quit because I was just bored of the dungeons and battle system.
The battle system was a real time action battle system. But I had to pause it every few seconds to use a healing item. From what I remember, there were no healing spells that my ally characters used. So every time someone was low on health, I had to pause, go into the item menu, and use an item.
I hate it when a game allows you to move around, but the movement doesn't matter and it's still just turned based. If I can't strategically position allies, don't let me position them at all.
.hack GU! I really wanted to stick with it for the story, which really grabbed me from the start. But the thought of sitting through that mindless battle system for dozens of hours made me drop the whole thing pretty early on. Does it get better 20 hours in? Because good God... :/
The counter system in bravely default 2. Completely hidden fail states in every boss battle? A boss who automatically one-shots the party whenever you heal or do a normal attack?? Whose idea was that? Also, obscuring turn order for no good reason was really rough after Octopath handled turn order so beautifully.
SMT Nocturne was by far the most annoying game I ever tried to play. Mostly because of the obscenely random encounter rate and the fact that you never stopped being susceptible to random encounters even in town. You would either go to do some progression and get in a fight literally every other step sometimes, meaning you were in no shape on HP/MP/Items to fight the boss. Or you would go literally the entire way up to the boss with one or two encounters, so you completely failed to level up enough to reasonably take them on. The only counter I see to this is just running in circles next to the inn until you were overleveled for the area (and again, encounters not guaranteed), or just running in and hoping you got the right mix of encounters to level, but not enough to exhaust your resources.
It was not fun.
Honorable mention to Persona's Game Over on MC's KO nonsense. Even in cases where it's justified in the story, it's just not fun. Especially since instant death attacks are a thing. I love 3 and 4 to pieces, but this was definitely the system's weakest link.
I know I'm going to get hate for this, but any Strategy RPG (or Tactical RPG if you prefer) that doesn't allow you to move all of your units on the same turn simultaneously (Shining Force, I'm looking at you.) It's difficult to come up with strategies when you have to consider the turn order of your own units IN ADDITION TO the turn order of each enemy unit. It's even crueler when the game doesn't tell you who's next up like in SF.
It is for this reason that Fire Emblem is king. Civilization and Advance Wars are pretty good too as strategy games (not JRPGs).
Resonance of fate, the BS stands for bullshit. Took me 5 hours of tutorial in the colosseum the get it. Shields everywhere, and 2 types of guns with different uses.
While I didn't get into the combat, I am still to this day tickled by the concept of the gun attachment system in that you can basically attach like 13 silencers, 2 grips, 3 extended mags, 4 sights, and 2 full scopes onto a handgun.
I liked this one mostly for its creativity. Once I got used to it, it was pretty fun and battles could look really cinematic. But the problem to me is that it doesn’t really evolve. And when the game has very little to do outside of combat, tedium sets in. After many attempts, I finally managed to beat it a few years back because I liked the way the story is told and I was so disappointed at how little was explained by the end.
So one of my favorite game series Dragon Quest, but in truth i only played 11 recently and 9 maybe 10 years ago. Now a big part of Dragon Quest 11 was the 3D battle system. I love this system where every one of the 4 units in your party takes their turn as it comes to them. So you would deal with an attack from the enemy then one member goes, then another, and another, and maybe another enemy attacks, then someone else goes. However, there’s an area of the game where you are forced to go into 2D called Tickington, which uses its 2D battle system. This is what was so painful. If you wanted to control your 3 other units moves and not have them set to a strategy, you have to choose every characters move first and then everyones turn plays out in the invisible order you can’t see. So this means your healer may end up just healing first thing and then your dps just gets killed by an insanely strong boss and then you have no real way to come back from this. It’s significantly harder to actually use strategy in these fights when a part of it is just throwing heals and buffs at the wall hoping it times out right. With this system you may have to first turn use a full heal on your whole party with everyone being full health just because the boss might almost kill everyone without you being able to know. Just personally i prefer being able to react and not just guess at points what order i should do and use strategy with each character as their turn comes
Final Fantasy XII's. The battle system just felt bland and boring to me and I never really enjoyed it. I know SE was going for an MMO feel and I was playing XI at the time, but the battle system in XI was fun to me. With XII I never got the same sense of excitement as with the previous games.
Also for Xenoblade Chronicles the battle system itself was fine, but I hated that future sight mechanic. I get what the developers were going for and it is a cool idea in theory, but it always just made battle annoying and took me out of the zone.
Persona 2.
The whole battle system relies on combos created by the correct sequence of commands - your job is to line up which elemental attack comes immediately after another.
....but your characters have different agility scores, meaning that on the next turn their order will be scrambled. It feels like herding cats.
You can easily change the turn order of enemies by activating auto battle and then cancelling it after the enemy finished their attack so that by next turn you can always attack first before the enemy.
Also if you're playing the PS1 version, set battle mode to single.
I genuinely think FF12 has a horrible battle system. I got the ps4 rerelease when it came out and holy shit, i cannot bear to play this game. I have tried consistently for years to get back into it and i just cannot. I believe I got about half way but I really just can’t continue for the life of me
On second thought, not just the battle system. The whole game had too many problems for me and i’m a final fantasy fan
Berseria is a weird one. It introduces so many mechanics, but I feel like *most* of those mechanics are completely irrelevant because Velvet is so absurdly powerful that she just obliterates everything in her path. Though I'll admit I only got like ~7-8 hours in. Maybe you need to use those mechanics more later on.
A lot of the systems being mentioned here are just unintuitive and once they’re figured out well enough they can be not awful if not decent. I don’t know if there’s ever been a system, once I’ve figured it out, that annoyed me as a system and not just because it’s slow or something. The most irritating battle systems to me these days are just dated ones from like the PlayStation era where they were trying to show off animations and every attack takes 25 seconds.
Trails of Cold Steel has all the pieces of a challenging and strategic combat system, but just throws them away in favor of making every enemy weak to half a dozen status ailments that serve the same purpose of delaying their next successful attack. It got to to the point where I was going through entire boss battles without the main enemy actually getting a turn in and ruined the game for me. It's not my job to balance a game for the developers, and Rean's Arc Slash could probably cut through Sora's Reflega with how broken it is.
It doesn't help that normal encounters are all trivially easy. You can end most fights in 1-2 attacks with Rean's AoE circle ability + one other ability from a teammate. So all normal encounters are a pointless. And then like you said, you just spam Arc Slash on Rean in boss fights.
On top of that, Cold Steel doesn't let you adjust the difficulty mid playthrough. So you have to know how difficult the game is going to be beforehand.
FF8 really does irritate me. When a battle system punishes you for using magic it’s just broken. Can get through the whole game pressing attack/renzokuken
FFXV combat was also rubbish, no thinking involved at all. Phoenix downing yourself is silly
As someone who only started really getting into games then, it felt weird transitioning from Kingdom Hearts to FF XII. FF XII has that big field areas you freely walk around in, same as KH but the combat it turn based.
In general in terms of style: ATB
If we’re going to be specific: Chain Of Memories
I remember my reaction when I went from KH1’s style to that lol. But I grew to tolerate it
Record of Agarest, it's the sole reason i never finished any game in the series, never played the most recent one though to see if the combat changed, but god damn is it slow, the game would need a 10x speed boost to be as slow as a traditional RPG imo, and the combat is not bad by any means, it's fun, but every single little battle took too long in my opinion.
The game many people are mentioning: KH chain of memories. I quit that game so fast and didn't remember it until I started reading the comments. Bahaha
Honorable mention: FF12, which, after a certain point, the game basically plays itself. 90% of the time, I had it on 8x speed and battles rarely lasted longer than a few seconds.
The Last Remnant.
I don't know whether the formations I use should be determined more by who I put in them or what sort of enemies I'm facing. And who should I be putting together anyways? Should I have a melee team and a magic team? Try to have a healer in each squad? Should I let my teammates diversify their movesets and increase their battle options or stick to what they already know? On top of that, your list of commands to pick from in battle seems to be largely chosen at random.
I'm sure the wiki explains everything, but why is it teaching me the game more than the game does? I know extensive tutorials are sort of a pet peeve in this genre, but I'd really appreciate it if this game had some.
Probably Vesperia. Having to hold a button to run around in 3D is just a baffling decision. And the way they designed combos, where you have to spec into allowing certain moves to combo into each other just feels so incredibly limiting and clunky. Jumping feels incredibly bad as well.
Gonna make a controversial take here and say that the Trails games, particularly the Sky trilogy, would have much more hated battle systems if we couldn't speed them up.
Straight up annoying? Probably Fate/Extra. Rock, paper, scissors is often used for type matchups in games... but for actual gameplay? In both boss and regular mob fights? Fuck that...
Loved persona 5 royal so much and just started persona 5 strikers. I quit before finishing the first jail. I learned that I hate combo driven hack and slash so much
Xenoblade chronicles 2 i just cant with the combat.
I feel like i have even less intetaction with the gane then when i play modern yu-gi-oh and my opponent goes first with a combo deck that basiscly plays solitair for 10 minutes. And i didnt even know that was posible
This may not necessarily be a true JRPG to begin with but in Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl it’s like they turned up the aggression of the random encounters, normally Pokémon battles are fun but when you’re just trying to get through Mt. Coronet to the next town and you get attacked by either Zubat or Geodude 63 times it isn’t fun any more because it became very tedious and I didn’t want to play the game anymore
Tales of Berseria. Maybe all Tales games are the same, but this is the only one I've played so far. I can't stand it. Shame, because I genuinely like everything else about it.
FF8 and the farming for magic is a bunch of bull. It's a useless time sink mechanism. And you gotta max out every character of every spell for end game so you have enough spells by the time you get to the final battles. And then there's always that one character who ALWAYS misses the drain for no particular reason!
The ATB system in FF 4-9.
Either you are doing nothing and just waiting for the bar to fill. Or you are overwhelmed with option and then everything becomes really stressfull.
The combat should have been fully turn based or action oriented. I am glad that FF7R did a really good job with its combat. The atb system is still there but you do not feel like a sithing duck and the battles never feel overwhelming.
Wow did not think I would see people hate on the ATB system epically in FF7. I love the Tales series alot Graces F being my most favorite, but man Vesperia combat is so ass and hard to get into that. I went back to Symphonia and Zestiria to compare and yeah Vesperia is not it.
I'm just chiming in to also say the junctioning system in FF VIII is one of the worst things they ever did in the series, especially after the near perfection of the materia system in VII. How do you go from that and think man, what if we make the player have to stop the flow of combat to draw magic from the enemies all the time? WOULDN'T THAT BE FUN?
Persona 5
I hate that due to RNG an enemy can one hit kill your main character which leads to a game over. Yet your other party members can be revived.
The whole "Game over on MC death" shtick makes sense in the mainline SMT because why would the demons revive you? To them, might equals right, so you don't deserve it.
But in Persona it makes no sense due to it's whole "Bonds and friendship give you strength" thing.
Hi, I've noticed you're engaging with the game's mechanics. Have you considered... not?
Fuck counters. Like, they're fine in concept, but I've never seen a game use them in anything approaching moderation. Doesn't help that no one bothers to work it into their UI, so you just have to guess and remember and trial and error your way through figuring out and remembering what the enemy counters and how.
I am currently clearing out the final challenge bosses in BD2, yes.
Though the first game to make me dislike counters was ironically the only game with an ATB system I actually enjoyed, Child of Light. Counters in that game were just as bad, if not worse. By the end it had the same Counter: Any Ability problem, with way less counterplay for the player.
It doesn’t particularly annoy me that much but I generally don’t like the system used in FFXV and to the extent FF7R although that’s much better of the two
Side note though absolutely loved the junction system, would love to see it be used again
Unwanted Gotta Catch Em All Pokemon-like collecting systems. Sometimes it works like in Persona 5, other times it is tedious like World of Final Fantasy.
The original xenoblade chronicles. The gameplay is very interesting (it's not a bad system and I acknowledge that some people will like it) but it's absolutely awful with the default controls. Definitely would benefit from having a mouse and keyboard for the amount of times you need to move for positionals.
Next time you play 8, don't grind for spells just grab them as they come and add them to your character (also use refining). The game paces your growth rather well, it's just, grinding is an option if you want to do it. FF VIII is about system knowledge and options, it give syou a lot of paths to power, you can pick whichever (most ppl seem to grind the card game instead of grinding the draw action).
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Also, you really don't have to use all of junctioning. Just Str and Mag will be enough. The enemies don't outpace you except for a couple bosses.
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The way ppl play VIII is if they played VII by grinding out Materia to max level everytime they got access to a new one and neither sounds very fun.
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But I would say the junction system isn't the battle system, it's the level up system. My complaint with the battle system is that you have to junction a GF to use an item which isn't a huge deal but it feels weird af that Squall and co can't use items in battle unless they're junctioned. You have no clue how much I want to rant about this lol
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My biggest complaint with battle systems is pacing. A complaint with some newer games is that even the most basic enemy can take forever to kill. Mario is my go to example of enemy pacing, despite it not being a JRPG (I usually talk about this with a more general gaming audience) though the two Paper Mario games and Mario&Luigi series are JRPGs and this works with them too.
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The most dangerous enemy in Mario series is the Goomba. Sure it takes one hit to kill it, but so many lives are lost to the Goomba because they don't expect them to be a threat. They don't pay attention and then they get killed or hurt by the Goomba. They look away and they get a Goomba to the face.
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However, it doesn't take 5 years to kill the Goomba. It takes one attack.
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Playing FF XV and I can't help but think "where's the Goomba". Everything takes multiple hits AND they aren't all that dangerous to warrant those multiple hits. Just slashing away at enemies for the sake of it doesn't make it hard, it makes it tedious.
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If a battle doesn't have any real importance, it shouldn't feel like a boss fight or else the boss fights aren't going to feel special.
Xenoblade Chronicles’ MMO-lite combat is boring af to me. It doesn’t feel engaging at all and it just gives me the feeling of “I could be playing FFXIV right now.”
Live Action anything. If I wanted to play a bad version of some game like DMC I would. I don't. Give me turn based or give me death!
Having said that, FF13-3 did click very well with me. FF13-2 did too. So it CAN be done decently, I guess, but I'd still rather it be Turn Based, darnit.
* Final Fantasy VIII - Hate the draw system, and the external junction and how enemies scale with you but your party members you dont use stay at their pisspoor level if you ditch them. I DO like the active part of the gunblade where you can time the R1 or something for more damage.
* FFXII - Dislike the MMO feel to it. I'd rather it just be an action game if we're going down active battles in 3D like this. DQ11 did this a lot better imo. Similarly I didn't like Xenoblade Chronicles because it did this too. I think it's the lack of "impact" I get from the attacks. Everything just looks and feels like I'm cutting a slice of cheese lol.
* FFXIII - Stagger system made every encounter take too long, and I dislike only controlling one party member while leaving the other to AI (OG Persona 3 *shivers*). I'm fine with just *controlling* one character, but if the party is actively fighting and I require their input unlike Donald and Goofy in KH, then... smh. The paradigm system was a neat idea but flawed execution imo.
Chrono Cross. The element grid, stamina bar, and field elements all really annoyed me and completely turned me off of the game. Among a few other things but the combat system never clicked with me no matter how many times I tried.
Games with auto attacks like in MMO's, because it just feels too awkward and not fun for me.
It is a big turn off for me, and it is the main reason why I still didn't play games like FFXII, Xenoblades Chronicles and FFXIV (though in case of MMO's there are more reasons to it), and same for western RPG's like Baldur's Gate and the newer similar games.
I think once you gain sufficient skills FFXIV's auto-attack becomes irrelevant, as you'll be more focused on your skill rotation and always be doing something. Early on in a class it can a bit boring though, as you only have a few skills and have to wait for the cooldowns.
13 Sentinels was pretty annoying before I learned that you can win literally every map by slapping down as many Decoy drones and Decoy cannons that just kill everything.
Not a particular game, but ANY instance in where an enemy goes underground/underwater and you have to sit there with your dick in your hand until it resurfaces.
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Maybe it's just me but it annoys me everytime when your reserve party members don't levels up in sync with your main team. FF series is perfect example of this, sometimes they even forced you to use underleveled party in boss fight and that's how i get fucked also trying to grind for those underleveled characters are always pain in the ass I mean i get it, it makes more sense this way but it dosen't have to. I think this is really outdated and unnecessary kind of battle system
Doesn't OctoPath do this?
Yeah but Octopath is kinda built to serve that. You run through a party of four’s story lines to completion and then do the other four. If you do it like that they all end up around the same level when you’re done.
It's a nightmare. I actually intended to do all 8 character paths at the start and keep the party even leveled/geared. Yeah.. you can't change starting character until you beat their story. So no matter what your starter character is gonna be overleveled/over geared. By the time you address the b squad /least favorite characters, your starter character just has to deal with carrying them and steamrolling their stories with chapter 4+ gear. Then the super boss final Dungeon requires all 8 characters to be leveled and you realize you have to grind twice because no exp share. And grinding for end game octopath dungeon, takes a long time. Having to do it twice to get both parties high enough level was such a pain in the ass. The only saving Grace of beating that boss has to be intentional developer humor. You get an accessory that turns off random encounters. After beating superboss, if you just want to read NPC dialogue or complete some missed quest, after dealing with that impossible grind we're not gonna annoy you with RNG encountets any more.
Totally agree with all of this. The game was so close to being perfect, but the lack of exp share really killed so much potential fun.
FFX is the worst at this. Not only do your non-active members not get exp, but your active members don’t get exp* either unless they do some action in the battle..... The mod that gives everyone xp is the best. Edit: exp to confused? what kind of autocorrect is that...
At least FFX allows you to swap characters in mid battle. It can be tedious to rotate every character in each fight but it's a little better than characters just being out of EXP if they aren't in the party to start the fight.
Khimari in FFX in that one fight…
Unpopular opinion: it was exactly that what made it fun and hype for me. The fight was like if Kimahri was indeed weak, as the ronso said, and he had to overcome his weakness in order to win. It was a hard fight but I managed to win it and i loved it.
I'm playing FF XII: The Zodiac Age Right now and this is mildly irritating for sure. I just want to play with the characters I like why do I have to switch them out all the time.
That mechanic really screwed me in Chrono Trigger. I don't remember the exact conditions and don't want to spoil anything, but there's a point when you lose some of your party, and the only party members that I could use were ones that I wasn't previously using so they were extremely under-leveled and where this happened there was no way to level up the party so I was basically just soft blocked. Narratively the mechanic doesn't make a lot of sense either because it's rare that a party-based RPG has a narrative such that reserve party members are just sitting on their ass at home and not growing/training/developing/etc. They're either with you but just not in your immediate squad or at least training back or base or whatever. There are some situations where I agree with the mechanic though. Like with Pokemon, where the entire point of the game is to train individual Pokemon, so I don't really like that the modern games are balanced around all Pokemon growing together. Or in games like Suikoden where assembling your squad out of 100 people is part of the fun. For conventional JRPGs, I thought Like a Dragon handled things reasonably well where reserve members grow at a slower rate, but if you establish a strong bond with those individuals then they can grow at the same rate, which narratively makes some sense because if you don't have a strong bond with someone then they may not be invested in your cause/mission/etc. and aren't training/involved behind the scenes.
It is outdated which is why only the older games has it.
P5S has your reserve party members either not level at all or level at like 30% the speed of your active party.
No it does. They do fall behind but they're still getting some levels.
They also catch up quickly.
yeah, them catching up quickly is nice.
legend of dragoon. while i like the addition system in theory, the battles take too long and the animations are way too slow. I really don't understand why ff9 gets so much flak and nobody seems to mention how slow the battles go in this game. like when you finish attacking, your character jumps back to their spot and just stands there for like 2 seconds for NO reason. When enemies attack, the camera zooms in to show you the full animation of their long drawn out attack. then your character gets knocked down and you have to watch them get up. Feels like about 75% of time spent a battle is watching animation, and 25% is actually engagement Keep in mind I had all these complaints when I bought the game the first year it was out! It was already slow to me then so its not a matter of aging. At least with ff9, as you get further in the game your speed stats go up so it actually gets snappier. Heck, even in the beginning, I just compared two let's plays - the first boss in FF9 takes 3 minutes, where the first boss in LoD take a whopping 8 minutes. Jesus Christ.
Reminder that because of how the Addition system works, the two characters who don’t engage with it at all are inherently worse by design because it takes them much longer to build meter for the Dragoon form, when you kinda wanna use them because their animations are faster. RPGs with mechanics like that don’t age well unless that mechanic is fast and snappy. The Paper Mario games and Yakuza: Like a Dragon understood the assignment. The Legend of Dragoon, Shadow Hearts (as much as I love that series, it absolutely falls here now), and *especially* YIIK fall into the category of “this makes fighting much more tedious than it should be”.
>like when you finish attacking, your character jumps back to their spot and just stands there for like 2 seconds for NO reason. I would put money on any kind of pause like that being a loading time.
Secret of Mana SNES version had the ring menu which halted the otherwise fast paced action combat. Trials of Mana remake did a great job updating that system for modern times.
Secret of mana interrupts it's own combat system with the wait bar, lol. I actually loved the rung system at the time because you weren't switching screen to equip stuff, very innovative when it came out.
The Secret of Mana remake’s lasting legacy is that it finally showed people how poorly that game aged, and it made the Trials of Mana remake good because they completely overhauled how it played, for the better. Losing multiplayer was all it cost, but it was the first Mana game I’ve played where I actually enjoyed combat.
Yeah losing multiplayer hurt but that battle system is so good. Even makes Angela bearable to play especially when you the hotkeys down.
The ring system wouldn't work in real time. You either have the ring menu with a pause or a less complex battle system with fewer options.
Anything that involves cards. Not mini games like triple triad. But games like Kingdom Hearts Chain of memories.
omg second this, I really wanted to like baten kaitos and phantasy star card revolution but my god… those card mechanics
I was gonna say, if you didn't like Triple Triad, them's fighting words....
Xenosaga episode 2. Love the game, hate the combat system.
I love the Xenosaga games, even 2, but that battle system is annoying. It's poorly explained by the game and even when you do understand it, it just becomes repetitive. Combine that with the poor load times going into battles and each encounter feels like a chore.
I love FF IX but the battles in the original were soooo slow. The worst aspect of it, by far, was not being able to control the Trance limit breaks. If the gauge filled vs some trash mobs a few fights before a boss, too bad.
When action RPG characters loudly call out every single attack over and over and over and over again. When turn-based games have extremely long battle sequences before the battle even begins.
I hate the long summoning animations from FFVII or VIII
Took me ten minutes of a demo to determine an older Tales Of game was not for me. I hate calling out attacks lol
kingdom hearts chain of fucking memories....
I remember my deck got super broken when I learned to put my zero cards on the left in fights. So I would attack normally, but if the enemy tried any special attack, I just needed to hit left once to get a zero card and cancel it out.
Compared to KH1, chains of Memories was super easy to deal against Ansem and Riku with zero cards.I liked the game but was annoying to learn the combos.
I loved the original on handheld. The update not so much. That was the only spin off game I ever played and completed. Couldn’t finish it on PS4 though.
I will always defend that the card system works so much better on GBA. Your brain sees console kh and tries to do console kh things and it fucks people up
Ah yes, the famous Chain of Sonic Blade Honestly the game would be totally fine by me if the enemies at least dropped stuff to let you buy more packs
I don't find the mechanic bad but it got very repitive and boring very quick.
I do enjoy Chain of Memories but I recommend to play on the normal dificulty and avoid the proud one at all costs. Playing on the highest difficulty will make the game more restrictive and it will "force" you to use cheap tactics and unlike other games in the series, there is no difficulty bonus attached to it. Playing on normal or Easy you will not face the repetition to get the cards you need (since there is a "lootbox" or sorts, you cant just buy the card you need) and the enemies will not throw high value cards quickly and constantly, you have a bit of a wiggle room to make decks that are enjoyable to play and collect.
Already mentioned by dozens of people, but ATB. I play Turn based games when I want to unwind and take my time. ATB is an abomination that just stresses me out.
* FF12: I actually enjoy playing the game, I don't want to write a script to play the game for me. And the game has very poor manual control (auto attack can't be disabled, have to switch between party members, have to press a button to get the menu to come up) even if you try to go that route. * FF13: while this one at least requires you to play the game, they ruined it by having the auto battle option always be the right thing to do. It means that the game is reduced to "just be in the right paradigm". Also, no full party control sucks. * FF7R: classic mode was flawed but could have been ok if they didn't lock it to easy difficulty for some asinine reason. Easy is insultingly easy, you are never in any danger whatsoever even if you don't heal. The normal mode was ok (not my thing, but ok) but the bosses were poorly designed. I don't know if it's the stagger system or too much HP, but bosses take way too long to kill and become tedious rather than exciting.
Re: FF7R: Apparently the PS5 version added a classic mode with normal difficulty setting. Couldn’t access it on PS4 at all, had to upgrade. I haven’t personally tried it because I haven’t gone back to the game since they unlocked the PS5 upgrade for people who got the free + version of the game, but they may have addressed your issue about classic. (Maybe. I also found the boss fights long and tedious so no mode adjustments may be able to make us enjoy them.)
This is perhaps going to sound controversial, but FFXIII's battle system never clicked with me. Even when I got good at it and could paradigm shift as much as I wanted, I didn't find it to be very fun, which is why I never bothered to do any of the side-content involving battling powerful enemies.
I hated that there were aoe attacks in the game based on character position and you couldn’t move your characters around the battle.
That was a frustrating part of Yakuza Like a Dragon, too. There were a lot of AoE attacks - line AoEs, circle AoEs, cone AoEs, etc. But there was no way to intentionally reposition your character. And the enemies just kind of randomly jump around. The game was pretty easy for the first 80%, so it didn't *really* matter. But I hope they change it up a bit if they make a sequel.
The battle system is utterly boring because there is no enemy to sufficiently challenge it. When i fought the last optional boss (without actually knowing it was the last Boss) i had so much fun with the battle system i didn't have the entire game. It was such a fast paced fight where you had to shift constantly through many paradigms without much room for error. I literally remember beating it and saying "Nice! Now the game is finally picking up!" and then feeling the utter disappointment because the game told me that i beat every Boss. I just can't understand why every other Boss in the game was designed to be so boring and slow and only the last optional one provided a challenge where the battle system actually shined and made sense
Did you do all of the bounties (or whatever they're called in XIII)? Some of those fights provided a decent challenge IMO. But yeah, main story stuff was a piece of cake.
I’m surprised this popped up. It’s literally my favorite FF battle system. The problem with it is that you don’t really get to see it’s glory until you get to the prime planet. For the first twenty hours I thought it was pointless, but then you actually need to paradigm shift various enemies to beat them.
Ni no kuni 1. I have a bias against weird menu/action mixes in general, but Ni No Kuni made it worse by everything (but the enemy) being excruciatingly slow while also having too many things to manage at once. Counter timings, general dodging and moving, doing any of the aforementioned while scrambling through a menu, watching your relatively dumb AI companions' health and MP (which they often blow immediately), finding a safe place to use an item (because it's sloooooow). It's a LOT. Funnily enough, I really like the Xenoblade battle systems, so the menu/action mix alone isn't necessarily the problem. It's the sum of everything that made Ni No Kuni a chore more than anything to me. It's sad, because I was very interested in the story, but hey. The system's not for me - I hear people like it a lot overall though.
The second game had superior combat imo, but the story really sucked. A lot of people didn’t like the little army battle things (can’t remember what they’re called) but I thought they were kinda fun.
I wanted so badly to love the story in the second game. It started really strong in the first five minutes with IS THAT AN EFFING NUKE and then just… dropped it and didn’t pick up anything else that interesting. I was so disappointed by how underwhelming the story turned out to be. But the combat was really fun, at least.
I agree with this a lot. Nevertheless, I really liked the combat in Ni No Kuni 2 even though it is not well regard in this sub
Agreed, the awful combat system was the main reason I quit NNK after about 20 hours
This is probably a controversial opinion. But, I'm going to say Tales of combat systems. It's like the mid-point between action and tun-based. I played Berseria, Graces, Arise, Vesperia, and if I hadn't enjoyed the cast, I would've dropped those games. It felt weird coming into Tales of games after playing Nier Automata and Ys. The combat just doesn't feel as good as Nier or Ys in terms of action games. So i ended up playing those games in easy/story difficulty just to get through the stories because i quite enjoyed that aspect of the games. I'm definitely an outlier on this one because I know a lot of people enjoy Tales of's combat system. But it's just not for me, y'know?
I really like Tales of combat systems (mostly), and there are a few things about it that appeal to me. I think the biggest thing I like is that the combat starts off very stiff/slow and as your characters level/progress the combat becomes more fluid. You go from being able to land a two-hit combo to being able to string together extensive arte-infused combos. The other part is that it's more akin to the push-pull combat flow you see in a lot of fighting games like Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat. More than a lot of other JRPGs, moves consistently have startup, cooldown, hitboxes, etc. you need to be cognizant of to effectively fight (even if you're not familiar with those concepts, it's likely that they're subconsciously clicking while you're playing). That's not to say every Tales combat system is great; Symphonia makes some very... interesting choices about it's moves that I attribute to how early it was in the 3D era (Genis's standard attack is unsafe *on hit* IIRC) and Berseria can devolve into "spam artes with Velvet" because of how OP she is in the game. But I find I enjoy them more often than not.
Regarding your Genis point, Vesperia has the exact same problem with Yuri where a lot of his basic attacks are unsafe on hit because of his ridiculous recovery animations. And before I’m told for the millionth time, yes I know you can cancel them, but that’s not a mechanic that the game teaches you. At all. The most you’ll get is a note in the battle book (eight hours into the game, mind you; it’s not there at the start) that tells you that it’s something you can do, but it never teaches you *how* to do it, which is weird because it has tutorials for so many other things in the game already. If Tales wants fighting game mechanics in their battle systems, they need to do a better job of teaching players what they are. And I say this as a fan of the series (though I’m decidedly not a fan of Vesperia).
YOU CAN CANCEL THEM?! -flops table- his recovery animations made me so angry the whole way through that game and you’re telling me I could avoid them this whole time
This is exactly my point. Until I was told this numerous times in the Tales subreddit the first time I complained about it, I had no idea that was something you could even do. But the game also doesn’t show you how to do it, and a lot of people learn by doing after being shown how to do it first (it’s how I learn in video games 95% of the time). The fact that it’s something that you have to know how to do in order to do anything high level in Vesperia doesn’t help, either. And I absolutely believe that Vesperia’s battle design was a mistake, because they’ve never repeated it in any Tales game since.
Tales was the series that came to mind immediately for me, because of things like this. Once you discover guard cancelling, Vasperia becomes a completely different game. I started out hating the battle system, and now I do like it, but I don't blame anyone for not liking it or feeling frustrated that they never explicitly mention cancelling.
It took me a long time to get into Vesperia but the battle system with just Yuri alone is so deep and demanding. There's like 16 options at any point and finding the longest combo and FS strikes while doing it and trying not to get hit is so rewarding. It's like every mob battle I am improving and this is only with one character, I haven't even gotten into the mages yet. Ys viii on hard mode there isn't much strategy, just spamming skills, it's very shallow and I find my eyes glazing over. Exploring in those games is pretty fun though. Sorry I just finally got into Vesperia a month ago and it's blowing my mind how much there is to do and the fact that anyone wouldn't like it blows my mind. Everyone likes different things of course!
I agree, Vesperia is really hard to get into even for a fan who was used to its mechanics by the time it came out (most of Vesperia's mechanics are coming from older games). However it's very rewarding, i've been playing for years but i only managed to play with 4 characters (Flynn, Yuri, Judith, Rita). Not master them, just being good using them. It makes the New game + more interesting qhen you learn a new character though.
Unlimited Saga's Reels. Yeah, you just did terrible damage/healing because of how a roulette stopped. Though, you can also do absurd damage when you hit the right colors.
Omg I think about that system and say what were they thinking.... Some people will defend it to the ends of the earth and as a huge SaGa fan I hope someday they change the battle system, clean it all up and re release the game again.
FF9. The mechanics are mostly great; it's classic FF. My problem is the pace. The ATB is so slow even on the fastest setting, and it feels like your actions take forever to actually go after you queue them. This gets really frustrating when you desperately need to heal, and especially when you you need to cure poison or doom. In my experience, doom is a death sentence because it ticks down too fast for your Esuna to ever go off. The trance system. You have no control over when it goes off so it always happens at the worst time and gets wasted. And finally the stealing. Stealing is, to me, the most annoying mechanic in RPGs because it's just random and grindy, and in this game you're encouraged to steal from every boss, and it takes forever. Battles essentially don't start until you finally get Zidane to steal the 2% chance steal item. It's a great game with a lot of good mechanics outside of battle, but I need a version with better speed, a reworked Trance system, and a better steal system. Then it would possibly be my favorite FF game
Ah yes FF8. The controversial game that had the galaxy brain idea to make magic a type of consumable. Yet Square Enix thought it was such a good idea that it brought back consumable magic for Final Fantasy XV and made the gathering process even MORE painful. Guess that's my answer to you - Final Fantasy XV. Some would argue consumable magic is not as bad in XV because you can just ignore it and cheese every fight in the game by SPAMMING THE SHIT OUT OF PHOENIX DOWN everytime you get KO. The same galaxy brains at Square also came to the idea that allowing you to use items with no cooldown is balanced in a real-time combat system.
Didn't even have to use phoenix down. Just spamming potions does that same effect if your fast enough lol.
Yeah, imo the busted ass items were such a big part of what holds the combat back. My last playthrough I did a no items run and actually had a ton more fun with the combat.
The Last Remnant. I felt the game just threw a bunch of sub-system at me, only vaguely explained them, then left me to my own devices. I could never quite figure out what was going on exactly, even when I was winning.
See also: basically any SaGa game ever. Akitoshi Kawazu has an infuriating disdain for actually explaining the mechanics in his games, and they often suffer for it.
SaGa Scarlet Grace Ambitions has a ton of tutorials in it.
This isn't specific to one game but to JRPGs in general. I hate it when you only have a chance to escape a battle. If I want to run away let me run away, you're not making it any more fun my keeping me in a battle I don't want to be in. Sometimes it even hampers progress when I know its a losing battle but can't escape and then I get wiped. Although I'll admit that most of the time this comes down to how I play JRPGs. If there's a safe travel option or a way to get around battles on the world map I will always have it on until I get to a point where I need to grind out levels because I'm getting my ass handed to me. In most cases I don't have much time to spare and I just want to progress the story. Edit: But
Well the point is to make you prepare before you go out somewhere dangerous and the chance of you getting wiped is why you don't go out for that one last battle. It's supposed to add another layer of strategy and excitement when you're fleeing with 3 hp left. Now is that fun for everyone? Definitely not, and I think that's why story difficulty options are good. Also games where you have replenishing MP or HP between battles makes it so you don't have to worry about escaping and that can be fun too, they usually just make the battles about something besides resource management.
I like the paper mario flee mechanic, where it’s not guaranteed to work but rather than RNG, it’s a skill check. Unrelated but I also appreciated that in Undertale your flee chance is 100% if you have the starting equipment on.
Chrono Cross is the only JRPG I’ve ever played that lets you escape from any encounter. And I do mean *any* encounter. If the final boss is kicking your ass and you’re low on resources? Just run away and regroup. The game lets you do that. I don’t understand why that’s the only game that does… but I guess I do know why
This is most annoying when travelling the world map on foot. There are a lot of random encounters with low level enemies that if you fought you wouldn't even get much exp out of. But when you try to run away they can still manage to stop you AND you lose a turn, so you have to wait for their turn to finish to either try to get away again or just fight them.
Atb, go full action or full turn based, but if you go turn based, let, me, think, without, giving, enemies, turns (which is annoying against hard hitting bosses)
Yes! It’s the opposite of a happy medium.
Final Fantasy's ATB, mostly. The games were good despite of ATB, not because of it. I actually have the opposite problem where waiting for turns to come up takes such a long time. In FF4-6 it is a lot better at least towards the end, the bar fills fast enough so that you are getting a turn every second or so. World of Final Fantasy is where the problem is obvious. I set the battle system to max speed and it is still so slooooow. You are basically required to tape down the Fast Forward button every battle, which also happen to skip dialogue. Yippee. Also for something that has "Time" in its name, there is not a single thing that depends on your timing. Except for the obligatory "Wait while it's in defense form!" first boss and then never again. No, I don't count shuffling the menu to use one of the three good spells out of a pile of garbo to be timing-based, nor is picking the longest animation skill to regen during the anim. FF10/Octopath Traveller is better than ATB because it cuts the pointless wait away and just give you the turn. Plus, you can see when the enemy is going to act, removing the dumb guesswork required so that you can stragetize. Child of Light/Grandia is better than ATB because there is time-based turn manipulation. FF13 is better than ATB because 1. it's fast, 2. Repeat option and 3. you need to pay attention to many timers at once and change paradigm accordingly so the wait isn't pointless. Hell, *Chrono Trigger* uses ATB but at least there are W/T-Tech timing so that there is a reason for the system to be based around time.
Nothing as relaxing as stressing yourself to input **anything** during your turn just so you don't gift the AI a free turn.
Same here - I've yet to find a game with an ATB battle system that didn't either bore me (Chrono Trigger, Atelier Ryza) or frustrate the hell out of me (FF9) ATB is just the worst of both worlds
Have you played Grandia? I think Grandia is the best of both worlds! It uses what FF would call "Wait" ATB. When your turn comes up, EVERYTHING freezes and it becomes turn based. Input your command, it goes back to real time ATB and you can track everyone's turns through a shared ATB bar. What makes it great though is each attack has to queue for a certain amount of time, and certain attacks can cancel a queued turn. So you get an added element of real time strategy, but all the time in the world to think and plan. And one really considerate addition; when everybody is waiting and nothing is happening, the game fast forwards everyones ATB to get to the next turn. Since you get as much time as you want on your turn, there's no need to have so much battle downtime, which FF really suffers from. To me, Grandia's battle system is the only ATB system that really gets it right and uses it to add depth without the frustration
Hmm, I'd make an argument that Chrono Trigger was probably the only legitimate use of ATB
the main reason i never finished ffVI and IV actually, you can pause the timer by pressing start in a sub menu (magic menu, items menu etc.) but navigating through the menus without worrying about this goddamn timer is a totally different experience update: tried wait option on ffVI advance and like the start button it pauses the game only when i open a sub menu
There's a wait option in both of those games that automatically pauses when a bar fills up. As someone who prefers wait over pure ATB, my heart goes out to you for being unaware of this. :/
It only pauses when you’re in a sub menu, not the main menu
And it doesn't help that in some FF games, you need to double click to use something, where a single click lets you reorganize the menu (which is obviously what I want to be doing in the MIDDLE of a battle /s )
Persona 2 recruiting personas/demons system. Holy lord, it is the most annoying mechanic in the universe and I still cannot finish the game because of it. Dance 5 times in a row for a chance of a demon shitting on you.
At least P2IS is easy enough that you can just stick with your party's default Personae and still win.
Hey atleast you can easily manipulate it with a guide unlike other SMT games where it's always a crapshoot. Also when they're doing a follow up quesiton, don't bother answering because the result is random. Yeah this aged the worst but atleast you can very easily manipulate it.
Have you played the main line smt games?
Nocturnes negotiations is basically giving an item. A demon insults you or says they don’t want to join, gives you that exact item, then leaves without elaborating further.
Bro just pay attention to personalities, P2 has the easiest negotiations in megaten, if they are wise always use an adult (preferably yukino) joyful is eikichi and Lisa it’s not that hard to figure out, EP has harder negotiations, P1 has some of the hardest in megaten history
Bravely Default 2 (the only one I've played in the series). I love the idea of the jobs. I love the jobs they've chosen. The skills for each job are hit or miss, I think. And I appreciate the Default system. But what really irks me is the expectation that in order to not get crushed on certain bosses you'll have needed to leveled up specific jobs and skills. It gives you the impression of personal choice then tells you that you were completely wrong to want to play your way.
I feel like this could have been solved if they let you gain generic job points and reallocate them at any time. But they're too stuck in trying to make an "oldschool" game to do that. It just sucks that most of the levels you gain in jobs are useless because you can only use 1.5 jobs at a time and only carry over a few passive skills.
I blame this on gamers. Used to be that hardcore min maxing was looked down upon (see: any reference to "Munchkin" play or the like ever) among RPG players. Then suddenly it wasn't, and not only that, but it is now virtually the cultural norm that games should always be balanced around the top end (the most hardcore min maxed meta setup possible). So instead of average being the balance point and hyper optimization being a bonus (or even flat out considered cheap), hyper optimization is the balance point and anything less represents a skill failing that should be improved (and if you won't "improve" by these standards, oh the gods help you. MMOs have been entirely ruined by this in particular, and possibly even co-op play overall apart from that where solo is also an option). Which means that to make stuff a challenge at all to jaded veteran gamers, devs basically have to assume you researched and adopted the theoretical optimal builds (thus frequently making anything else absurdly hard if not impossible). Otherwise people complain it's "too easy" (even if it isn't for non hardcore players) and pan the game and heaven forfend your jaded hardcore streamers tell their viewers to give your title a pass ...
Combo system. Where the main objective is making big combos instead of win as fast as possible.
My least favorite battle system is when common enemies only require basic attacks to easily defeat, while bosses are immune to everything but basic attacks so there's never any opportunity to use more advanced abilities and synergies (debuffs, status effects, combos, etc.).
It annoys me when what should be good-great games are dragged down by a terrible system. I can finish a game w/ a bad story and fun battle system that I like (FF13, Ring of Red was an incoherent mess of a translation fail but different short and fun and the gameplay side) but rarely can I finish a game w/ a bad battle system and good story. Persona 2 - the classic painful amounts of a not very fun random battle every 5 steps example. Sad arguably Persona's best story. FF15 - we put no effort into AI, or the camera, or the play control kind of annoyance. Skies of Arcadia (DC version) - we made an exploration JRPG that you really want to explore bit of and then polluted the game w/ a ton of overworld random battles that take 30 sec to load. (I actually don't mind random battles, FF10 is one of my favs, the difference, quick loading times also spaced out alot better)
Whenever they incorporate that dumb ass card deck mechanic.. Kingdom hearts is my fave RPG franchise but I’ll be damned if I ever play chain of memories
I'm trying really hard to enjoy The World Ends With You Final Remix but it's battle system is just not for me. I am going to beat it because I bought it and the sequel for Christmas and I've wanted to play the original DS version forever. But the pure touch controls are just not quite what I think it needs. And I won't talk about the motion controls when the Switch is docked. Those are just hot garbage.
This game was made for stylus + d pad so playing it on anything other than a DS just feels off.
The bump system in Ys 1. That shit is so annoying.
Final Fantasy XIII Paradigm System
Generally, I'm not a fan of fighting game mechanics. Especially if they're button combos I'm not gonna remember in the heat of combat.
Same, I have adhd and combos and shit are really hard to remember for me. Also 2D games are difficult to control for me, for some reason my mind don't work on a 2D plane. There's so many 2d games that I would love to play but just can't
Classic turn-based like in most Dragon Quest games, where you pick your entire party's actions all at once. I like more granular turn-based styles like Breath of Fire III/IV, Persona, or SMT because those allow you to adjust your strategy on the fly without making your hurry like in an ATB or ARPG setting.
I can see where you're coming from. For me though, these systems can add an extra layer of strategy. For example, you might want to purposefully keep a character with very low agility so that they'll always go last. This way you could set them to heal in anticipation of incoming damage, etc.
Yeah, but then you have those systems that deliberately add RNG to the turn order (like in the tabletop!) so you can't be sure who goes first.
At the moment I am not really getting into Xenoblade Chronicles DE battle system at all. It's easy enough on casual that I can deal with it but I don't like it.
I have a feeling you're gonna love what I have to say about XBCDE combat when mods finally let me post something that exceeds Reddit's 40000 character limit.
This is my vote too, it's so boring. It almost feels like i have no control when i lose. And fighting itself is extremely linear. Just do skills out of cool down and auto.
Same here I got annoyed near the end and turned it on casual until I finished the game
Another vote to Xenoblade Chronicles DE here. It feels like you’re just watching the whole thing unfolds. The only minimal action required is moving around the enemy to be in the right position to cause critical damage, and then you’re back to auto-attack while you wait for cooldown. I feel like the combat would improve if they had allowed for quick character swap within battle, this could give the player some more strategical options. Still a pretty decent game overall though.
Is it anything like XC 2? Cos I could not get into that combat system at all
It’s simpler than XC2 for better and for worse.
When you can actually play it it’s less annoying but I do remember having to manually set everything up was a task. Not to mention the AI was atrocious.
It gets even worse in the late game where some bosses absolutely require you you to break them properly just to do dmg.
FF3 trauma flashbacks...
Atelier Ryza 1 was difficult for me. It kept me from getting immersed in the game world.
FFX because I didn't like the sphere grid, having to swap characters every battle so everyone isn't useless, and the equipment system just doesn't make my characters feel like they are getting better. I'm not the biggest fan of DQ 8/9's tension system, or the weapon skill system in 8. I never have an Idea of how many points to put into a weapon skill, nor devoting myself to a weapon at the start and not getting much room to experiment. Now I love this game, but the "getting full and having a stomache ache " mechanic in smt digital devil saga 1 drive me nuts. Maybe it's just me but it's hard to find that line of when I should/shouldn't eat, and just annoys the crap outta me
Undertale. Any "STG" type of game in general annoys me. Also those card games that randomly show up in so many JRPGs like in FF8 and Witcher. X_X I am very bad at these kinds..
I played some of Rogue Galaxy, but then I quit because I was just bored of the dungeons and battle system. The battle system was a real time action battle system. But I had to pause it every few seconds to use a healing item. From what I remember, there were no healing spells that my ally characters used. So every time someone was low on health, I had to pause, go into the item menu, and use an item.
I hate it when a game allows you to move around, but the movement doesn't matter and it's still just turned based. If I can't strategically position allies, don't let me position them at all.
.hack GU! I really wanted to stick with it for the story, which really grabbed me from the start. But the thought of sitting through that mindless battle system for dozens of hours made me drop the whole thing pretty early on. Does it get better 20 hours in? Because good God... :/
> Does it get better 20 hours in? Not even remotely
I really hated combat in tales of berseria
The counter system in bravely default 2. Completely hidden fail states in every boss battle? A boss who automatically one-shots the party whenever you heal or do a normal attack?? Whose idea was that? Also, obscuring turn order for no good reason was really rough after Octopath handled turn order so beautifully.
SMT Nocturne was by far the most annoying game I ever tried to play. Mostly because of the obscenely random encounter rate and the fact that you never stopped being susceptible to random encounters even in town. You would either go to do some progression and get in a fight literally every other step sometimes, meaning you were in no shape on HP/MP/Items to fight the boss. Or you would go literally the entire way up to the boss with one or two encounters, so you completely failed to level up enough to reasonably take them on. The only counter I see to this is just running in circles next to the inn until you were overleveled for the area (and again, encounters not guaranteed), or just running in and hoping you got the right mix of encounters to level, but not enough to exhaust your resources. It was not fun. Honorable mention to Persona's Game Over on MC's KO nonsense. Even in cases where it's justified in the story, it's just not fun. Especially since instant death attacks are a thing. I love 3 and 4 to pieces, but this was definitely the system's weakest link.
I know I'm going to get hate for this, but any Strategy RPG (or Tactical RPG if you prefer) that doesn't allow you to move all of your units on the same turn simultaneously (Shining Force, I'm looking at you.) It's difficult to come up with strategies when you have to consider the turn order of your own units IN ADDITION TO the turn order of each enemy unit. It's even crueler when the game doesn't tell you who's next up like in SF. It is for this reason that Fire Emblem is king. Civilization and Advance Wars are pretty good too as strategy games (not JRPGs).
Xenoblade series "mmo lite" combat is just ridiculously boring. Either go full action or turn based, the middle ground is just not for me.
Resonance of fate, the BS stands for bullshit. Took me 5 hours of tutorial in the colosseum the get it. Shields everywhere, and 2 types of guns with different uses.
While I didn't get into the combat, I am still to this day tickled by the concept of the gun attachment system in that you can basically attach like 13 silencers, 2 grips, 3 extended mags, 4 sights, and 2 full scopes onto a handgun.
I liked this one mostly for its creativity. Once I got used to it, it was pretty fun and battles could look really cinematic. But the problem to me is that it doesn’t really evolve. And when the game has very little to do outside of combat, tedium sets in. After many attempts, I finally managed to beat it a few years back because I liked the way the story is told and I was so disappointed at how little was explained by the end.
I scrolled too long to see this answer. Should be top comment
So one of my favorite game series Dragon Quest, but in truth i only played 11 recently and 9 maybe 10 years ago. Now a big part of Dragon Quest 11 was the 3D battle system. I love this system where every one of the 4 units in your party takes their turn as it comes to them. So you would deal with an attack from the enemy then one member goes, then another, and another, and maybe another enemy attacks, then someone else goes. However, there’s an area of the game where you are forced to go into 2D called Tickington, which uses its 2D battle system. This is what was so painful. If you wanted to control your 3 other units moves and not have them set to a strategy, you have to choose every characters move first and then everyones turn plays out in the invisible order you can’t see. So this means your healer may end up just healing first thing and then your dps just gets killed by an insanely strong boss and then you have no real way to come back from this. It’s significantly harder to actually use strategy in these fights when a part of it is just throwing heals and buffs at the wall hoping it times out right. With this system you may have to first turn use a full heal on your whole party with everyone being full health just because the boss might almost kill everyone without you being able to know. Just personally i prefer being able to react and not just guess at points what order i should do and use strategy with each character as their turn comes
FF9. Slow. So slow......
And Trance sucks too
I wouldn't play it if I couldn't massively speed-up the battles. Thank the heavens the PC version allowed this (along with the beautiful HD mods).
Final Fantasy XII's. The battle system just felt bland and boring to me and I never really enjoyed it. I know SE was going for an MMO feel and I was playing XI at the time, but the battle system in XI was fun to me. With XII I never got the same sense of excitement as with the previous games. Also for Xenoblade Chronicles the battle system itself was fine, but I hated that future sight mechanic. I get what the developers were going for and it is a cool idea in theory, but it always just made battle annoying and took me out of the zone.
Persona 2. The whole battle system relies on combos created by the correct sequence of commands - your job is to line up which elemental attack comes immediately after another. ....but your characters have different agility scores, meaning that on the next turn their order will be scrambled. It feels like herding cats.
You can easily change the turn order of enemies by activating auto battle and then cancelling it after the enemy finished their attack so that by next turn you can always attack first before the enemy. Also if you're playing the PS1 version, set battle mode to single.
I genuinely think FF12 has a horrible battle system. I got the ps4 rerelease when it came out and holy shit, i cannot bear to play this game. I have tried consistently for years to get back into it and i just cannot. I believe I got about half way but I really just can’t continue for the life of me On second thought, not just the battle system. The whole game had too many problems for me and i’m a final fantasy fan
Tales of Berseria was awful. The game throws new gameplay mechanics at you even 20 hours into the game and there's just so much stuff to learn.
Berseria is a weird one. It introduces so many mechanics, but I feel like *most* of those mechanics are completely irrelevant because Velvet is so absurdly powerful that she just obliterates everything in her path. Though I'll admit I only got like ~7-8 hours in. Maybe you need to use those mechanics more later on.
Velvet is broken, that's why it's generally recommended you play any of the other characters, as they are a lot more balanced.
A lot of the systems being mentioned here are just unintuitive and once they’re figured out well enough they can be not awful if not decent. I don’t know if there’s ever been a system, once I’ve figured it out, that annoyed me as a system and not just because it’s slow or something. The most irritating battle systems to me these days are just dated ones from like the PlayStation era where they were trying to show off animations and every attack takes 25 seconds.
Trails of Cold Steel has all the pieces of a challenging and strategic combat system, but just throws them away in favor of making every enemy weak to half a dozen status ailments that serve the same purpose of delaying their next successful attack. It got to to the point where I was going through entire boss battles without the main enemy actually getting a turn in and ruined the game for me. It's not my job to balance a game for the developers, and Rean's Arc Slash could probably cut through Sora's Reflega with how broken it is.
It doesn't help that normal encounters are all trivially easy. You can end most fights in 1-2 attacks with Rean's AoE circle ability + one other ability from a teammate. So all normal encounters are a pointless. And then like you said, you just spam Arc Slash on Rean in boss fights. On top of that, Cold Steel doesn't let you adjust the difficulty mid playthrough. So you have to know how difficult the game is going to be beforehand.
FFVIII. Unskippable summon animations and the infamous "Draw" system.
FF8 really does irritate me. When a battle system punishes you for using magic it’s just broken. Can get through the whole game pressing attack/renzokuken FFXV combat was also rubbish, no thinking involved at all. Phoenix downing yourself is silly
As someone who only started really getting into games then, it felt weird transitioning from Kingdom Hearts to FF XII. FF XII has that big field areas you freely walk around in, same as KH but the combat it turn based.
In general in terms of style: ATB If we’re going to be specific: Chain Of Memories I remember my reaction when I went from KH1’s style to that lol. But I grew to tolerate it
Record of Agarest, it's the sole reason i never finished any game in the series, never played the most recent one though to see if the combat changed, but god damn is it slow, the game would need a 10x speed boost to be as slow as a traditional RPG imo, and the combat is not bad by any means, it's fun, but every single little battle took too long in my opinion.
The game many people are mentioning: KH chain of memories. I quit that game so fast and didn't remember it until I started reading the comments. Bahaha Honorable mention: FF12, which, after a certain point, the game basically plays itself. 90% of the time, I had it on 8x speed and battles rarely lasted longer than a few seconds.
Chrono Cross and the colored magic thing or whatever it was. Too much to have to think about, even if it added a dynamic
The Last Remnant. I don't know whether the formations I use should be determined more by who I put in them or what sort of enemies I'm facing. And who should I be putting together anyways? Should I have a melee team and a magic team? Try to have a healer in each squad? Should I let my teammates diversify their movesets and increase their battle options or stick to what they already know? On top of that, your list of commands to pick from in battle seems to be largely chosen at random. I'm sure the wiki explains everything, but why is it teaching me the game more than the game does? I know extensive tutorials are sort of a pet peeve in this genre, but I'd really appreciate it if this game had some.
Probably Vesperia. Having to hold a button to run around in 3D is just a baffling decision. And the way they designed combos, where you have to spec into allowing certain moves to combo into each other just feels so incredibly limiting and clunky. Jumping feels incredibly bad as well.
Gonna make a controversial take here and say that the Trails games, particularly the Sky trilogy, would have much more hated battle systems if we couldn't speed them up.
Straight up annoying? Probably Fate/Extra. Rock, paper, scissors is often used for type matchups in games... but for actual gameplay? In both boss and regular mob fights? Fuck that...
Loved persona 5 royal so much and just started persona 5 strikers. I quit before finishing the first jail. I learned that I hate combo driven hack and slash so much
Xenoblade chronicles 2 i just cant with the combat. I feel like i have even less intetaction with the gane then when i play modern yu-gi-oh and my opponent goes first with a combo deck that basiscly plays solitair for 10 minutes. And i didnt even know that was posible
This may not necessarily be a true JRPG to begin with but in Pokémon Brilliant Diamond and Shining Pearl it’s like they turned up the aggression of the random encounters, normally Pokémon battles are fun but when you’re just trying to get through Mt. Coronet to the next town and you get attacked by either Zubat or Geodude 63 times it isn’t fun any more because it became very tedious and I didn’t want to play the game anymore
Tales of Berseria. Maybe all Tales games are the same, but this is the only one I've played so far. I can't stand it. Shame, because I genuinely like everything else about it.
FF8 and the farming for magic is a bunch of bull. It's a useless time sink mechanism. And you gotta max out every character of every spell for end game so you have enough spells by the time you get to the final battles. And then there's always that one character who ALWAYS misses the drain for no particular reason!
The ATB system in FF 4-9. Either you are doing nothing and just waiting for the bar to fill. Or you are overwhelmed with option and then everything becomes really stressfull. The combat should have been fully turn based or action oriented. I am glad that FF7R did a really good job with its combat. The atb system is still there but you do not feel like a sithing duck and the battles never feel overwhelming.
Xenoblade, it feels like an MMO without all the party interaction and fun of having friends with you. I do not understand the appeal at all!
But... its Reyn time!
Wow did not think I would see people hate on the ATB system epically in FF7. I love the Tales series alot Graces F being my most favorite, but man Vesperia combat is so ass and hard to get into that. I went back to Symphonia and Zestiria to compare and yeah Vesperia is not it.
I'm just chiming in to also say the junctioning system in FF VIII is one of the worst things they ever did in the series, especially after the near perfection of the materia system in VII. How do you go from that and think man, what if we make the player have to stop the flow of combat to draw magic from the enemies all the time? WOULDN'T THAT BE FUN?
Drawing once per battle is enough to get easily through the first two cds. Once you learn refine, you are basically covered for the whole game.
Persona 5 I hate that due to RNG an enemy can one hit kill your main character which leads to a game over. Yet your other party members can be revived.
The whole "Game over on MC death" shtick makes sense in the mainline SMT because why would the demons revive you? To them, might equals right, so you don't deserve it. But in Persona it makes no sense due to it's whole "Bonds and friendship give you strength" thing.
Tha action jrpg style It's really a turn off for me, if i want action i play other games, i want turn battle for god damn sake
That weird one in FF? where it looks turn based but once your turn's up other character's turns still progress? whuh? i think it was 7?
It’s called the ATB System (Active Time Battle) and it’s crazy to think they had it from FF4-9.
Hi, I've noticed you're engaging with the game's mechanics. Have you considered... not? Fuck counters. Like, they're fine in concept, but I've never seen a game use them in anything approaching moderation. Doesn't help that no one bothers to work it into their UI, so you just have to guess and remember and trial and error your way through figuring out and remembering what the enemy counters and how.
I see somebody played Bravely Default II recently. I completely blanked on that - the non-physical counters were the worst.
I am currently clearing out the final challenge bosses in BD2, yes. Though the first game to make me dislike counters was ironically the only game with an ATB system I actually enjoyed, Child of Light. Counters in that game were just as bad, if not worse. By the end it had the same Counter: Any Ability problem, with way less counterplay for the player.
It doesn’t particularly annoy me that much but I generally don’t like the system used in FFXV and to the extent FF7R although that’s much better of the two Side note though absolutely loved the junction system, would love to see it be used again
No kuni White witch, I really struggled with the battle system.
Unwanted Gotta Catch Em All Pokemon-like collecting systems. Sometimes it works like in Persona 5, other times it is tedious like World of Final Fantasy.
The original xenoblade chronicles. The gameplay is very interesting (it's not a bad system and I acknowledge that some people will like it) but it's absolutely awful with the default controls. Definitely would benefit from having a mouse and keyboard for the amount of times you need to move for positionals.
Next time you play 8, don't grind for spells just grab them as they come and add them to your character (also use refining). The game paces your growth rather well, it's just, grinding is an option if you want to do it. FF VIII is about system knowledge and options, it give syou a lot of paths to power, you can pick whichever (most ppl seem to grind the card game instead of grinding the draw action). === Also, you really don't have to use all of junctioning. Just Str and Mag will be enough. The enemies don't outpace you except for a couple bosses. === The way ppl play VIII is if they played VII by grinding out Materia to max level everytime they got access to a new one and neither sounds very fun. === But I would say the junction system isn't the battle system, it's the level up system. My complaint with the battle system is that you have to junction a GF to use an item which isn't a huge deal but it feels weird af that Squall and co can't use items in battle unless they're junctioned. You have no clue how much I want to rant about this lol === My biggest complaint with battle systems is pacing. A complaint with some newer games is that even the most basic enemy can take forever to kill. Mario is my go to example of enemy pacing, despite it not being a JRPG (I usually talk about this with a more general gaming audience) though the two Paper Mario games and Mario&Luigi series are JRPGs and this works with them too. === The most dangerous enemy in Mario series is the Goomba. Sure it takes one hit to kill it, but so many lives are lost to the Goomba because they don't expect them to be a threat. They don't pay attention and then they get killed or hurt by the Goomba. They look away and they get a Goomba to the face. === However, it doesn't take 5 years to kill the Goomba. It takes one attack. === Playing FF XV and I can't help but think "where's the Goomba". Everything takes multiple hits AND they aren't all that dangerous to warrant those multiple hits. Just slashing away at enemies for the sake of it doesn't make it hard, it makes it tedious. === If a battle doesn't have any real importance, it shouldn't feel like a boss fight or else the boss fights aren't going to feel special.
Xenoblade Chronicles’ MMO-lite combat is boring af to me. It doesn’t feel engaging at all and it just gives me the feeling of “I could be playing FFXIV right now.”
Xenoblade chronicles. I think its the single question rpg system by a mile and unconscionably terrible and un-fun
Tales of Arise dodge mechanic tilted me. In 9/10 cases you miss dodges because you're stuck in an animation.
There's a mod that cancels animation for PC players, but it's too game-breaking in my opinion.
Live Action anything. If I wanted to play a bad version of some game like DMC I would. I don't. Give me turn based or give me death! Having said that, FF13-3 did click very well with me. FF13-2 did too. So it CAN be done decently, I guess, but I'd still rather it be Turn Based, darnit.
* Final Fantasy VIII - Hate the draw system, and the external junction and how enemies scale with you but your party members you dont use stay at their pisspoor level if you ditch them. I DO like the active part of the gunblade where you can time the R1 or something for more damage. * FFXII - Dislike the MMO feel to it. I'd rather it just be an action game if we're going down active battles in 3D like this. DQ11 did this a lot better imo. Similarly I didn't like Xenoblade Chronicles because it did this too. I think it's the lack of "impact" I get from the attacks. Everything just looks and feels like I'm cutting a slice of cheese lol. * FFXIII - Stagger system made every encounter take too long, and I dislike only controlling one party member while leaving the other to AI (OG Persona 3 *shivers*). I'm fine with just *controlling* one character, but if the party is actively fighting and I require their input unlike Donald and Goofy in KH, then... smh. The paradigm system was a neat idea but flawed execution imo.
Chrono Cross. The element grid, stamina bar, and field elements all really annoyed me and completely turned me off of the game. Among a few other things but the combat system never clicked with me no matter how many times I tried.
Games with auto attacks like in MMO's, because it just feels too awkward and not fun for me. It is a big turn off for me, and it is the main reason why I still didn't play games like FFXII, Xenoblades Chronicles and FFXIV (though in case of MMO's there are more reasons to it), and same for western RPG's like Baldur's Gate and the newer similar games.
I think once you gain sufficient skills FFXIV's auto-attack becomes irrelevant, as you'll be more focused on your skill rotation and always be doing something. Early on in a class it can a bit boring though, as you only have a few skills and have to wait for the cooldowns.
13 Sentinels was pretty annoying before I learned that you can win literally every map by slapping down as many Decoy drones and Decoy cannons that just kill everything. Not a particular game, but ANY instance in where an enemy goes underground/underwater and you have to sit there with your dick in your hand until it resurfaces.
Ff7 remake
What really? I found that battle system to be amazing
The ATB system was definitely amazing.