A few things I would really like to see dropped from JRPGs

Items / Endings / Areas that can only be found from following strategy guides from the start of the game.

E.g. The god damn Zodiac Spear in Final Fantasy 12. This item could only be got if you avoided opening 4 chests early on in the game, which had no marking, clues, or warnings to differentiate them from any of the other thousand identical chests. Nice.

Also see: Some of the missable quests in Last Remnant. I have to go back to a distant area and talk to a guy before and after each of 6 connected missions in order for a quest to open afterwards or it's missed forever?!?!? WTF.

No further explanation needed :)

70 hour+ game times.

Long gone are the days where good games were few and far between, or I just couldn't afford more than one game every 3 months. Nowadays I don't need my games artificially stretched out. Once I've seen every game mechanic around 100 times, and you've not got anything new in the
gameplay to surprise me, it's time to wrap up the plot and show me the credits.

Again, The last Remnant is a hideous offender in this respect. It's main way of stretching things out is unskippable extra long battle animations for any action (even swinging a damn sword). I've taken to reading a book whilst letting the battles play out, stopping occasionally to issue orders.

Personna 3 is an absolutely brilliant game in most respects, but suffers badly from this. I've been playing it on and off for around a year now, because the battle sides of it do get horribly repetitive until the boss shows up :| Does that freaky tower really need that many floors?

Unskippable, slow moving battle animations.

Already mentioned this above a little regarding The Last Remnant's (Seems like I'm picking on it, but honestly there is a lot to like about that game) gameplay being extended by the long winded battle animations . Final Fantasy is a well known offender for this as well (Knights of the Round being a move taking 1 minute 21 seconds to execute).

Yes we love eye candy, but is there really any reason to force it upon us the 10th time if we want to skip it?

Disgaea showed the world how it's done. You can turn all animations off! Now this may seem like it's taking the fun out of it, but when you're just fighting through an item world to level up you're glad of any time saving device the developers give you!

Alchemy

Oh how I hate alchemy in JRPGs. Some people might love the idea of alchemy in RPGS, but to me they're yet another mechanic to sell the strategy guides and prolong the game.

They're never intuitive, combinations being either trial and error, or done to fixed recipes you have to find in the world. Not that having a bloody recipe helps, because it's never obvious which is the only place in the whole frigging world you're going to find that piece of necrotic metal.

Even once you have all the ingredients, you usually don't dare make the ruddy thing. You never know if that ingredient you're using to build that slightly better sword is the only one of it's kind, and it might be the core ingredient of the even better (but only slightly so) betterer sword you'll get the recipe for in the next part of the game.

Seriously, what is alchemy bringing to the game? Sending me off to the other side of the world (via a strategy guide) for a piece of item that only drops from monster X if I have item B and have killed 300 of them. THAT'S NOT FUN. Give me shops with gradually improving stock and nice item rewards for doing side quests. IT WAS LIKE THAT FOR A REASON.



Got any pet JRPG hates of your own? Comment!

Image Credit : "Moogle" by Christina L. Frazer