Things in RPGs That PISS ME OFF!

[Gabriel]

I like RPGs, but that doesn't mean they're perfect. There are quite a few frustrating elements about them. My return to Xenosaga has reminded me of them in force. Since I will, in all likelihood, FINALLY finish the game very soon, I feel it is an appropriate time to commemorate these flaws.

 

The first problem is one that actually doesn't come up often anymore. Most games have learned to avoid this particular pitfall, but Xenosaga gleefully jumps in head first. That flaw is equipment. In any game when you get an item you have to be able to answer the question, "What is this and what does it do?" Xenosaga makes this difficult. For mecha weapons the game gives no indication of the relative strengths of one weapon against the other, and they're all named "helpful" names like BMP55H. If you're like me, BMP55H doesn't have any particular meaning to you. So, you're forced to buy things blindly without any idea if it's better or worse than what you already have. (Or you can buy the strategy guide, see below)

 

The next problem is also related to equipment, but is more about micromanagement. Some games, Xenosaga included, throw tons of stuff at you and you have to start juggling it immediately. The most basic of these elements are towns and NPCs to talk to. In between each dungeon, the game grinds to a halt as you must wander over the entire universe and talk to every single person standing around. Not only that, but you better also investigate every damn nook and cranny. Xenosaga goes even one better that that. You can select an active character for your party (the character displayed as you're running around onscreen), and certain events are triggered ONLY if you have a specific character selected as active and are checking out certain areas. To top this off, there's so much equipment packed with special abilities and skills. You're constantly switching equipment out and learning new abilities from it. Every few fights, you have to stop and manage your equipment/redo your points before you can get on with what you're doing. In short, most games make you do about an hour of busywork to each hour of actual play.

 

There's also the strategy guide aspect. Xenosaga isn't too bad about this, but there are definitely many games which feature things you simply will NEVER see unless you use the strategy guide. An example in Xenosaga is how Momo (the little magical girl) earns her final spells. You have to select her as your onscreen character, and then you must see a tiny, intermittent flicker of light in a certain location. If you investigate this, you get her spells. Think about it. Unless you have a strategy guide, the only way you'd discover this is if you did so by accident, or investigated every nook and cranny of every map with every character!

 

The strategy guide aspect can be allieviated if you can go back and check things out later. Xenosaga allows this to a certain extent. The bad news is, like many others, there are certain things that if you miss out on the tiny window to unlock them, you're SOL. Xenosaga's example of this is the F-Scythe, Kos-Mos's (the blue haired chick) ultimate weapon. If you don't walk into an officer's lounge near the start of the game, in an area you can never return to, then you will NEVER get her ultimate weapon. There's another subplot of the game which is similar.

 

Returning somewhat to the items issue, it has become a common trend in RPGs to provide lots of special function items which boost stats or cause or prevent various status effects. The trick in all these cases is to mix and match to optimize your characters against opponents. This is straightforward enough. You enter a new dungeon, see the first few opponents, spend the next hour sorting equipment on characters, then proceed with your party better prepared. The problem is when you encounter a boss. In these games there are literally no clues whatsoever about what special items you will need to fight a boss. The best you can do is load up your characters for general combat and hope for the best. But every once in a while you'll encounter a boss with strange capabilities where you really had to optimize yourself specifically to fight the boss. If you didn't, you die, and have to reload your game. In other words, if you didn't read the strategy guide, you die and are going to have to reload and try again. WTF is up with that?

 

A couple of quirks specific to Xenosaga are flying monsters and mech fights. If you happen upon a flying monster, you can only use ranged attacks against them. If you don't have ranged attacks, you just get to be a target. It's extremely irritating to outfit all your mechs with melee weapons (because they're the only things worth a damn) only to find that what you have to fight are flying monsters which can't be attacked with melee weapons. Speaking of mech fights, there's no real rhyme or reason to when you should use your mechs. Sometimes you'll want to use your mech against little targets. Other times you'll want to use your mech against big targets. Early in the game, there are bosses where it really seems you should jump into the mechs for, but doing so is a death sentence for your party. Oh, and even if you want to use your mechs all the time, you can't just have your characters start out combat safe and sound in their giant robot. You have to waste a turn to jump in every time you want to use one.

 

That's it, for now. I should probably complain about mini-games, but the ones in Xenosaga are so perhipheral to the game that I don't have a good rant built up for it right now.

[Bivotar]

I enjoy a good RPG, but haven't played one for quite some time. I admire the people that can get through a game without using a strategy guide. For me, most RPGs became an exercise of working through a strategy guide/walkthrough. Some of the things you were supposed to do or find, like you pointed out, were almost impossible without a guide. Back in the days of the NES and Before the days of the Internet, I remember calling the Nintendo hotline for a few tips on getting through a game like Dragon Warrior or Willow.

 

One of the more frustrating aspects of an RPG for me is talking to all the townspeople and entering the houses. How realistic is that to just randomly enter houses and start searching them?? Or if some old lady is in the house, don't you think she would be like, "WTF!! A group of armed strangers entered my house!! Haven't you heard of knocking?! HELP!!!!".

[Atari5200]

One of the more frustrating aspects of an RPG for me is talking to all the townspeople and entering the houses. How realistic is that to just randomly enter houses and start searching them?? Or if some old lady is in the house, don't you think she would be like, "WTF!! A group of armed strangers entered my house!! Haven't you heard of knocking?! HELP!!!!".

 

It's like that in Oblivion, if you break into a house and people are in there. Even if the door is normally open, if the people don't know or trust you, they'll let you walk around, but they'll follow you to make sure you don't steal things.

 

I do enjoy a good RPG now and then. I've never bought a strategy guide except for FFX and even then i bought it after I beat it , i just wanted to replay it with the strategy guide to get all the Aeons and special weapons.

[Bruce Tomlin]

Wow. That seems even more pathetic in perspective, since I played D&D Heroes (Xbox) about 15 hours yesterday, from first start.

 

Yeah, it's a hack-n-slash rather than an RPG, but even with some need to figure out which items I want to keep (since it limits your inventory by weight), I managed to resist the few momentary temptations to google a walkthrough.

 

My RPG pet peeve is the "walk thirty seconds, fight five minutes" cliche, with battle in a completely different map. No monsters walking around on the screen to avoid, just a timer that says it's time for a random encounter. It's especially annoying when you're just trying to explore to find the layout of the place, in which case it's total murder on your short term memory. This made sense back in the 8-bit days when it was a lot of work to have random monsters walk around on the map for you to avoid, or even to use the same display, but is completely stupid in a 3-D rendered map environment. I had a demo disc with a couple of areas from Wild Arms 3 and it had the exact opposite effect of what demo discs are supposed to do. Instead of making me want to buy the game (which I only finally got last month to fill in a buy-2-get-1-free deal), it made me want to avoid the game like the plague.

 

I played one of the Lunar games by mostly running away once I found I could do it. I was surprised because WD seemed so proud of "improving" games with things like saves costing you points (probably Vic Ireland's idea) that I thought they had made it nearly impossible to run away.

[Bruce Tomlin]

One of the more frustrating aspects of an RPG for me is talking to all the townspeople and entering the houses. How realistic is that to just randomly enter houses and start searching them?? Or if some old lady is in the house, don't you think she would be like, "WTF!! A group of armed strangers entered my house!! Haven't you heard of knocking?! HELP!!!!".

As opposed to the typical console RPG idea that not only can you, but you should open every cabinet and break every pottery jar in town looking for healing potions and stuff.

 

In Morrowind, there's a fort on your way to the second town, and while the towns have crates along the streets that nobody seems to care if you loot them (but I made sure nobody was looking), the soldiers get rather upset if you try to tinker with the crates that have their stuff.

 

It's like that in Oblivion, if you break into a house and people are in there. Even if the door is normally open, if the people don't know or trust you, they'll let you walk around, but they'll follow you to make sure you don't steal things.

Oblivion apparently really puts the "RP" in RPG. My best RPG story is from some guy playing Oblivion.

 

He was fighting a lich at the bottom of a dungeon, and instead of killing the lich, he thieved the loot and teleported out of there.

 

About a month (real time) later, he was in a village that suddenly got attacked. Turns out that the lich had been following him around all that time, and that was the first time he had stayed in one place long enough for the lich to catch up. The good news was that he had leveled up quite a bit in that month, and the lich was toast.

[shadow460]

Oh, you got me started now...

 

ATB: I hate it when you don't know that an enemy attack is going to preempt your own. Case in point is when you're fighting a boss and you're down to one character with a single hit point, but they have a massive revive spell like Final Attack+Phoenix. You summon the Phoenix anyway, but you're a split second too late, and you get hit with something that drains your MP. On the next turn, you dig out a Turbo Ether, but you get hit with some weak elemental attack first, and it's all over.

 

Too many or too few fights: It seems to me that Shining the Holy Ark only attacks you at the worst possible times. If you go back into Desire Mine at the beginning of the game, you can't get attacked at all, no matter how badly you need the experience points. On the other hand, if you move forward though the Mysterious Woods, you get hounded constantly and you get a nice surprise in the graveyard when your HP is at an all time low.

That's not bad compared to SaGa III, though. I've seen times when I go to explore an area...Floatland for example, and I get attacked with every single step I take. I'll fight for a couple of minutes, take a step, fight for a couple minutes, take a step, fight for a couple minutes, take two steps, get into a really tough fight, die, and have to choose "Fight again" half a dozen times in order to avoid going to my save file and losing an hour of play time.

 

Triple Triad: Enough said. "Let's play a game using Dollet's rules and ours!" No, let's not, because the "random" rule sucks balls, and I'd like to abolish Dollet's rules instead of spreading them.

 

Ultra difficult bosses that you have to beat in order to finish the game. Conversely, final or super bosses that are too easy (*cough* Ruby Weapon *cough*) don't help matter either.

The Elite Four are a force to be reckoned with in any Pokemon game. Vegnagun, on the other hand, was a complete pushover. Sa Ga players with a penchant for pain can be punished incessantly by the Creator, Shining Force players can find some serious injury at the hands of Blader, but where's the balanced boss? Diamond and Emerald Weapons are very well balanced, and each poses a significant challenge when the level required to beat them is reached. Ultimecia is another very fun battle.

Sephiroth? Weakling. One hit of Knights of the Round and he's dead. Several other combos exist that will make him whimper for mercy. A good hit of comet could probably kill him, as well as W magic and Quadra Magic+Ultima. A single Omnislash could waste him. Coin Toss is a killer. Where's the Xagor style edge of your seat suspense during the fight?

 

I fought another boss called Chaos in a different game, and he mopped the floor with me for half a day. I didn't like that very much at all.

[thomasholzer]

this happens mostly in japanese rpgs: you kill, move to the next screen, for some reason you return to the previous screen, and the people/monsters you killed have come back to life.

No, bugger off, I'm not interested in killing you again, you are dead already.

Edited June 11, 2007 by thomasholzer

[rockman_x_2002]

For your viewing pleasure: The Grand List of Console Role Playing Game Clichés

 

As for Chaos, sounds like the original FF to me.

[Video]

I personally don't like the randome fights. I mean, yeah, that's the Idea or whatever, but hell, I don't see a reason to run in the map screen for 5 seconds (if your lucky( and then spend 5 MINUTES figinting some lame ass crap that you've already fought 4000 times befor.

 

Weak charactures. I mean, most living creatures in real life have kind of a "kick my ass" detector and if you could easily kill it, it will tend to avoid you (unless you corner it or something) But in RPG's you'll forever be cursed to fight level 1 skeletons and blobs even towards the end of the game.

 

Leveling up. I like that you can level up. But I hate that the game (or bosses) are so badly desiged that they take a 10 hour game (MAX) and stretch it to say 60 hours and say "look, we got a 60 hour game" when it's only that long cause you have to keep fighting lame ass low level charactures for hours and hours, not to get to the next boss, but just so you can even have a hope of standing your ground when you get there.

 

Last RPG I played, that I gave a damn about, was Golde Sun, which was actually fairly well constructed over all, not to many randome fights, no obscenely leveled bosses, and the levels would keep you from running into weak charactures unless you went to earlier parts of the game. Really a great game IMO

[8th lutz]

You have to talk to everyone in town or in a house to trigger an event.

[Malc74]

Random battles are precisely the reason I don't even bother with most RPG's (Japanese ones particularly). The whole concept drives me absolutely crazy. I mean, Origin were able to make games without that kind of nonsense twenty years ago and yet it still seems to be a staple feature in many modern games.

 

this happens mostly in japanese rpgs: you kill, move to the next screen, for some reason you return to the previous screen, and the people/monsters you killed have come back to life.

No, bugger off, I'm not interested in killing you again, you are dead already.

 

I hate this kind of thing in any game, not just RPG's - I found Metroid Prime, in particular, thoroughly irritating because of it - and, of course, it's a staple feature of the Zelda series. Making you kill the same enemies over and over again is just a way of trying to keep you interested while you trudge through the same old areas for the tenth time, not to mention it's a great way to artificially inflate the amount of time it takes to complete a game.

[Scumdogg]

I had a demo disc with a couple of areas from Wild Arms 3 and it had the exact opposite effect of what demo discs are supposed to do. Instead of making me want to buy the game (which I only finally got last month to fill in a buy-2-get-1-free deal), it made me want to avoid the game like the plague.

 

 

Aww crap, i just bought Wild Arms 3.

[Shannon]

# Garrett's Principle

Let's not mince words: you're a thief. You can walk into just about anybody's house like the door wasn't even locked. You just barge right in and start looking for stuff. Anything you can find that's not nailed down is yours to keep. You will often walk into perfect strangers' houses, lift their precious artifacts, and then chat with them like you were old neighbors as you head back out with their family heirlooms under your arm. Unfortunately, this never works in stores.

Just Nod Your Head And Smile

And no matter how big that big-ass sword is, you won't stand out in a crowd. Nobody ever crosses the street to avoid you or seems to be especially shocked or alarmed when a heavily armed gang bursts into their house during dinner, rummages through their posessions, and demands to know if they've seen a black-caped man. People can get used to anything, apparently.

 

 

I think the thing that annoy's me most about modern RPG's is the random battle crap. Probably one of the reasons I like Oblivion so much is that it avoids alot of the annoyances of other modern RPG's. Although it does have a few annoyances of it's own.

Edited June 12, 2007 by Shannon

[Gabriel]

I don't mind random battles at all. In fact, I prefer random battles to the current RPG fetish of being able to see the enemy roaming the map.

 

One thing I hate about the roaming enemies is that, in every game I've seen them used in, it is simply not possible to avoid them. They're invariably placed in narrow areas which you can't maneuver around, and even when they aren't, they can almost always catch you as you try to navigate by.

 

The end result is that if a tiny room has 3 roamers, you will always have 3 encounters. There's no way around it. At least with random battles, you might get lucky and not draw as many encounters. Another thing, every game with random encounters I've ever played has featured a spell or item which eliminates random encounters if used. So, when playing a game with random battles, you could always use that and avoid a lot of the pointless battles on your way to something else.

 

The only good thing I see about the roaming encounters is that it benefits grinding. You know exactly where the encounter is, so you don't have to run through the trees for 8 hours trying to get the specific encounter you want to spawn.

[MCHufnagel]

The thing that I dislike about modern console RPG's is the fact I don't have the time to play them. Half hour cut scenes and 1 hr + boss battles don't cut it for me when I might have only an hour to play at a time. I've been playing portable (DS/GBA) RPG's heavily for the past year. I can save nearly anywhere and at anytime and don't have to worry about spending too much time watching a damn long cutscene.

[Gabriel]

The thing that I dislike about modern console RPG's is the fact I don't have the time to play them. Half hour cut scenes and 1 hr + boss battles don't cut it for me when I might have only an hour to play at a time. I've been playing portable (DS/GBA) RPG's heavily for the past year. I can save nearly anywhere and at anytime and don't have to worry about spending too much time watching a damn long cutscene.

 

I feel your pain in terms of the need to commit large blocks of time to play these types of games.

 

I like cutscenes. If I don't want cutscenes, I'll play something that doesn't have them or rely upon them. Movies are fine. The ones that irritate me are LOOOOONG blocks of text to button press through. Final Fantasy Tactics is the patron saint of the type of cutscenes I despise.

 

JRPG writers really need to learn some lessons about trimming down exposition, and some are in desperate need of having "Show it! Don't tell it!" drilled into their heads.

[Mark III]

I'm just really sick of the genre in general. I've played a lot of RPG's all the way through the 8-bit days to the newer ones and they're all pretty much the same thing. Either Generic Fantasy or Final Fantasy VII rip off. (I'm not a fan of FFVII btw, but it's pretty noticeable how heavily it influenced the genre after its release). RPGs used to be my favorite games but they're in drastic need of some innovation. I've really played enough games with the 16 year old generic goody good hero character or the brooding feminine looking "badass" with amnesia and a mysterious past. I've seen enough of that shit, try something new. Even if it's just a similar game from a different perspective. How about letting us play as a henchman for an expanding empire who has to take over all the towns in the area instead of liberating them? Town's mayor won't cooperate? Offer him a nice juicy bribe to get him on your side, or just burn down his house to show him who's boss. Noticed a really good swordsman in town who won't join your posse? Kidnap his daughter with vague promises of returning her if he works for you. Just watch out for the group of nosey heroes who always seem to turn up and try to mess with your plans.

 

Or how about just being a mercenary for hire? The only goal is to get as much money as you can and be the biggest baddass in town. I know a few RPG's that started this way but then quickly ditched this idea in the first hour or two and reverted back to the generic "recruit a bunch of misfit losers and save the world from an evil empire/corporation/ancient wizard." formula.

 

That's probably why the only RPG I've enjoyed in the last 5 years has been Knights of the Old Republic, as it had at least breathed some fresh air into a tired, tired genre. I really liked how you were constantly faced with decisions which ACTUALLY impact the game and change the story around quite a bit.

 

 

btw: I haven't tried Oblivion out yet, but from what everyone else has been saying I'll definately have to give it a go.

[BydoEmpire]

Wandering around having no clue what to do or where to go. Fortunately, most modern games do a pretty good job of avoiding this. Even a game as big as Morrowind was great, since there was a journal and plenty of people to talk to.

Being forced into fights you have no hope of winning without major grinding. Side quests with really tough fights are fine.

[Bruce Tomlin]

Someone mentioned boss fights. @#%@#$ BOSS FIGHTS.

 

While there are some that aren't too annoying, there is a disturbing tendency to bosses with extremely cheap attacks that either kill you instantly or keep you so busy that you only get one good attack off every couple of minutes, assuming you don't screw up either healing or with the timing of when you can get off the good attack. And it's not just the cheap attacks, it's also how long the battles last. I've played games with boss fights that last half an hour, and that's way too long.

 

I don't mind it as much when after playing for a minute or so, it's pretty obvious how to attack properly (or even how to be cheap back at the boss), but this is usually only in action RPGs like Zelda. Typical JRPGs make you watch a bunch of numbers, and if you blink you'll miss them.

 

And hell, I actually enjoyed the Arbiter's Grounds boss fight in Twilight Princess. I was really getting my JSRF groove on. All I needed was some cheesy J-pop music about making a birthday cake.

[Uzumaki]

What about dialogs? First time I play through a new RPG it's fine but when you've played the game a few times, you tended to want to skip the dialogs for quicker game play. But some asinine programmers made dialogs in some RPG game non skip-able, forcing me to waste about 5 minutes looking through something that I already know.

[Lord Helmet]

I hate invisible walls and barriers that you can't walk through or around.

[Gabriel]

I hate invisible walls and barriers that you can't walk through or around.

 

Near the beginning of Xenosaga 2, there's a little puzzle/mini-game where you have to rush through some kind of malfunctioning electrical installation and turn the power off. About halfway through, there's a section where there's a row of electrical discharges. These discharges push you back and onto a conveyor belt which forces you back to the beginning. You can't step off of this conveyor belt and back to where you originally got pushed on to it. Why?

 

There's a tiny 6 inch curb in the way. Your characters cannot figure out how to step over a 6 inch tall freakin' curb!

 

It absolutely boggled my mind. The character can jump 20 feet up in the air during their combat moves, but while walking around they can't lift their feet high enough to step over a totally insignificant rise in elevation. Even R2D2 and Daleks can go up stairs!

[Atari5200]

you know what pisses me off?

 

That a Fenix down can cure death from anything but a stab from a sword. C'mon, why didn't Cloud bust out a Fenix down on Aeris? In the world of Final Fantasy, nobody should die, ever. lol.

[shadow460]

You have to talk to everyone in town or in a house to trigger an event.

 

You have got to be talking about Enemy Zero here. There's one area that if you don't examine everything in a room that it's possible to examine, the story will not advance, and you will have absolutely no idea why you are stuck. This even puts the game's other half, the FPS part, to a complete stand still.

On that same subject, there are parts that totally deviate from the in game tutorials. David begins to tell you that "the enemy is near", but you can't shoot them with his gun! It doesn't matter how close you try to get, the gun simply does not work. You'd never think that you have more than one way to exit that level, but you do. Instead, you try and try and try, getting killed each time and unloading gobs of shots. Hopefully you don't still have Kimberly's gun, or you're gonna be hosed.

 

Chaos, by the way, was from Sa Ga III. I beat on him for half a day before finally just giving smooth up.

Speaking of Sa Ga, Su-Zaku can take a hike, too. He gets to pick at you whenever he wants, and you can't do a single thing about it except to keep buying those saws.

 

I hate battles that you have to fight, but you can't trigger normally. Case in point is when you're either trying to defeat a particular boos (Ultima Weapon is a very good example of this) or trying to steal an item you need.

 

Stone. Just kill me, please. *Game Over* ok, thanks.

Even worse, instant death spells that affect your whole party.

"Cart ghost casts soul steal level 2!

Arthur's soul was stolen!

Basso's soul was stolen!

Melody's soul was stolen!

Forte's soul was stolen!"

Oh, great!. The last time I saved was in Mirage Village! There go a couple of hours of play time... and what's worse is that the entire reserve party, including Doyle, is at full health. If I'd known this would happen, I'd have tried one of the other characters who might have avoided instant death.

 

Here's another nasty surprise:

Gloria attacks <enemy> with <-Drain.

<enemy> has more power to absorb!

Gloria fell...

 

-or-

 

Gloria attacks <enemy> with <-Durend

<enemy> counters with StonSkin

Gloria was turned to stone!

 

Just kill me already *Game Over* ok, thanks...

[Lord Helmet]

you know what pisses me off?

 

That a Fenix down can cure death from anything but a stab from a sword. C'mon, why didn't Cloud bust out a Fenix down on Aeris? In the world of Final Fantasy, nobody should die, ever. lol.

 

Ha! That's a good question!

 

Oh..and its Phoenix down