Guys, you have the point wrong... just because I'm listing complaints doesn't mean I don't like them. Some jRPGs are among my favorite games (Mother series, Tales series, Secret Of Mana, Final Fantasy 5/6/8) this includes older games that did many of the things I'm listing... 'cause I'm one of the people that doesn't mind it. Again, I'm not saying, all jRPGs did this, in fact I listed some jRPGs that did not follow the norm.
I was listing points that jRPG haters will often find irritating compared to the western games they normally play, since many of them seem unable point them out.
However, I have to stress that many of these systems are done for laziness. I have made (comparably tiny) games for years, I have read interviews with game designers for years, I have looked into the ROM hacking and resource-grabbing scene for years, hell, I've been emulating/playing games for ages (mostly every single day because I was a lot more socially awkward when I was young so I just played games a lot), and I have seen many, many games that take various approaches to situations. The most common approaches in jRPGs (such as I listed) are done because some of the better ones take longer times and more effort.
I could list all sorts of things like that, but I mainly wanted to show that people who dislike jRPGs aren't doing so for no reason.
EDIT: And it's not like tvtropes doesn't list this kind of stuff for a living anyways.
I was listing points that jRPG haters will often find irritating compared to the western games they normally play, since many of them seem unable point them out.
However, I have to stress that many of these systems are done for laziness. I have made (comparably tiny) games for years, I have read interviews with game designers for years, I have looked into the ROM hacking and resource-grabbing scene for years, hell, I've been emulating/playing games for ages (mostly every single day because I was a lot more socially awkward when I was young so I just played games a lot), and I have seen many, many games that take various approaches to situations. The most common approaches in jRPGs (such as I listed) are done because some of the better ones take longer times and more effort.
- Chrono Trigger's method of enemy encounters requires placing specific event instances throughout the map, each with their own detection shape, direction, radius, and width/angle, then giving each one it's own enemy group, assigning each group it's own animation for when the battle starts, and then test-playing it multiple times to make sure the player can't sneak past the detection spots for all the enemies.
- Earthbound's method of enemy encounters involves laying out specific event areas that will cause enemies off-screen to spawn (recent TAS videos have found and exploited this), and (assuming the AP wasn't set off) setting each spawn to a min/max number of enemies (in order to avoid slowdown, which happened anyways), and then giving each enemy it's own walking/aggro AI (see bats versus moles versus fobbies), then setting the various other enemies that show up in the same areas to either path towards the player or deactivate (depending on species) when the player encounters another enemy, to add to the enemy formation faced when the battle starts.
- Your standard fallback jRPG random encounter system requires marking off an area and setting enemies to show up in it after a random number of steps (or on a certain RNG result per step). Done, it's functional.
I could list all sorts of things like that, but I mainly wanted to show that people who dislike jRPGs aren't doing so for no reason.
EDIT: And it's not like tvtropes doesn't list this kind of stuff for a living anyways.
