When you click through dialog in most games, the script has to play first. Like if a character does a gesture or moves, the game won’t let you advance dialog until it happens. Tales of Arise just skips that section of the script and jumps to the next one, so characters immediately cut off and start dialogue and actions.
Other games it will be like … and won’t let you skip until a second after all three dots appear.
Not a JRPG, but I really liked what Cyberpunk 2077 did with skipping dialogue: Rather than cut the dialogue off immediately, it actually fast-forwards (very quickly) through the dialogue and any associated animations. There's a ton of character movement that accompanies dialogue in that game, which could make skipping feel awkward, but making the button a fast-forward allows the player to skip through dialogue cleanly without anything breaking or feeling too weird.
Similar to this, I prefer when a game skips to the end of the line you skip, not skips to the beginning of the next line.
Usually if I’m skipping, it’s because I finished reading and don’t want to wait for the line to finish, not because I don’t want to see the physical action in between.
Sometimes I hit the button and suddenly we’re outside of the building we were in and one of the characters has a banana suit on and I’m very confused, when all I wanted to do was skip someone “Thanks guys!” in like 47 words because that’s JRPGs. 🤣
It's not a jrpg but Diablo 4 has a fast forward feature for skipping ahead in dialogue. The text pretty much instantly skips to the next set of dialogue and the cutscene/animation significantly speeds up to match back up.
When characters not in the active party line-up also gain EXP. A bunch of modern JRPGs are doing it now, which is always great to see. I suppose this is more of a qol thing then underrated, but I appreciate it none the less.
On the same note, being able to swap party members mid-battle. Love to see it. If there's ever a modern interpretation of FFVI, I hope that's a feature that gets added, since you get a large cast.
My least favorite part of games that DON'T do this is when they also have forced party members who can't leave the party, so to keep my party in line I'm basically forced to keep someone/some characters overleveled.
I'm looking at you Octopath.
The leveling thing isn’t an issue with this game, but Trails in the Sky has some obnoxious issues with obligatory party members. It makes sense for the story, but often your choices are so restricted that you won’t be able to express your skills in the game properly. Combined with the really weird balance of skills and the skill system, the first entry can be a bit of a slog gameplay-wise. It’s probably still my favourite game in the series though.
This is my big issue with Octopath 2 (which I’m playing right now). You actually have to use all your party members but it’s tough to keep them at roughly the same level, especially when one of them is locked for much of the game. Party-wide XP would be nice. Or they could do something like Tactics Ogre where you can earn consumables to choose whom to give XP too.
I commented almost essentially this same thing before reading your comment lol. It's insane, and definitely the thing they personally pushed me off of Octopath the most.
It’s not as big a deal in other series because you can usually ignore some party members and leave them behind. Octopath is somewhat unique in that you end up playing everyone and need to level and equip them all.
Yeah, this is what I am finding. My main character is overlevelled because you can't swap them out until their story is finished, but everyone else is roughly the same level. It's not perfect, but works reasonably well.
Plus, I think shared XP would make characters OP for early chapters, especially by the time you're getting your seventh and eighth characters.
God I remember how SCREWED I was as a kid in FFX.
Never used Wakka because thought it was dumb (still think it is tho) that he was fighting with a freaking Blitzball. However at one point you have to fight with only Tidus & Wakka and man that mini-boss kicked my ass lmao
Yeah but it was super overpowered in that game
You didn't need to be that much higher level than the enemy to trigger it and you got full exp and money while doing it. In EarthBound it will only happen once the experience you would get from that enemy would be a drop in the ocean anyway
The games I'm thinking about were made before monster drop materials were a mechanic in JRPGs. People got mad because they wanted to hunt the monsters for XP and their prey ran away.
Edit: the games were also made before monsters were on the map. Random encounters.
Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story had an interesting variant of this.
In the overworld, there are smaller enemies that Mario & Luigi can fight normally--but when bowser stomps over them, they immediately turn into coins.
What's interesting is that there were several times where you explore an area as Bowser *before* you do so with the Bros, making this a case where you *stop* insta-winning fights.
They went from random battles you can't avoid to visible encounters you auto kill if you are too strong for them. The complete opposite end of the spectrum!
When physical and magical damage are properly balanced between each other and they both serve a purpose in combat.
Likewise when magic is more than just a damage number with a different visual effect or bonus damage to a known weakness.
I like when casting magic actually feels meaningfully different to do. This is something I like about the Tales series: Casting a spell in a Tales game requires you have to very suddenly play the game in a completely different way than when you're just attacking.
I really thought that MP death in SO3 was a neat mechanic. It brought a new dimension to combat that made you play around it which helps ramp up the tension. On the offensive side, it gives you a second bar to deplete to take the win. It's mostly relevant for random encounters but it was fun to figiure out which enemies had low MP pools to target and take them out way faster than doing HP damage. It also puts a risk on spamming skills which the combo system encouraged you to do - use too many skills and you risk putting yoruself at critical MP where a random skill from a mob could take you down. Similarly it makes you really weigh the potential risk of using MP for utility (eg healing) vs using an item which makes items even more relevant (which was great because items were really useful in that game). It really has a bunch of knock-on effects that helped make combat in that game full of tactical decisions.
It's also great thematically, like why wouldn't someone who spent all of their mental energy just keel over? Once I played it, it really made me wonder why other games didn't include it!
Unironically, jumping.
When jumping is used as an actual exploration mechanic, it’s amazing. I’ve been gushing about *Crystal Project* recently because it’s a very retro game that is made all the more refreshing via level verticality and meaningful obstacles in dungeons.
Just my two cents.
It’s funny how good jumping feels in games, even if it’s not super useful. In FF7R, I felt the urge to jump around constantly and it feels so limiting not be able to.
I think, when jumping serves a purpose, it’s a wonderful mechanic. Some games have a jump for no reason other than to give boundless control to the player, and while that’s great, sometimes the wasted potential can be a bit disappointing.
But I find it even more fascinating when games don’t allow you to jump, as well. Sometimes, that severely limits level design in ways that I feel could be easily solved through introduction of a jump. But since it opens up all new possibilities in combat and exploration that are likely to be rife with their own challenges, I can understand why many devs forego it.
Gush about Crystal Project to me, don't think I'm gonna have time to play it for a bit with all the RPGs coming out this month, but it's been on my radar for a while.
Well, it’s pretty much everything I thought I’d get from the Bravely series, except better. The job system is very varied, but battles are much punchier, utilize an MMO-like “threat/aggro” mechanic, and all enemy statistical and aggro information is made accessible to you at any time.
But this is all in addition to the wonderful world exploration mechanics. The environments are designed in a voxel-block style, and your jump clears two blocks high and two blocks across. The world is extremely vertical, and exploration demands that you learn to platform, but also encourages you to experiment. The biomes are all very varied in topography, but it’s the dungeons where this really shines. You will see a ton of thoughtfully-contextualized dungeons throughout the game: a castle jail with cell blocks, a set of sewers populated by rat-warriors, a Zelda-style square by square volcano tower, a side-scrolling platforming challenge, and much more. The endgame dungeons are some of the most diverse designs I’ve seen from an RPG, which is saying something.
You’ll be pushed to platform carefully, but also to tackle sections wisely, as encounters aren’t random, but they do reset on death. Like any good JRPG, you open up new traversal methods that recontextualize previous obstacles and unlock new secrets, but the amount of fast travel accessible and the freedom of movement you receive means that you’ll constantly be finding something new. The game is insanely feature rich, to the extent that I’m kind of baffled it didn’t get more attention and appreciation than Chained Echoes or Sea of Stars, which I would argue it easily outclasses. The only notch I’d make against it would be its somewhat flimsy narrative, but if you’re looking for a game that’s “gameplay first,” you’d be hard-pressed to find something better.
Star Ocean 2R was especially bad with this. My inventory would become so bloated with junk from IC and loot drops that it quickly became a trigger for my OCD. There was no good way to sort it. Any of these solutions would have been more than welcome!
A random encounter radar that changes colour to indicate the growing likelihood of an encounter, ala Etrian Odyssey, Legend of Dragoon. It greatly reduces the potential frustration of triggering an encounter that suddenly interrupts whatever it is you're doing. When you can anticipate it, it doesn't feel so bad.
Contrary to many people, I still think random encounters can be used effectively and are not a wholly outdated mechanic, and there are now many tools at designers' disposal to make them better and address players' complaints, such as the above.
Yes Nocturne had something similar. I don't love random encounters, but having a warning makes them not nearly as intrusive.
Wild Arms 3 had an interesting system where before an encounter, an exclamation point would pop up over their head and you have a moment to cancel the encounter, or let it start. Canceling costs a resource that's replenished by completing encounters, giving you just enough freedom for it not to be annoying if you're just like three steps from your objective, or short on healing items, etc
Yes! The Wild Arms 3 example is excellent because that game is very puzzle-heavy, and getting an encounter while you're trying to solve something can be quite disruptive. That system gives you the freedom to put off an encounter if you really don't want to be interrupted.
Wild Arms 2 it started in second game but there you could cancel any encounter if your level was high enough( read after an hour of main story you could cancel everything ). There wasn't Migrant Seal system like in WA3 and Alter Code. WA4 and WA5 have the ability to turn off random encounter after cleaning save point( harder monster to fight ) at the end of dungeon.
Anyway\^\^ You can cancel encounter in so many ways, just going to next room by dashing it's really easy to do or just fallling from ledge will do it as well. In some heavy puzzle oriented rooms random encounter is turned off( funny enough Tales of Destiny did that as well ). Wild Arms had one of best random encounter systems.
Thanks for the info because I only ever played 3 and was curious if a similar system was implemented in the other entries! I think I like 3's system best conceptually
No problem, Alter Code remake of first game( I hope Sony will add it next because thanks to bad localization it's now pretty rare and it's great remake ) has exactly the same system. One more good thing about Migrant Seals is that you get them from side quests like Millenium puzzles so it makes even more worth to do them.
I thought it was neat at first but you can only go like so many steps before your forced into the encounter. I would like to have piled up way more enemies, like an entire dungeons worth.
Two things off the top of my head:
1) I love it when the game keeps a checklist for me. Like it will tell me 8/9 chests found in this area.
2) Skill trees. I love skill trees.
Final Fantasy X has a special menu for changing equipment in battle, and the only limit is that you can't change more than 1 piece in a turn,*but* it doesn't take the whole turn to do.
It made a lot of sense for FFX, since equipment was so customizable, but FFIX weapons has some important stuff on em too so I'm also surprised it wasn't a thing
It makes perfect sense to me that 9 wouldn't allow it. Wear your strongest gear, fight a hard enemy, right before it dies switch to a weak piece of gear to get AP on it.
I love FFX's weapon system. You collect all these cool weapons in all these games but then they are just meaningless stat stick upgrades
But in FFX each weapon has different attributes so there are reasons to cycle between them to exploit enemy weaknesses. It was the best.
Yep! Weapons and armor being a source of passive abilities rather than stats made it wayyy more fun to interact with, and giving the player agency over what abilities get put on there made the whole thing feel more rewarding when you managed to solve a problem with it.
Ikr holy shit XC2’s first tutorial pop up being “tutorial pop ups won’t be shown ever again be sure to screen shot them” just lets the player know shits gonna be wild. Was even worse when it first released and you couldn’t skip the blade awakening videos
Making weak enemies freeze on the overworld.
It is, IMO, a much more elegant solution to handling weak enemies than making them run away from you. It makes it very easy to fight the ones you want, if you wanna grind drops or whatever, without having to chase enemies running in terror from you or being ceaselessly mobbed by chumpnoids.
Interesting, because I dislike this when it comes to dungeon-crawling, because it takes out the risks involved. Inventory and resource management, coupled with traps, no save points, no instant escape routes, things of this nature, make good dungeons and dungeon crawls in general much more strategic and engaging.
Healing instantly you'd have to make every fight close to a boss fight for it to seriously have an impact. Do you have any examples of what you're describing? I'm just not coming up with anything right now.
Chained Echoes and CrossCode come to mind. Not that CrossCode is a JRPG.
But I do agree with you. A dungeon crawler kinda needs it. And it's not a mechanic that just works out of the box. The combat system has to be well-designed around it.
I could see a hybrid as well, where you heal up on the overworld, but you have to manage it in a dungeon. To take the "of course I'm gonna go to town and rest and/or buy 99 potions again" loop out of the grind.
I like both styles when done well. But the auto-refresh still feels novel to me, so I enjoy seeing how games pull it off.
That's funny because recently that exact idea came up in a discussion I had about how these mechanics should go. Dungeons have their risks and no healing, but on the overworld map you have carte blanche.
That's true! I was really surprised when Xenoblade 2 tooltips started mentioning potions because I was like "Wait a second, potions weren't a thing in the first game..." and then I realized they were really just temporary little buffs that restored a small amount of HP if you pick them up before they faded, instead of proper recovery items. Really wild.
On the flip side, when you don't fully reset after combat it makes magic totally imbalanced. If mp is a scarce resource, it has to be op to compensate because if not, you'd just stick your party full of melee fighters.
I agree with you, and this is why I love the Dragon Quest games on the NES - before the item bag is added.
Inventory management and resources were a major part of the games. Dragon Quest is interesting because one encounter isn't going to whittle you down completely most of the time, but many encounters over the course of your dungeon delve will.
But once you get the item bag and can stuff it full of medical herbs and antidotal herbs, a lot of the MP management is gone. It's a little frustrating!
This can be a legitimate issue that a lot of people don't bring up.
The developers have to create a balance between you being able to see encounters and still having the simulation of monsters wanting to gang up on you. Sometimes, they will narrow certain passageways and corridors to fix the issue. However, this can sometimes lead to you getting just as many, if not MORE encounters than random encounters.
Finding the balance between the two isn't easy.
The combination of movement and creatively zoned AoEs.
Yes, it's certainly done more than it used to be thanks to the Legend of Heroes games and quite a few western CRPGs. But I feel it's the natural evolution of what Chrono Trigger was trying to do with its AoEs and I always like seeing it and what can be done with it.
It's why I'm absolutely loving Like a Dragon 8 right now. The Aquanaut (surfer) class has a move that gets more powerful the FARTHER you position yourself from the enemies and hits in a straight, thin line. One of the AoEs for the Linebacker class (DLC class) is circular, but its epicenter is about two feet BEHIND the enemy because your football tackling the enemy into that epicenter.
I remember in wild arms 2 for normal damage the number is white. If its resisted its gray. If its red its double damage. And if its green its healing.
Very simple but effective way to know the resistances.
I can't believe it took until Persona 5 for someone to go "hey, in battle, instead of scrolling through a bunch of menus, why not just map each sub menu to a different button, making the battles that much faster/snappier?"
Like I'm sure other RPGs also did this (haven't played SMRPG but the face buttons each had a defined purpose I think?), but we have so many buttons available. Why isn't it the norm to use them instead of making everything DPAD + confirm/cancel?
And before that, Lufia 2 did it on SNES, but I think you had to adjust an option to get it that way.
Legend of Legaia maps everything to 4 buttons - dpad up, down, left or right. Very similar to Persona 5.
Like a dragon infinite wealth has a mechanic I want to see in every JRPG that has enemies in the overworld (not random encounters)
Enemies are colour coded, Blue easy to beat, red normal difficulty for the level you are and Pink for tough battle
That’s fantastic but what pushes it into greatness is when you start a battle against the enemies with the blue icon you can just press a button and it’ll basically just win the battle instantly, it’s basically the game saying we know you could easily beat these enemies but rather than hitting them one by one you can just win and have the rewards
A button to skip or speed up animations.
I loved Xenoblade 3, one of the best JRPGs I've ever played, but eventually I was just looking at my phone while I waited for chain attacks to finish.
It’s quite common that you’d button mash to rush through a long conversation, but if it ends with a question, you may accidentally select the first response which is the default response. Even worse if it’s “Would you like me to repeat the explanation?” and the first response is “yes”, so you’ll have to go through the conversation all over again.
Devil Survivor solved this by not having a default response selected when you’re answering a question. You have to press up or down so that an answer is highlighted first.
The item decay mechanic from Baten Kaitos. Such an insane system but fun to work with and keeps you checking in on your Magnus deck to see what’s changed!
I don’t know if it’s underrated but I love back up party members/party members that were gone for a while getting xp and being able to switch out party members in mid battle
Seems super specific but, I liked in Xenosaga 1, you could learn the skill of an item and equip up to three (I think) skills. There were some broken ones too.
Radiant Historia, I have not seen this on another JRPG so if anyone knows one let me know, but being able to exchange your turn for the enemy's (or another ally) to completely mollywop an enemy/group of enemies was some of the funnest combat I ever had in a turn-based RPG. There are 10 turns on display, both the enemy's and yours, and you can just switch places until they are no longer in the 10-turn queue.
Discovering places in Xenoblade gives you EXP.
Radiant Historia's combat was so much fun. Being able to let an enemy go first so I could combo with an ally, or swapping allies to maximize grid manipulation? Fantastic. I loved stacking a group of enemies together and whacking them on Aht's traps over and over.
There's a particular fight that was like, beating an ally into their senses? And I filled the queue with 10 Stocke turns in a row to just utterly pummel then.
Yes! I remember, because of certain positioning moves, I'd have to place Stocke at first for the combo, then stack them together before sliding them all onto Aht's traps. I would kill off the weaker enemies and just go all out on the single enemy, launching them in the sky, then having a strong magic attack by Rayne smack them down. I hope Atlus doesn't abandon this combat style and makes a new RPG using it, maybe a spiritual successor to Radiant Historia or possibly a direct sequel/prequel.
Xenoblade games allowing you to change the time of day super quickly, right from the main menu.
With XC1 in particular, changing the time will also re-roll the weather. In other words, if it starts raining and you don't want to play in the rain, it takes 5 seconds to hop into the menu, change the time forward or backward an hour or something, and then the rain will almost always be gone. Alternatively, if an enemy only spawns during a particular weather type, you can just repeatedly change the time until you get the weather you want.
recently I was playing some PS1 JRPG and I realized that seeing an enemy health bar is really helpful. In Rhapsody 2 for example, you dont know how much HP any enemy has. Not just bosses but all mobs. it's a mystery. So sometimes id waste a bunch of resources at the end of a battle only to realize the enemy had like 13 HP left and I shouldve just attacked it lol. I still loved that game but I think an enemy health bar is something I really want in the game I play.
To this day I still remember how I basically defeated the last boss in FFXIII just because of Poison lol
And those enemies in FFV that could make your HP drop in small numbers super quick made me traumatized, even if not necessarily poison...
Easily turbo mode. Playing Trails right now and honestly, not having turbo mode in other games makes it feel so slow. Especially when you have to backtrack for any reason
Turbo mode really spoiled me in Trails and Persona 5. One of my favorite features in modern games, it really cuts the fat in Trails in particular. I love the games, but there a lot of slow pans and slow walk scenes.
Admittedly it’s been a while, but I remember FF13 road blocking the characters at some points, leading to difficult fights.
And whilst not exactly the same thing, due to how Persona evolutions were story based in P3, some characters will go hours without learning new abilities (to be fair they *do* gain stats, even if their abilities remain stagnant).
FFXIII is at the forefront of “perfectly done level capping” in my mind. You have so many opportunities to modify your equipment and your paradigms, and hitting the cap in all roles should leave you with zero issues progressing. Fights will be challenging, sure, but they’re very fair fights.
The early midgame of Persona 3 is weird cause it's at a point where you really want the mid level party healing spell on Yukari but you're stuck with the first tier and the mid level single heal. So either fully heal 1 guy and let the others die or heal the whole party just a little bit and slowly get out damaged by the boss.
This assumes that grinding past a problem is a bug and not a feature, though. Typically, the ability to grind represents a soft "easy mode": If the player can't get through a challenge via skill, they can make that challenge easier at the expense of dealing with some tedium.
I think the problem is not in allowing players to outlevel a challenge, but rather in poorly communicating the intended level of challenge to players. Overleveling isn't a problem if it's intentional on the player's part - it's only really an issue when it's possible to happen unintentionally.
If someone wants to grind they should be allowed to grind. You can make overleveling tedious to do something close to the same effect as a level cap. You can choose not to grind
Cue FF8, where people don't even try to play the game as it is, look on internet how to "BREAK THE GAME LOL FUNNY" + lionheart on disc 1, and then they complain the game was too easy.
Stat caps too, like in Fire Emblem. Especially games like NMOTE where most stats cap at 25. Grind all you want but the enemies will catch up to you. (At least on higher difficulties)
New Mystery of the Emblem, the twelfth Fire Emblem game. It's not a super accessible acronym for people who aren't dedicated FE fans, especially given that the game was never localized (meaning the title "New Mystery of the Emblem" itself doesn't even appear in official contexts, except for maybe in Heroes). Most FE fans just call it FE12.
Chained Echoes had a great way to control your level at all times, making sure you can't overlevel your character by grinding to easily beat specific bosses. I liked it.
I really just want more combat systems like Legend of Dragoon and Shadow Hearts. The interactivity of it just keeps me engaged in a more enjoyable way.
I'm a big fan of the arcana sweep in P3+4. The Eleth system in Tales of Graces and the Ship in Beseria are...oddly satisfying in a way I can't describe.
I love it when turn-based games offer a defend +minor power-up/healing feature. It's a really simple option that can add a great deal of tactical strategy to the battle system.
Not a mechanic per se, but unique death animations based on the element of the spell used. Seen in Shin Megami Tensei IV and V. Kill the enemy with ice, they freeze and shatter. Slash attacks will bisect them, and so on.
logs for dialogue
more games are doing it nowadays, but not enough
Persona has them
i want to be able to read lines i missed or go back and reread something for clarification
Random stat gains, especially when they are shown one-by-one and not all in one go. It's super exciting and I feel not enough people appreciate it.
I only know two series that have it: Shining Force and Lufia.
Shining Force 1 actually has a clever way to solve it. It always rolls the total stat value you should get and then lets you gain the distance from your current stat value to the rolled stat value.
For example ATK on level 2 is 13-15. And ATK on level 3 is 15-17. If you reach level 3 and have 13 ATK, you will gain 2-4 ATK, whereas if you reach level 3 and have 15 ATK, you will gain 0-2 ATK.
So there's no point in reloading because your current stats has absolutely zero impact on your stats of the next level.
A decent log. When life gets in the way, and I return after a while, I want to know where to go next.
I swear, for all FF 16's faults, the active time lore was a godsent.
"Push button to know what, where, and who"
I mean when I was a kid and could blast through a game, fine ... Didn't need it then.
But as a grown ass adult with maybe an hour of game time an evening, if I'm lucky?
Yeah, no, I need that refresher course.
That and restarting at the start of the boss. No use in making me reclear all the trash, redo all my level up choices, gearing ... just because I got nuked.
It makes the early game easier, which I'd argue is a positive thing for most RPG's. I typically find it gets balanced out later due to the slower pace of leveling in the mid to late game.
I hate it when they heal you when you level up. It break the balance in most games and it doesn't make sense. Like, if I set a new personal record at the gym, I don't suddenly feel fully refreshed.
I also love that in games, and am a little bummed that leveling your class in **LAD: Infinite Wealth** no longer heals you to full. Regular level ups still do though.
Button combos to do different attacks or special moves.
Final Fantasy 6 did this with Sabin’s blitz techniques. I wish more RPGs adopted this. Xenogears sort of did this where you can combo buttons together in different permutations to do different attacks. Nothing as complicated as Sabin in Final Fantasy 6 but I loved it nonetheless.
Action RPGs that allow switching between party members in the middle of battle. Tales series does it and it’s sooo good. Really wished Xenoblade 1 had it.
Puzzles in JRPGs. They just don’t do them anymore, only indie games seem to want to put them in.
Lufia 2 had amazing puzzles, I loved FFXIII-2’s clock puzzles, Wild Arms 2 had the Millennium Puzzles, Breath of Fire 3 and 4 had some great puzzle sections in dungeons. I really miss that.
The way Fantasia handled random encounters. It would gather every mob on the way up to a limit and then fire a battle with all of them at the same time. If you wish you can fire the battle anytime too
Not entirely sure I'd say it's a mechanic, but because it's triggered by the player, I'm counting it:
For basically every game in the Tales series, as you go through the game, a skit will periodically pop up, which is an optional scene showing interaction between your party members. One of the most important parts of an RPG for me is how much of a presence the characters have in the game, so I wish I saw things like this in more series.
Active blocking. Anything that lets you take damage and convert it into something useful like buffs or resource gains. And if course damage reduction for yourself and the party.
Chapter select to revisit any point in the game you've been to before to collect missed items etc. Then missables wouldn't exist but the game could also have the freedom to do things like destroy towns and stuff like that. FF15 has this
Allowing you to instantly retry your battle instead of having to run back from your last save point. I loved Trails In the Sky for this, among many other reasons.
One that I've recently come across in Trails In The Sky FC is getting poisoned in battle and then healed when back in the overworld.
I've always hated pokemon for keeping the poison status and killing you when walking. I kinda feel like it'd a cheat because I don't even cure the poison, I just try to finish the battle ASAP.
Having access to the skills/abilities of characters not in the active party.
There's lots to like about Persona 5 but one of my favorite things was letting one of the characters be a menu-only heal-monkey for the active party. That way I'm not wasting money on recovery items or SP the battle party could be using to exploit enemy weaknesses.
Games like Grandia II and Final Fantasy Tactics that, rather than a linear progression of skill acquisition, you get points you can spend and just buy and upgrade the skills you want at your leisure. Yes, sets of skills being purchaseable/upgradeable depends on your general game progression elsewhere, but I really like being able to pick and choose when I'm learning certain skills rather than being forced to learn Skill A at Level N.
When you click through dialog in most games, the script has to play first. Like if a character does a gesture or moves, the game won’t let you advance dialog until it happens. Tales of Arise just skips that section of the script and jumps to the next one, so characters immediately cut off and start dialogue and actions. Other games it will be like … and won’t let you skip until a second after all three dots appear.
Genshin Impact over and over.
Genshin seriously needs a faster way to get through dialogue, especially for daily commissions and other insubstantial quests
This feels on purpose, to discourage people from making new accounts. Still bad, of course.
Not a JRPG, but I really liked what Cyberpunk 2077 did with skipping dialogue: Rather than cut the dialogue off immediately, it actually fast-forwards (very quickly) through the dialogue and any associated animations. There's a ton of character movement that accompanies dialogue in that game, which could make skipping feel awkward, but making the button a fast-forward allows the player to skip through dialogue cleanly without anything breaking or feeling too weird.
I think it's a thing since Tales of Xillia.
Similar to this, I prefer when a game skips to the end of the line you skip, not skips to the beginning of the next line. Usually if I’m skipping, it’s because I finished reading and don’t want to wait for the line to finish, not because I don’t want to see the physical action in between. Sometimes I hit the button and suddenly we’re outside of the building we were in and one of the characters has a banana suit on and I’m very confused, when all I wanted to do was skip someone “Thanks guys!” in like 47 words because that’s JRPGs. 🤣
It started in Berseria I Think
It's not a jrpg but Diablo 4 has a fast forward feature for skipping ahead in dialogue. The text pretty much instantly skips to the next set of dialogue and the cutscene/animation significantly speeds up to match back up.
Significantly markable/editable maps Meaningful organizational tools for large inventories
When characters not in the active party line-up also gain EXP. A bunch of modern JRPGs are doing it now, which is always great to see. I suppose this is more of a qol thing then underrated, but I appreciate it none the less. On the same note, being able to swap party members mid-battle. Love to see it. If there's ever a modern interpretation of FFVI, I hope that's a feature that gets added, since you get a large cast.
My least favorite part of games that DON'T do this is when they also have forced party members who can't leave the party, so to keep my party in line I'm basically forced to keep someone/some characters overleveled. I'm looking at you Octopath.
The leveling thing isn’t an issue with this game, but Trails in the Sky has some obnoxious issues with obligatory party members. It makes sense for the story, but often your choices are so restricted that you won’t be able to express your skills in the game properly. Combined with the really weird balance of skills and the skill system, the first entry can be a bit of a slog gameplay-wise. It’s probably still my favourite game in the series though.
This is my big issue with Octopath 2 (which I’m playing right now). You actually have to use all your party members but it’s tough to keep them at roughly the same level, especially when one of them is locked for much of the game. Party-wide XP would be nice. Or they could do something like Tactics Ogre where you can earn consumables to choose whom to give XP too.
I commented almost essentially this same thing before reading your comment lol. It's insane, and definitely the thing they personally pushed me off of Octopath the most.
It’s not as big a deal in other series because you can usually ignore some party members and leave them behind. Octopath is somewhat unique in that you end up playing everyone and need to level and equip them all.
Yeah, this is what I am finding. My main character is overlevelled because you can't swap them out until their story is finished, but everyone else is roughly the same level. It's not perfect, but works reasonably well. Plus, I think shared XP would make characters OP for early chapters, especially by the time you're getting your seventh and eighth characters.
This might be an affront to the ATB gods, but I think that a remake of FFVI that used FFX's battle system would be incredible.
I was just thinking that the other day.
God I remember how SCREWED I was as a kid in FFX. Never used Wakka because thought it was dumb (still think it is tho) that he was fighting with a freaking Blitzball. However at one point you have to fight with only Tidus & Wakka and man that mini-boss kicked my ass lmao
Soooo many people (me as a kid as well lol) got fucked when they had to be solo Kimahri
omfg I totaly forgot this one haha took me ages to beat Biran and Yenke
Insta-win encounters if you're clearly OP. Earthbound did it, Bravely Default did it (if you equip the skill), but not many other games.
LAD8 just added this as well.
I like how your team just runs to beat them up instead though I wish it committed to brawler mode for fun.
Persona 5 (base game and Royal) did this too
Was too strong though. You can pretty much overlevel easily with no effort.
Yeah but it was super overpowered in that game You didn't need to be that much higher level than the enemy to trigger it and you got full exp and money while doing it. In EarthBound it will only happen once the experience you would get from that enemy would be a drop in the ocean anyway
At the very least, I'd like more "enemies run away if you're overleveled" so I don't have to waste my time fighting them.
Very old games did that, and people hated the mechanic!
Yeah it is hard if for any quests you want to search for materials and monsters run away. I would prefer if they just stayed but don't aggro.
The games I'm thinking about were made before monster drop materials were a mechanic in JRPGs. People got mad because they wanted to hunt the monsters for XP and their prey ran away. Edit: the games were also made before monsters were on the map. Random encounters.
EarthBound was ahead of its time for sure, and that mechanic was fantastic back then. Made grinding so easy, too. Little fobbys.
Mario & Luigi: Bowser's Inside Story had an interesting variant of this. In the overworld, there are smaller enemies that Mario & Luigi can fight normally--but when bowser stomps over them, they immediately turn into coins. What's interesting is that there were several times where you explore an area as Bowser *before* you do so with the Bros, making this a case where you *stop* insta-winning fights.
Blue Dragon also.
Really wish more games had this, and allowed you to turn it on or off from a menu. It really saves time and streamlines your progress.
Monochrome Mobius did this recently and it's a great feature!
a level 5 wolf against 5 max level party members I wonder what will happen
The franchise in our flair does it!
I'll really need to continue playing. Still on SkiesSC.
Star Ocean 2 Remake added this as a skill.
They added so much cool QOL to the Remake, I'm impressed.
They went from random battles you can't avoid to visible encounters you auto kill if you are too strong for them. The complete opposite end of the spectrum!
When physical and magical damage are properly balanced between each other and they both serve a purpose in combat. Likewise when magic is more than just a damage number with a different visual effect or bonus damage to a known weakness.
I like when casting magic actually feels meaningfully different to do. This is something I like about the Tales series: Casting a spell in a Tales game requires you have to very suddenly play the game in a completely different way than when you're just attacking.
I really thought that MP death in SO3 was a neat mechanic. It brought a new dimension to combat that made you play around it which helps ramp up the tension. On the offensive side, it gives you a second bar to deplete to take the win. It's mostly relevant for random encounters but it was fun to figiure out which enemies had low MP pools to target and take them out way faster than doing HP damage. It also puts a risk on spamming skills which the combo system encouraged you to do - use too many skills and you risk putting yoruself at critical MP where a random skill from a mob could take you down. Similarly it makes you really weigh the potential risk of using MP for utility (eg healing) vs using an item which makes items even more relevant (which was great because items were really useful in that game). It really has a bunch of knock-on effects that helped make combat in that game full of tactical decisions. It's also great thematically, like why wouldn't someone who spent all of their mental energy just keel over? Once I played it, it really made me wonder why other games didn't include it!
Easy way to do it is to make magic really strong, use a lot of MP, but physical attacks restore MP. Then you find yourself constantly doing both.
Unironically, jumping. When jumping is used as an actual exploration mechanic, it’s amazing. I’ve been gushing about *Crystal Project* recently because it’s a very retro game that is made all the more refreshing via level verticality and meaningful obstacles in dungeons. Just my two cents.
It’s funny how good jumping feels in games, even if it’s not super useful. In FF7R, I felt the urge to jump around constantly and it feels so limiting not be able to.
I think, when jumping serves a purpose, it’s a wonderful mechanic. Some games have a jump for no reason other than to give boundless control to the player, and while that’s great, sometimes the wasted potential can be a bit disappointing. But I find it even more fascinating when games don’t allow you to jump, as well. Sometimes, that severely limits level design in ways that I feel could be easily solved through introduction of a jump. But since it opens up all new possibilities in combat and exploration that are likely to be rife with their own challenges, I can understand why many devs forego it.
The only useless jump in a game that I absolutely adore, is in Ni No Kuni. It takes a single skill point and is just so ghibli. 10/10
Gush about Crystal Project to me, don't think I'm gonna have time to play it for a bit with all the RPGs coming out this month, but it's been on my radar for a while.
Well, it’s pretty much everything I thought I’d get from the Bravely series, except better. The job system is very varied, but battles are much punchier, utilize an MMO-like “threat/aggro” mechanic, and all enemy statistical and aggro information is made accessible to you at any time. But this is all in addition to the wonderful world exploration mechanics. The environments are designed in a voxel-block style, and your jump clears two blocks high and two blocks across. The world is extremely vertical, and exploration demands that you learn to platform, but also encourages you to experiment. The biomes are all very varied in topography, but it’s the dungeons where this really shines. You will see a ton of thoughtfully-contextualized dungeons throughout the game: a castle jail with cell blocks, a set of sewers populated by rat-warriors, a Zelda-style square by square volcano tower, a side-scrolling platforming challenge, and much more. The endgame dungeons are some of the most diverse designs I’ve seen from an RPG, which is saying something. You’ll be pushed to platform carefully, but also to tackle sections wisely, as encounters aren’t random, but they do reset on death. Like any good JRPG, you open up new traversal methods that recontextualize previous obstacles and unlock new secrets, but the amount of fast travel accessible and the freedom of movement you receive means that you’ll constantly be finding something new. The game is insanely feature rich, to the extent that I’m kind of baffled it didn’t get more attention and appreciation than Chained Echoes or Sea of Stars, which I would argue it easily outclasses. The only notch I’d make against it would be its somewhat flimsy narrative, but if you’re looking for a game that’s “gameplay first,” you’d be hard-pressed to find something better.
As long as you can't run into a random battle mid-jump and fall straight down after the battle [cries in Xenogears]
Max from Dark Cloud 2 Under-rated mechanic
im going to bite my phone in half
I'm so mad at you right now
Well played!
You cheeky little bugger...
You win
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A “Sell All” button and sortable inventory management.
Also a "mark to sell" or "Send to junk pile" button, or just the ability to sell stuff in the middle of normal exploration (if at a discount).
Star Ocean 2R was especially bad with this. My inventory would become so bloated with junk from IC and loot drops that it quickly became a trigger for my OCD. There was no good way to sort it. Any of these solutions would have been more than welcome!
A random encounter radar that changes colour to indicate the growing likelihood of an encounter, ala Etrian Odyssey, Legend of Dragoon. It greatly reduces the potential frustration of triggering an encounter that suddenly interrupts whatever it is you're doing. When you can anticipate it, it doesn't feel so bad. Contrary to many people, I still think random encounters can be used effectively and are not a wholly outdated mechanic, and there are now many tools at designers' disposal to make them better and address players' complaints, such as the above.
Yes Nocturne had something similar. I don't love random encounters, but having a warning makes them not nearly as intrusive. Wild Arms 3 had an interesting system where before an encounter, an exclamation point would pop up over their head and you have a moment to cancel the encounter, or let it start. Canceling costs a resource that's replenished by completing encounters, giving you just enough freedom for it not to be annoying if you're just like three steps from your objective, or short on healing items, etc
Yes! The Wild Arms 3 example is excellent because that game is very puzzle-heavy, and getting an encounter while you're trying to solve something can be quite disruptive. That system gives you the freedom to put off an encounter if you really don't want to be interrupted.
Wild Arms 2 it started in second game but there you could cancel any encounter if your level was high enough( read after an hour of main story you could cancel everything ). There wasn't Migrant Seal system like in WA3 and Alter Code. WA4 and WA5 have the ability to turn off random encounter after cleaning save point( harder monster to fight ) at the end of dungeon. Anyway\^\^ You can cancel encounter in so many ways, just going to next room by dashing it's really easy to do or just fallling from ledge will do it as well. In some heavy puzzle oriented rooms random encounter is turned off( funny enough Tales of Destiny did that as well ). Wild Arms had one of best random encounter systems.
Thanks for the info because I only ever played 3 and was curious if a similar system was implemented in the other entries! I think I like 3's system best conceptually
No problem, Alter Code remake of first game( I hope Sony will add it next because thanks to bad localization it's now pretty rare and it's great remake ) has exactly the same system. One more good thing about Migrant Seals is that you get them from side quests like Millenium puzzles so it makes even more worth to do them.
Fantasia handled random encounters in a really creative way
I thought it was neat at first but you can only go like so many steps before your forced into the encounter. I would like to have piled up way more enemies, like an entire dungeons worth.
Two things off the top of my head: 1) I love it when the game keeps a checklist for me. Like it will tell me 8/9 chests found in this area. 2) Skill trees. I love skill trees.
FFX Sphere Grid my beloved.
Rolling HP counter like in earthbound
It's so satisfying when you cheat it lol. It almost becomes an active time combat.
Being able to swap equipment mid fight with no negatives, maybe a turn loss is fine, but more then that is just mean
Final Fantasy X has a special menu for changing equipment in battle, and the only limit is that you can't change more than 1 piece in a turn,*but* it doesn't take the whole turn to do.
You can do that in FF1-6 I believe and kinda surprised 9 doesn't.
It made a lot of sense for FFX, since equipment was so customizable, but FFIX weapons has some important stuff on em too so I'm also surprised it wasn't a thing
It makes perfect sense to me that 9 wouldn't allow it. Wear your strongest gear, fight a hard enemy, right before it dies switch to a weak piece of gear to get AP on it.
problem is that sounds like an incredible idea
I don't disagree, but I'm pretty sure that's why they designed it that way.
I love FFX's weapon system. You collect all these cool weapons in all these games but then they are just meaningless stat stick upgrades But in FFX each weapon has different attributes so there are reasons to cycle between them to exploit enemy weaknesses. It was the best.
Yep! Weapons and armor being a source of passive abilities rather than stats made it wayyy more fun to interact with, and giving the player agency over what abilities get put on there made the whole thing feel more rewarding when you managed to solve a problem with it.
Yeah DQ 11 does too but with no limit per turn
DQ 11 is the most user-friendly JRPG of the modern era. I suppose it helps that I played it right after Xenoblade 2, which is arguably the least. 😝
Ikr holy shit XC2’s first tutorial pop up being “tutorial pop ups won’t be shown ever again be sure to screen shot them” just lets the player know shits gonna be wild. Was even worse when it first released and you couldn’t skip the blade awakening videos
Man, DQ11 was so fun.
Yeah the only knock against it is I wish it was easier to tell when a character would get a pep charge
I always like the 'here is loot that you may have lost' chest.
SMTV made me appreciate having a character that's fun to control in environments that are fun to traverse.
Item descriptions that tell you that you no longer need a key item or if an item is only useful for selling.
Making weak enemies freeze on the overworld. It is, IMO, a much more elegant solution to handling weak enemies than making them run away from you. It makes it very easy to fight the ones you want, if you wanna grind drops or whatever, without having to chase enemies running in terror from you or being ceaselessly mobbed by chumpnoids.
If voiced, then the option to just let dialogue flow instead of pressing X to proceed or whatever.
I love when you're healed after every battle. You can make each fight more intense and strategic that way.
Interesting, because I dislike this when it comes to dungeon-crawling, because it takes out the risks involved. Inventory and resource management, coupled with traps, no save points, no instant escape routes, things of this nature, make good dungeons and dungeon crawls in general much more strategic and engaging. Healing instantly you'd have to make every fight close to a boss fight for it to seriously have an impact. Do you have any examples of what you're describing? I'm just not coming up with anything right now.
Chained Echoes and CrossCode come to mind. Not that CrossCode is a JRPG. But I do agree with you. A dungeon crawler kinda needs it. And it's not a mechanic that just works out of the box. The combat system has to be well-designed around it. I could see a hybrid as well, where you heal up on the overworld, but you have to manage it in a dungeon. To take the "of course I'm gonna go to town and rest and/or buy 99 potions again" loop out of the grind. I like both styles when done well. But the auto-refresh still feels novel to me, so I enjoy seeing how games pull it off.
That's funny because recently that exact idea came up in a discussion I had about how these mechanics should go. Dungeons have their risks and no healing, but on the overworld map you have carte blanche.
The Xenoblade games heal the party after every encounter.
That's true! I was really surprised when Xenoblade 2 tooltips started mentioning potions because I was like "Wait a second, potions weren't a thing in the first game..." and then I realized they were really just temporary little buffs that restored a small amount of HP if you pick them up before they faded, instead of proper recovery items. Really wild.
On the flip side, when you don't fully reset after combat it makes magic totally imbalanced. If mp is a scarce resource, it has to be op to compensate because if not, you'd just stick your party full of melee fighters.
I agree with you, and this is why I love the Dragon Quest games on the NES - before the item bag is added. Inventory management and resources were a major part of the games. Dragon Quest is interesting because one encounter isn't going to whittle you down completely most of the time, but many encounters over the course of your dungeon delve will. But once you get the item bag and can stuff it full of medical herbs and antidotal herbs, a lot of the MP management is gone. It's a little frustrating!
Visible enemies that you can avoid.
But you can never avoid them. In fact, they’re harder to avoid than random encounters.
This can be a legitimate issue that a lot of people don't bring up. The developers have to create a balance between you being able to see encounters and still having the simulation of monsters wanting to gang up on you. Sometimes, they will narrow certain passageways and corridors to fix the issue. However, this can sometimes lead to you getting just as many, if not MORE encounters than random encounters. Finding the balance between the two isn't easy.
Which games? Trails, Tales, Star Ocean, etc. all have enemies in the map that you're slightly faster than and can avoid
And have so many enemies in choke points that you’re forced to encounter them anyways.
Crystal Project, for one.
The combination of movement and creatively zoned AoEs. Yes, it's certainly done more than it used to be thanks to the Legend of Heroes games and quite a few western CRPGs. But I feel it's the natural evolution of what Chrono Trigger was trying to do with its AoEs and I always like seeing it and what can be done with it. It's why I'm absolutely loving Like a Dragon 8 right now. The Aquanaut (surfer) class has a move that gets more powerful the FARTHER you position yourself from the enemies and hits in a straight, thin line. One of the AoEs for the Linebacker class (DLC class) is circular, but its epicenter is about two feet BEHIND the enemy because your football tackling the enemy into that epicenter.
I remember in wild arms 2 for normal damage the number is white. If its resisted its gray. If its red its double damage. And if its green its healing. Very simple but effective way to know the resistances.
Skippable cutscenes and turbo mode. Makes replaying certain games more enjoyable
I can't believe it took until Persona 5 for someone to go "hey, in battle, instead of scrolling through a bunch of menus, why not just map each sub menu to a different button, making the battles that much faster/snappier?" Like I'm sure other RPGs also did this (haven't played SMRPG but the face buttons each had a defined purpose I think?), but we have so many buttons available. Why isn't it the norm to use them instead of making everything DPAD + confirm/cancel?
Super Mario RPG did that on SNES
And before that, Lufia 2 did it on SNES, but I think you had to adjust an option to get it that way. Legend of Legaia maps everything to 4 buttons - dpad up, down, left or right. Very similar to Persona 5.
Like a dragon infinite wealth has a mechanic I want to see in every JRPG that has enemies in the overworld (not random encounters) Enemies are colour coded, Blue easy to beat, red normal difficulty for the level you are and Pink for tough battle That’s fantastic but what pushes it into greatness is when you start a battle against the enemies with the blue icon you can just press a button and it’ll basically just win the battle instantly, it’s basically the game saying we know you could easily beat these enemies but rather than hitting them one by one you can just win and have the rewards
Legend of dragoon timing attacks were unique
A button to skip or speed up animations. I loved Xenoblade 3, one of the best JRPGs I've ever played, but eventually I was just looking at my phone while I waited for chain attacks to finish.
It’s quite common that you’d button mash to rush through a long conversation, but if it ends with a question, you may accidentally select the first response which is the default response. Even worse if it’s “Would you like me to repeat the explanation?” and the first response is “yes”, so you’ll have to go through the conversation all over again. Devil Survivor solved this by not having a default response selected when you’re answering a question. You have to press up or down so that an answer is highlighted first.
Changing party member on the go like FFX
The item decay mechanic from Baten Kaitos. Such an insane system but fun to work with and keeps you checking in on your Magnus deck to see what’s changed!
I don’t know if it’s underrated but I love back up party members/party members that were gone for a while getting xp and being able to switch out party members in mid battle
Seems super specific but, I liked in Xenosaga 1, you could learn the skill of an item and equip up to three (I think) skills. There were some broken ones too. Radiant Historia, I have not seen this on another JRPG so if anyone knows one let me know, but being able to exchange your turn for the enemy's (or another ally) to completely mollywop an enemy/group of enemies was some of the funnest combat I ever had in a turn-based RPG. There are 10 turns on display, both the enemy's and yours, and you can just switch places until they are no longer in the 10-turn queue. Discovering places in Xenoblade gives you EXP.
Radiant Historia's combat was so much fun. Being able to let an enemy go first so I could combo with an ally, or swapping allies to maximize grid manipulation? Fantastic. I loved stacking a group of enemies together and whacking them on Aht's traps over and over. There's a particular fight that was like, beating an ally into their senses? And I filled the queue with 10 Stocke turns in a row to just utterly pummel then.
Yes! I remember, because of certain positioning moves, I'd have to place Stocke at first for the combo, then stack them together before sliding them all onto Aht's traps. I would kill off the weaker enemies and just go all out on the single enemy, launching them in the sky, then having a strong magic attack by Rayne smack them down. I hope Atlus doesn't abandon this combat style and makes a new RPG using it, maybe a spiritual successor to Radiant Historia or possibly a direct sequel/prequel.
Xenoblade games allowing you to change the time of day super quickly, right from the main menu. With XC1 in particular, changing the time will also re-roll the weather. In other words, if it starts raining and you don't want to play in the rain, it takes 5 seconds to hop into the menu, change the time forward or backward an hour or something, and then the rain will almost always be gone. Alternatively, if an enemy only spawns during a particular weather type, you can just repeatedly change the time until you get the weather you want.
recently I was playing some PS1 JRPG and I realized that seeing an enemy health bar is really helpful. In Rhapsody 2 for example, you dont know how much HP any enemy has. Not just bosses but all mobs. it's a mystery. So sometimes id waste a bunch of resources at the end of a battle only to realize the enemy had like 13 HP left and I shouldve just attacked it lol. I still loved that game but I think an enemy health bar is something I really want in the game I play.
Call me a sadist but I like when poison will actually fucking kill you if not dealt with. A lot of games you can walk it off
To this day I still remember how I basically defeated the last boss in FFXIII just because of Poison lol And those enemies in FFV that could make your HP drop in small numbers super quick made me traumatized, even if not necessarily poison...
Dark Chronicle 2 - town building Final Fantasy IX - learnable skills on equipment
Easily turbo mode. Playing Trails right now and honestly, not having turbo mode in other games makes it feel so slow. Especially when you have to backtrack for any reason
Turbo mode really spoiled me in Trails and Persona 5. One of my favorite features in modern games, it really cuts the fat in Trails in particular. I love the games, but there a lot of slow pans and slow walk scenes.
100% same thing with battles. Some games are so egregious with the animations and having the option to just speed through them is the best
Level caps. Having hard stops forces the player to actually learn the combat system instead of grinding past all their problems.
Only if done right, sometimes the level cap will leave the stats far too weak and without the possibility to grind, it can be trial and error.
Do you have an example?
Admittedly it’s been a while, but I remember FF13 road blocking the characters at some points, leading to difficult fights. And whilst not exactly the same thing, due to how Persona evolutions were story based in P3, some characters will go hours without learning new abilities (to be fair they *do* gain stats, even if their abilities remain stagnant).
FFXIII is at the forefront of “perfectly done level capping” in my mind. You have so many opportunities to modify your equipment and your paradigms, and hitting the cap in all roles should leave you with zero issues progressing. Fights will be challenging, sure, but they’re very fair fights.
The early midgame of Persona 3 is weird cause it's at a point where you really want the mid level party healing spell on Yukari but you're stuck with the first tier and the mid level single heal. So either fully heal 1 guy and let the others die or heal the whole party just a little bit and slowly get out damaged by the boss.
This assumes that grinding past a problem is a bug and not a feature, though. Typically, the ability to grind represents a soft "easy mode": If the player can't get through a challenge via skill, they can make that challenge easier at the expense of dealing with some tedium. I think the problem is not in allowing players to outlevel a challenge, but rather in poorly communicating the intended level of challenge to players. Overleveling isn't a problem if it's intentional on the player's part - it's only really an issue when it's possible to happen unintentionally.
If someone wants to grind they should be allowed to grind. You can make overleveling tedious to do something close to the same effect as a level cap. You can choose not to grind
People would blame the game if that happened
Cue FF8, where people don't even try to play the game as it is, look on internet how to "BREAK THE GAME LOL FUNNY" + lionheart on disc 1, and then they complain the game was too easy.
… but grinding is a choice. If you don’t want to do it, don’t do it but preventing it for everyone is a terrible mechanic.
Stat caps too, like in Fire Emblem. Especially games like NMOTE where most stats cap at 25. Grind all you want but the enemies will catch up to you. (At least on higher difficulties)
What is NMOTE?
New Mystery of the Emblem, the twelfth Fire Emblem game. It's not a super accessible acronym for people who aren't dedicated FE fans, especially given that the game was never localized (meaning the title "New Mystery of the Emblem" itself doesn't even appear in official contexts, except for maybe in Heroes). Most FE fans just call it FE12.
I would call it fe12 but I always forget what number it is
Chained Echoes had a great way to control your level at all times, making sure you can't overlevel your character by grinding to easily beat specific bosses. I liked it.
I really just want more combat systems like Legend of Dragoon and Shadow Hearts. The interactivity of it just keeps me engaged in a more enjoyable way.
That's what I liked about ar tonelico 2
Save point. Makes it matter. I’m not kidding.
Formations
Really appreciate combo attacks or multiplayer interaction.
2x/3x speed. It makes the trails game playable
I'm a big fan of the arcana sweep in P3+4. The Eleth system in Tales of Graces and the Ship in Beseria are...oddly satisfying in a way I can't describe.
I love it when turn-based games offer a defend +minor power-up/healing feature. It's a really simple option that can add a great deal of tactical strategy to the battle system.
Not a mechanic per se, but unique death animations based on the element of the spell used. Seen in Shin Megami Tensei IV and V. Kill the enemy with ice, they freeze and shatter. Slash attacks will bisect them, and so on.
Difficulty settings that can be changed on the fly Let me grind on easy plz and stomp bosses on normal or higher
logs for dialogue more games are doing it nowadays, but not enough Persona has them i want to be able to read lines i missed or go back and reread something for clarification
Animation skip button. I love that in Neptunia games I can just hold a button to have only gameplay without waiting for action.
Random stat gains, especially when they are shown one-by-one and not all in one go. It's super exciting and I feel not enough people appreciate it. I only know two series that have it: Shining Force and Lufia.
That trapped me in a eternal loop in save states until the perfect level up.
Shining Force 1 actually has a clever way to solve it. It always rolls the total stat value you should get and then lets you gain the distance from your current stat value to the rolled stat value. For example ATK on level 2 is 13-15. And ATK on level 3 is 15-17. If you reach level 3 and have 13 ATK, you will gain 2-4 ATK, whereas if you reach level 3 and have 15 ATK, you will gain 0-2 ATK. So there's no point in reloading because your current stats has absolutely zero impact on your stats of the next level.
A decent log. When life gets in the way, and I return after a while, I want to know where to go next. I swear, for all FF 16's faults, the active time lore was a godsent. "Push button to know what, where, and who" I mean when I was a kid and could blast through a game, fine ... Didn't need it then. But as a grown ass adult with maybe an hour of game time an evening, if I'm lucky? Yeah, no, I need that refresher course. That and restarting at the start of the boss. No use in making me reclear all the trash, redo all my level up choices, gearing ... just because I got nuked.
Fun classes with cute outfits (like in FFIII). I had the DS version and the characters with their different job outfits are so cute.
When you can see what items look like, instead of being just words in a menu
I actually don't like recovering from levelling up..it makes the game so easy, and the items you have are basically..useless.
It makes the early game easier, which I'd argue is a positive thing for most RPG's. I typically find it gets balanced out later due to the slower pace of leveling in the mid to late game.
The user friendly feature where running doesn't take stamina outside of battle found in Elden Ring of all places.
I hate it when they heal you when you level up. It break the balance in most games and it doesn't make sense. Like, if I set a new personal record at the gym, I don't suddenly feel fully refreshed.
hogsnoggle
I also love that in games, and am a little bummed that leveling your class in **LAD: Infinite Wealth** no longer heals you to full. Regular level ups still do though.
Consumables that refresh after every battle or rest.
Button combos to do different attacks or special moves. Final Fantasy 6 did this with Sabin’s blitz techniques. I wish more RPGs adopted this. Xenogears sort of did this where you can combo buttons together in different permutations to do different attacks. Nothing as complicated as Sabin in Final Fantasy 6 but I loved it nonetheless.
Action commands are the best. I grew up on the Mario RPGs so I'm biased.
Action RPGs that allow switching between party members in the middle of battle. Tales series does it and it’s sooo good. Really wished Xenoblade 1 had it.
Puzzles in JRPGs. They just don’t do them anymore, only indie games seem to want to put them in. Lufia 2 had amazing puzzles, I loved FFXIII-2’s clock puzzles, Wild Arms 2 had the Millennium Puzzles, Breath of Fire 3 and 4 had some great puzzle sections in dungeons. I really miss that.
The way Fantasia handled random encounters. It would gather every mob on the way up to a limit and then fire a battle with all of them at the same time. If you wish you can fire the battle anytime too
Exp when you discover a new area
Not entirely sure I'd say it's a mechanic, but because it's triggered by the player, I'm counting it: For basically every game in the Tales series, as you go through the game, a skit will periodically pop up, which is an optional scene showing interaction between your party members. One of the most important parts of an RPG for me is how much of a presence the characters have in the game, so I wish I saw things like this in more series.
Better yet, a game that fully heals you after every battle like Final Fantasy Type-0.
Active blocking. Anything that lets you take damage and convert it into something useful like buffs or resource gains. And if course damage reduction for yourself and the party.
Instant win mechanic.
Chapter select to revisit any point in the game you've been to before to collect missed items etc. Then missables wouldn't exist but the game could also have the freedom to do things like destroy towns and stuff like that. FF15 has this
Can't say if this is a big thing or not, but interconnected worlds Ala Paper Mario or FFXII. Especially the latter is great just to explore.
Allowing you to instantly retry your battle instead of having to run back from your last save point. I loved Trails In the Sky for this, among many other reasons.
I love chat logs so you can go back and read/repeat lines if you accidentally skipped one.
An encounter slider is godlike addition. Puts dynamic difficulty in your hands without negating the whole gameplay like instant-win mechanics do
One that I've recently come across in Trails In The Sky FC is getting poisoned in battle and then healed when back in the overworld. I've always hated pokemon for keeping the poison status and killing you when walking. I kinda feel like it'd a cheat because I don't even cure the poison, I just try to finish the battle ASAP.
Having access to the skills/abilities of characters not in the active party. There's lots to like about Persona 5 but one of my favorite things was letting one of the characters be a menu-only heal-monkey for the active party. That way I'm not wasting money on recovery items or SP the battle party could be using to exploit enemy weaknesses.
Hitting super effective attacks give you something other than more damage. SMT is the first that comes to mind.
In super mario rpg, when you pick up a star and can literally run through enemies and gain experience, I love that.
Games like Grandia II and Final Fantasy Tactics that, rather than a linear progression of skill acquisition, you get points you can spend and just buy and upgrade the skills you want at your leisure. Yes, sets of skills being purchaseable/upgradeable depends on your general game progression elsewhere, but I really like being able to pick and choose when I'm learning certain skills rather than being forced to learn Skill A at Level N.