vv221: The ideal save system is save anywhere, anytime, no restriction, no question asked.
Anything more restrictive is most of the time an artificial restriction used to hide game flaws.
There's some common cases, like during combat in games with modal combat, where save restrictions don't feel so artificial. Thing is, to actually implement saves in such a game, the developers would need to code in access to the save feature, and would need to write code to save and load the combat state, which would otherwise not be necessary. More code means more bugs, in addition to being more work on the part of the developer.
Also, in a game like Dragon Quest 1, is it *really* necessary to allow saving during a battle? (Then again, there's also a good technical restriction for not having save anywhere in that game; it would make the passwords longer, as that game did not already have a battery backup. With this said, this argument applies to the rest of the series and to much of the Final Fantasy series, as well as to most JRPGs and some (mostly older) WRPGs.
There's also some menus where it doesn't make sense to save, like on the title screen and load save menu, or on the save menu (which would lead to recursive save menus, which a player could use to try to overflow the stack), or (for the vast majority of games) pretty much anytime the player is already in a menu. Or, for that matter, saving in the middle of a load screen might not be practical.
(Yes, some of this might seem pedantic, but some of this (namely the modal combat situation) is not.