So the guide I just finished writing is for Mana Khemia, a PS2 RPG of the Gust lineage. It's a series I basically like, but in a conflicted way. The games are really progressive and challenging in some respects, mindlessly easy and somewhat backwards in others. Playing it for the 100+ hours guidework demands left me with a lot of thoughts about what's right and wrong in RPGs. Yeah, this isn't too Nintendo-focused (outside of my examples, anyway), but it's just relevant enough that I felt like posting it! The list starts behind the cut.
7. Mandatory Tutorials
I don't mind in-game tutorials in principle, but they are more or less something I only ever want to see once if at all. Nothing kills my momentum when replaying a game like tutorials, and too many at once can really cool off my interest in a game. A well-done tutorial is brief, unobtrusive, and explains the game's system points to you in a transparent way.
There is nothing in the world more boring than replaying a tutorial, and I can't conceive of why more games don't let you skip. Sometimes I think much of my issue with the switch to 3D for Zelda was the sudden, massive proliferation of in-game tutorials in the 3D titles. Twilight Princess was a bear to get into because for the first few hours the game was always forcing you to do something boring to prove you understood how to play it.
6. Obligatory Characters
This is primarily an issue with Japanese RPGs. If you're going to deprive me of the freedom to make my own character in an RPG, I expect the game itself to be providing with a decent story that features entertaining characters. If the game has a large cast, I want all of the story's characters to be distinct in terms of both personality and mechanics.
An element of making a character distinct is that they have to be at least somewhat original. Even if it's just a quirk or mannerism, or a detail of motivation that sets them apart from the pack... the game needs that. A game that lacks that ends up being... well, like Tales of Symphonia, a world populated entirely by people who are results of running the Random Anime Character Generator.
Either way, it's a basically undesirable situation. If you're going to have a big ensemble cast, go the FFVI route and make all of the characters completely distinct in terms of personality and, to a degree, what their mechanical abilities are. If you can't think of a lot of good characters for your game, then shrink the cast size down until all of the characters are good, and put effort into making the rest of the game better. If you can't think of any good characters, then just let players design their own and put effort into making the game's world interesting.
5. Junk Stats
This is a pet peeve with Japanese RPGs, which really go crazy for this sort of thing. Look, if I can't look at your status screen and immediately figure out what all the numbers mean, or can't go to an in-game help system or the game manual and figure out the same thing, your game has a problem. It's even worse if the game or manual is telling me things about the stats that turn out to be flagrant lies to due programming errors. (This is shockingly common with the classic NES and SNES RPGs; whole chunks of the game system just didn't work properly in the original editions of Final Fantasy and FFVI.)
Despite living in an era when most games are deathly afraid of making a player do something challenging, RPGs are still utterly addicted to junk stats. This even affected Etrian Odyssey, a game I otherwise love to death; huge chunks of the stat and skill system tell you nothing about what the numbers mean until you've done lots of painful trial-and-error testing or done hours reading the GameFAQs results of other people doing that. If the point of stats is to define a character, there's no point in attaching numbers to them that aren't self-evidently important to what you're doing in the game.
4. Pointless Grind
One of the most interesting things about Mana Khemia is that it totally throws out the experience point system every other RPG in the universe uses to advance characters. That's right, no matter how many random battles you grind through, your characters never get tougher. As for how they actually get tougher... well, you kind of have to play the game for it to make any sense, but it's way better than killing monsters.
I find myself wondering why more games, and especially higher-profile games, haven't done this. The XP grind has its place and if the grind is well-designed, you can get something joyous like Etrian Odyssey or the Nippon Ichi strategy games or what's shaping up to be my next addiction, Shiren the Wanderer DS. Still, it makes no sense that twenty years of video game development hasn't managed to come up with more creative ways of character advancement than what Gary Gygax conceived when he designed D&D back in the late 70's.
If anything, there seems to be less thought than ever put into the basic idea of leveling up, thanks to the influence of MMOs. Since MMORPGs draw their complexity from social interactions and the persistence of the game world, well, the core engine needs to stay somewhat simple. Now that MMOs are influencing single-player console RPG design, you have your Final Fantasies and Dragon Quests getting grindier and, frankly, less creative. I'd rather see more RPGs try to find ways to throw experience points out completely.
3. Gratuitous World-Saving
This is more an objection to story than actual gameplay, and I don't usually raise these because the sophistication of your average video game story is slightly worse than your average Golden Age comic book. The medium is still growing, and stories just aren't going to grow more sophisticated until technology stops advancing quite so rapidly. Games will definitely be art at some point in the future, but they aren't now and may not be before I die.
This said: I'm really, really tired of RPGs where we're supposed to care because the fantastic world of Genericland is being threatened by Evil Dude, who wants to blow it up or rule it or something. This is not an essential element of RPG storytelling. A good RPG can be about anything and have any sort of setting, as Persona 3 and Mass Effect aptly prove. Sure, neither game is trail-blazing fiction, but they still manage to be trail-blazing RPGs just because you never have to go punch absolute evil in the cock for lack of anything better to do.
I'm finding myself interested in Shiren the Wanderer simply because the story is "Shiren wants to find a fabulous lost treasure, and here's the crazy stuff he does to try and get to it", and I can very easily sympathize with a pro-active protagonist whose motivation is "I'm broke" and is risking life and limb to do something about it. Yet still we get tons of Tales of Symphonia-alikes shoveled out, about generic heroes on a generic adventure to save a generic world from generic bad guys.
Look, developers, making the stakes in your game "higher" by threatening a world players have no reason to care about does nothing. Make characters with identifiable motivations and you'll hook players into your story, and you might end up with a story actually worth telling, too.
2. Inconsistent Difficulty
This is the Rogue Galaxy problem, as I like to think of it. Rogue Galaxy was the last PS2 RPG created by Professor Layton developers Level-5, and it was in most respects a good if somewhat forgettable experience. The ending, however, is burned into my brain, because it's one of the stupidest things I've ever played.
The bulk of Rogue Galaxy is a team-oriented action RPG where you have to use group tactics, speed, and reflexes to beat monsters. For the game's hour-long climax, you have... a series of seven one-on-one gimmick battles with your party members, and then a super-duper final battles where the hero fights the final monster with a giant sword. Your stats and items up to this point are totally irrelevant to how this final battle plays out, and the controls and strategies are arbitrarily unlike anything else you've done in the game. This is horrible and made me want to go find Akihiro Hino and kick him in the shin.
A good RPG has what is best described as a difficulty curve. Things start off a little easy, and then slowly, more problems trickle in to the game to solve. You get more abilities to play with and more decisions to make. The classic Dragon Quests are pretty good examples of this, really. Give players a few toys, and let them learn how to use them. Then let them have more and more. Ideally you've stopped with the tutorial information early in the game, and the players are now out exploring the possibilities inherent in the systems you've introduced.
1. Invalid Difficulty
The concept of invalid difficulty is one I explain like so: if it is a gameplay element that makes victory a function of investing time, rather than tactical decision-making, it is invalid difficulty. You didn't really make the game harder, you just made a lazy programming decision and made the monster's numbers bigger. Probably the classic example of this is Yiazmat from FFXII, who is perfectly beatable with the right kit and a few clever tricks-- but under no conditions can you beat him quickly. He has very big numbers, you see.
Look, this kind of thing is stupid and poor excuse for "bonus challenge". Make something hard to do or at least don't screw around and waste the player's time. Shiren the Wanderer is again what springs to mind as an example of valid difficulty. Things in it are just legitimately hard to do. They're never impossible, but there is no set formula you can duplicate to achieve instant success. The randomized nature of the game means you can't always have the items you want and don't know what you're fighting next. So you have to make do with what you can find, and try to manipulate other game systems to try and create a store of items that will persist between your many inevitable deaths. Getting to new areas or finding endgame stuff is a legitimate thrill, because you can't predict when or how it will happen.
Invalid difficulty challenges bother me because you end up with "challenges" that pretty much any idiot can handle, provided they have some idea of what in-game items to gather up and the time to invest in grinding through. It's similar to the endgame content in MMOs, but there gathering up your kit is fun, because other people can help you and you can help them. The preparation becomes an excuse to socialize.
Just about any gameplay goal becomes more interesting if you have a bunch of people involved in achieving it, no matter how banal otherwise. For whatever reason, it seems like single-player RPG designers are mistaking the system content of MMOs for what actually makes the genre popular, the social interaction. This is a case where aping the popular thing won't make your games better. It will, in fact, make them worse. Challenges that just revolve around having the right kit are dumb, RPG designers, and they have no place in single-player games.
