After mulling it over for a bit I think I have to agree with you there. It doesn't bother me quite as much as to impact my view of the games, but it is a shit mechanic.

I was only judging by the PS1 games alone. If I want to go beyond.

I think the Ivalice games are the absolute best Final Fantasy games.

I'm really not a fan of paid walking simulations. They're basically just tech-demos with no content, for the most part at least. Kholat is one of those "games" that is really bad.

It does say "Nasty Woman she/her". Just don't give her power (read control) over others :P

That reminds me. The Stanly Parable is terrible, complete and utter garbage. It tries to be "smart" but falls flat on its face. It's the gaming equivalent of modern art, if you don't "get it" you're an uncultured swine and should keep quiet.

That's right, each and everyone of these walking sims are garbage and for those who support this genre, shame on you for infecting this fine hobby with this nonsense.

I hate myself jumping on this hate bandwagon but it is for the greater good.

Cultivated fascists!

So basically just pretentious vomit? It would have saved many a lot of headaches if they just said that upfront, then everyone would just take it as an adventure into pure satire or something :P

Hear, hear. Games that require reading a guide first if you don't want to miss out on stuff are annoying, to say the least. Sure, you can fail to find stuff, but to make it so oh, if you got past this point you can't even try to search again if you realize you may have missed a spot. Or stuff like oh, you spent the skill points from X levels to get Y stat to value Z? Tough, if you'd have waited you could have gotten it straight to Z without using up any here, but now that's it, you can't add Z points to it, you could have just gotten it to Z...

Also, one problem with missable quests is that it punishes a specific play style that shouldn't be punished.

The way I see it, we can look at 2 different completionist play styles:
1. At every point in the game, search for side quests and do every one you find, progressing the story only when every side quest is completed.
2. Rush the main story, then do side quests afterwords.

The problem is that missable quests punish players who choose play style #2, which is really not fair to those who prefer that play style. (A better approach, if you want the player to do some side quests early, is to make main quest progress difficult or impossible without doing side quests. For example, Baldur's Gate 2 requires that you earn a certain amount of money to get past Chapter 2, Romancing SaGa requires doing a certain amount of battles (with side quests being a way to do something while fighting those battles) to open up the end game (though that game is guilty of having missable quests), and some Might and Magic games expect you to be a certain level and/or require a certain amount of trinkets to find in order to open up the endgame).

Also, missables can be a problem if some of them are crucial to making the game's difficulty manageable; Paladin's Quest is my favorite example here, where the final boss is hard enough even with both Gigabls and Heart magic for Midia (one of the Gigabls is missable, as is Heart for Midia).

I thought of another that I don't *think* I''ve mentioned in this topic?

For RPGs, random encounters are better than the most common alternatives.

You did. Yep, another one I definitely disagree with.
I was thinking of Eschalon since I just managed to get back to it and heading towards the end. There are trainers for several skills, but they only get skills up to level 5. With some 50 skill points available normally (and it takes 3 to gain a new skill, 2 wasted to get it to level 1), that's a massive boost, so saving those skill points to get all that stuff to 5 without them is quite crucial, but if you don't know it in time...

The vast majority of video games out there today aren't truly worth your time, effort, and money.

On this topic, I have been thinking recently that the approach that Final Fantasy Mystic Quest took (visible enemies that don't move, don't respawn until you leave the dungeon, but can't be avoided except by taking a different path) might be the best solution.

* The main issues with random encounters tend to be that players get frustrated getting repeatedly attacked, especially when trying to explore. (I note that some implementations of visible encounters that move in real time, like the one used by the DS remake of SaGa 3, also have this problem, but with the added complication that the player might not have a chance to open the menu between encounters.)
* One of the issues that's common with visible encounters is that players will just avoid every encounter, which ends up eliminating the resource management aspect of long dungeon crawls.
* The other issue that's common is that, when the enemies move in real time, the game turns into an action game when you are trying to avoid (or, in some cases, seek out) enemies.

The FFMQ approach avoids these issues; the game never becomes an action game, and the player can't just dodge every encounter and avoid having to manage resources like MP.

(There are other things that FFMQ did right that aren't as common in RPGs as they should be; I like the idea of chests that contain consumables replenishing if you leave and re-enter the dungeon, for example.)

That's an example of ugly mechanics that encourage play styles I don't consider to be fun.

A better approach would be to handle training separately from normal skill increases; instead of not being able to train past level 5, you would be allowed to get up to 5 skill levels by training a skill, regardless of how many points you got with skill points. Furthermore, these skill levels would not count against the cap for skill point increases. (Also, when respecing skills, the skill levels earned via training would not be re-allocatable.)

Of course, I've decided that skill points, especially without a respec option, are not a good mechanic; having skills improve by usage is a better mechanic, except for rarely used skills. (With that said, more difficult tasks should be worth more skill experience; this is one aspect where the Elder Scrolls series, for the most part, fails.)

Side-scrolling and platform games are crap. Always have been, always will be.

That's my opinion and I'm sticking to it :)

Yeah who needs that new-fangled devilry. Great games like Pac-Man, Galaga or Pitfall never needed scrolling. And how can you properly measure the game size in screens if everything keeps moving.

I hear there's even stuff like "parallax" scrolling now where stuff moves with different speed. No wonder kids get ADD these days...

;-)