Music: No idea if this has been mentioned yet (this is one monster thread). Yes, the composer for Final Fantasy may be an award-winning, ingenious and brilliant composer ever, but hearing the same combat theme uncountable times and having it repeats in your dream is not cool. Why not throw in several more combat tracks, like Heroes of Might and Magic?
Party Size Limit: How cool! The typical Final Fantasy games give you a roster of around eight, but you can only use three or four at the same time. Chrono Cross was guility of this too - over forty characters, and you can only use three!
The worst is when characters not in the party does not level up. Which brings us to…
Unexpected One to One Duel in RPG: Now and then the audience demands blood and the storyteller hence puprosely arrange for an one-on-one duel. The character, and if Murphy’s Law applies, the character which you didn’t train at all, will be in the duel, and guess what, he fights alone and if he loses, it is game over.
Tour of rendered polygonial cities: Yes, some of the games out there are pretty beautiful. But gosh, it doesn’t mean that I have to wander in them for more than ten minutes just to get a simple fetch-quest done. One particular guility game is Sukioden II. It throws you into a big city near the beginning and you are just wandering all about the place, looking for …well, I don’t know what I was really looking for.
Any fps type game where you can’t jump or otherwise get around objects. For example, there is a 1ft high by 3ft wide wooden box in front of you. You have killed 1000’s. You are the baddest thing that walks. But you can’t step on top of that stupid box. Nor can you destroy it with your vast firepower. You must go around it.
Agree with most of the masses. Jumping puzzles = bad.
MMORPGS - balance issues, untested patches. Also stupid dev’s. For example, the dev’s announce, “We are going to do X in a future patch.” The players cry, “Noooo! That will make A too uber, B useless, and C just plain boring.”
They do X anyway, it seems largely untested and bug ridden. Months down the road the dev’s put out a note, “We are changing X. It seems it has made A too uber, B useless, and C just plain boring.”
Unless a game is really pushing realism, I have no problem with an unlimited inventory.
In Leisure Suit Larry II-Looking For Love In Several Wrong Places, one of the items is a soda cup the size of a trash can. When you try to pick it up, you get a message like ‘What? There’s no way you could ever pick that up! Even if you could, where would you keep it! Oh, what the heck. This isn’t real life. Just an incredible simulation.’ Larry then picks up a container filled with what must be several hundred gallons of fluid, and puts it neatly in his inside breast pocket.
Re Scantily Clad Babes
Unless the babe in question is a thief or mage, she should be armored like a tank. (For those who don’t play D&D, mages can’t cast spells if wearing armor. Thieves have problems moving silently, climbing walls, hiding in shadows etc when wearing most armors)
I’d say that the internal explanation would be that the powers derive from the dressphere in the garment grid and when you’ve got the Warrior sphere loaded up you can’t use the powers derived from the Black Mage sphere (unless you’ve got a Black Magic Lore handy, which leads to an interesting catch that you get a Bushido Lore before you get the Samurai sphere and…).
As an external explanation: you want the game easier?
This is not to say I dislike the game. I think the dresspheres are an interesting spin on the jobs system. Then again, I play RPGs now as much for interesting mechanics as for interesting plots.
Reminds me of Freddy Pharkas: Frontier Pharmiscist, where at one point the title character picks up about a dozen huge sacks of baking soda and squeezes them all into his pocket(the narrator makes a comment about this making a horrible sound).
In the demo, and even the game itself, there is a joke about being able to pick up the building you own and putting it in your inventory. The demo says you’ll be able to do so once you buy the full game and the game says you can do it, but you have no reason to carry it around.
Inventory rarely makes sense, with people carrying far more then they should be able to. When playing The Legend of Zelda: A link to the past, I used to remark that Limk should have a little wagon he’s pulling to carry his inventory. The first FF games first had a number of spaces you could fill with one item per space, but later this rull was ditched in favor of "You can carry as many types of items as you want, but can only carry 99 of each type., which seemed a little arbitrary.
The Fallout games had a fairly good system, where all objects had weight and you could carry a certain amount of weight depending on your strength. Granted, you could still carry a lot of stuff and I have no idea where you put it, but it’s better then most systems I’ve seen. Though your NPC teammates(at least in the first game) didn’t have these rules apply to them, so people who knew this usually ended up putting all their spare crap on their NPC teammates until they could sell it off.
The Journeyman Project games actually had a “null time pocket” that held an infiniate amount of items so you could store all your junk while you weren’t using it. Probably the best example I’ve seen of “infinite inventory”.
Not in years. There are tricks to it, such as finding certain hollows. You sit in a little depressed area and wait for the flash. When you jump back and out of the hole, you turn around and as the next flash comes (almost immediately) you jump right back in. It keeps you from having to walk around to keep from backing into the protected areas, and walking around is what really kills you since the dodging seems to work better when you’re standing still.
Ironically enough (considering the complaints here), from what I recall, FFX-2 has actually been pretty good in this regard. IIRC, all the jobs that are combat oriented and have high defense (Warrior, Dark Knight, Samurai, etc.) have pretty modest and body-covering garb. The only exception I can think of is the Berserker, and they’re not generally known for caring about defense. All the “scantily clad” jobs, like White Mage and Lady Luck, are magic-oriented jobs. Not that this is necessarily what folks complain about, but I just thought I’d point it out.
One of my older pet peeves that isn’t as applicable anymore is the limited-use weapon as your ONLY source of damage. This was first introduced to me in the first Final Fantasy games for Game Boy. GOD, did I HATE having to buy and keep a fresh supply of weapons for my party for when their uses inevitably ran out! Dark Cloud had something similar, but their way to get your weapon use back was a LOT more common and a LOT cheaper…
That really bugged me in Chrono Cross, too. I think that the party size could and should have been expanded to six members, which would have fitted in nicely with the six innate elements. One thing that I DID like in CC was the Relief Charm that Serge awakened with in the New Game+. This charm allowed another character to take Serge’s place in battles.
I don’t play video games to sightsee. This was my main complaint with Myst. I believe that Myst is the only computer/video game I’ve ever sold.
In one of my first D&D campaigns, the DM introduced the concept of hiring a muleskinner and team of mules to the group. It was one of his ways of keeping our wealth low. If we tried to do without the mules and teamster, we ALWAYS found a valuable, huge item. In video games, I find that having 99 of a particular item to be really outrageous. And having 99 potions, and 99 hi potions, and 99 ethers…well, let’s get real here. We’re supposed to have those items available in our immediate inventory?
As for the scantily clad babes, even a thief or mage is likely to wear clothes that cover her completely. A thief’s or stage illusionist’s accomplice, on the other hand, might very well wear as near to nothing as she possibly can, as a distraction from the activities of the thief or performer. Any adventurer is going to learn very quickly to cover up exposed flesh. At the very least, one wants some protection from the minor bruises and scrapes that an adventuring lifestyle is liable to incur. When I used to go camping with a girls’ group, we were always told to wear clothes which would protect us from thorns, insects, stray branches, and the like. And this was at a well-established campground. I don’t imagine that a wilderness or dungeon setting is more hospitable than Camp El Tesoro.
Yeah, someone said that earlier, and pointed out that this is explicitly explained within the game. This is one of the explanations that make the problem sound even dumber than it did before I heard the explanation, though.
I still haven’t finished the game, but so far, I’ve found it a lot harder than FFX. I made it more than 3/4 of the way through X before I lost a fight. I’ve already gotten my ass kicked dozens of times in X-2.
Me too, but I also want systems that are at least vaguely realistic, at least within the conventions of the game’s genre. The dress sphere system in X-2 feels too gamey to me: the limitations are obviously made for game balance reasons, and not for the purposes of realism. Still a good game and all, but this sort of thing still bugs me. Especially after the great grid system FFX used, which was one of the best leveling schemes I’d ever seen in a game. I remember the first time I pulled the view all the way back to see the full grid, and just thinking, “DAMN! That’s a lot of experience points.”
Granted, it would have been much more realistic if you could have instantly healed dozens of high-caliber gunshot wounds with a simple first aid kit you could find in any medicine cabinet.
To be fair, that kind of thing has been a staple of video games for a long time before “Return to Castle Wolfenstien”.
That and I’m not sure how you can criticize the realism of a game that has the Nazis inventing both a manportable minigun and tesla weapons, as well as creating zombie-cyborg supersoldiers.
So you’re saying Hellboy isn’t historically accurate?
Re-Phreddy Pharkas Frontier Pharmacist
Some similarities with Larry are to be expected. Both were written by Al Lowe. He also wrote the surprisingly wholesome Torin’s Passage.
Pharkas deserves mention here for something I’ve never seen in any other game. IIRC The demo is not just a section of the full game. The demo involves objects not found in the full game, actions you can’t perform in the full game, and a problem you never have to deal with in the full game.
Re Inventory
The C 64 game Time Tunnel actually used something like a null pocket- a gnome closet. Just hold down the fire button, and you’ll be transported to the gnome closet-an odd little room on a seemingly infinite plane. Oddly, the closet only held IIRC 6 items. It was still very useful considering that you could only carry one item at a time.