Agreed on roguelikes, mainly because of the wildly fluctuating challenge and not being able to practice a segment I failed at.

HD Remasters - More devs should dare to mess with mechanics, controls, difficulty balance and even scripts to improve the game fully.

Games bloated with pretty much useless or soon to be so items.


Agree here too. Day of the Tentacle showed how to do this way back, letting you speed up or skip on a per paragraph/sentence basis so you can get the info at your own pace.

Unfortunately for you, neither developers, nor players agree with your definition of RPG :/

There are still games that would fit my definition of RPG, but still turn into action games when you are trying to avoid (or seek out) enemies, including the one I am playing right now. In fact, just now I had a time I couldn't heal between battles because an enemy attacked before I could open the menu, which is really annoying.

(With that said, the one I am playing now is not as annoying in this regard as the one I was just playing before.)

I also note that Serment: Contract With a Devil seemed to handle at least the opening cutscene rather nicely (I haven't really delved into that game heavily).
* You can skip it entirely, if you want to go straight (or gay, if you prefer) into the gameplay.
* You can rewind the dialog.
* You can even save in the middle of the dialog, and come back later. (This really should be more common, and should IMO be mandatory for games that merit trigger warnings.)
* I believe you can skip just that part of the dialog.
* The options menu has an entire "Narrative" tab, as well as a tab for "Gameplay".

* (One oddity; I believe you usually can't save in the dungeon, but I think you can save if there's dialog in the middle of the dungeon.)

^Sounds good!

Logs are nice too, or if you want it to be less game-y you could be able to ask the relevant characters about a previous conversation.

In trying to follow in the spirit of the thread, I didn't really focus on stuff I would outright call bad (though microtransactions are pretty much it thanks to years of developers learning to abuse such a system) but stuff that just cheeses my onions.

Procedural level generation is one such thing. We're at the point in time when all the "nostalgia" FPS titles are in vogue and the developers trying to capitalize on that fad aren't staying true to it when they're relying on an algorithm to craft a map for them. I'm not so much of a hardass that I believe it has to be hand-crafted to stay "pure" or some ridiculous jibberish like that but there's a lot to be said of the likes of E1M1 of Doom over say... uh... sorry, I can't name a truly memorable level from (for example) Strafe because they all kinda lump into this forgettable mess of generated quackery.

I do believe there's a jaw dropper just waiting to be unleashed on the gaming public at large but for now what we get with proc-gen level design is not great. Likewise, the people who want to try level design without realizing it requires more thought than they initially walk into it with also make some unbelievably lazy trash as far as levels go (though there's a special place in hell for people who do it deliberately).

Reminds me of SaGa 2 (whose remake I am playing right now), in which there is a "Memo" feature, where you can read information that has been gathered from conversations.

(Interestingly enough, this is *not* a new feature of the remake; the original, released in late 1990 in Japan and in 1991 in the US, had this feature, even with the Game Boy's limited cartridge size.)

Reminds me of things like Mario Maker troll levels. The thing is, though, that a well-designed troll level can be quite fun(ny), provided you don't get too attached to survival and are OK with the notion of dying frequently through no fault of your own (and sometimes due to forgetting that a trap is there). Before then, there were games like Syoban Action; also, older kaizo mario hacks (though modern practice seems to be to separate kaizo (requiring advanced techniques and high precision) and troll (easy if you know what's coming, but will punish you harshly (and often in funny ways) for reasonable actions.)

I actually found a document online that discusses how to design a good troll level. Yes, there is the notion of good and bad troll levels. (Levels where you have to wait a while for each subsequent attempt are often considered poor design, for example.)

There have been indie platformers that would be considered kaizo (Super Meat Boy and Celeste come to mind), but not as many that would fit in the troll category, and I would like to see more well-designed games that fit into the taller category.

Just thought you should know that the early SaGa games are *very* different from the later ones. Romancing SaGa 2 is very different from SaGa 2, to the point where it's not unlikely for someone to love one and hate the other.

SaGa 2 was called Final Fantasy Legend 2 in the US, so if yout want to play the orignal version in English (and are OK with monochrome graphics and 8-bit music), that's the game to look for.

SaGa 2 is pretty similar to SaGa 1, but is much longer, slower paced, has Humans and Espers (Mutants in FFL2) gaining stats based on actions, and introduces Robots, who get all of their stats via equipment. Also, death is much less punishing; SaGa 1 gives you a limited number of cheap resurrections that can only be done in town, while in SaGa 2 death is a temporary status ailment that wears off at the end of battle.

SaGa 3, on the other hand, is quite different, especially if we look at the original version, which has levels and experience points (something you don't see elsewhere in the series).

Yeah to be clear, I have played the first GB Saga (as well as the wonderswan version and RS1 for SNES as well).

Thanks for the deets though!

You're welcome.

Out of curiosity, which version of SaGa 1 do you prefer, the original Game Boy version or the WonderSwan version? I think I prefer the GB version, as the WSC version didn't fix some bugs that really should have been fixed (the confusion bug, for example), and even added new bugs (HP drain attacks are no longer useful for the player). About the only fix the WSC version did that I like is to fix the RNG so that it's actually random (it isn't in the original).

By the way, for SaGa 2 I do not recommend using more than 2 humans on your first playthrough; humans are slow to gain stats (though not as slow as espers/mutants), and they can be quite expensive due to needing to replace equipment as it wears out. Also, remember that you need agility to hit with strength based weapons; a character with high strength and low agility will not (for the most part) be able to put that strength to use. (I could also point out that Punch is quite good during the early part of the game once you've used it some.)

most probably been answer by others, i have the same

- Dev's spending more money on psychologists to devise more predatory monetization strategies than on coders to make good games.

- Single player games that need an internet connection for any reason (DRM, Selling stuff... I don't care why).

- Game Series that I loved that have been destroyed by loot boxes, auction houses, and microtransactions. (I'm looking at you Diablo... and Call of Duty... and Assassins Creed... and Star Wars Battlefront...)

- Anyone who says that "Single player games are dead... people want games as a service"... they need to be working the drive through at Arby's not designing games.

- The tendency for game makers to pile onto any game style that looks like it can make a quick buck. "Ooohhh... look at how well PUBG is doing... we need to add a Battle Royale mode to our fishing simulator RIGHT NOW! And zombies... we need zombies... zombie fish..."

- Mobile games... not because they're mobile but because they've given AAA houses some really terrible ideas.

- Any game maker that is so dumb that they'd announce they're going to waste time and resources making mobile games out of a PC top franchise... AT A PC CONFERENCE.

- A game maker who relies on the community to fix their incomplete and buggy games and make them special (with years of hard work) spitting out an MMO that's just as incomplete and buggy as their SP games... but blocks that same community.

I could go on... and on... the current state of gaming is pretty depressing to me... with a very few bright spots (CDPR being one big one)

You know I actually played the GB port included with the WSC version only, but I think that one was preferable overall? Almost the same but fixed a bug with an OP weapon in the late game, the saw IIRC.

Started playing but didn't finish the WSC remade version yet, I can link you to my thoughts on it when I do finish it.

What's the confusion bug and why aren't HP drain attacks useful anymore?

My understanding is that the WSC version did not fix the saw bug. (Simple way to test it: Get your Strength up to (displayed) 99 Strength, then attempt to use the saw on a weak enemy from the first world. If the bug is still present, the saw will not work (the logic is inverted, and it will only work on enemies whose DEF is *higher* than your STR).) Also, this bug is referenced in the PS2 remake of Romancing SaGA.

The confusion bug is as follows: If an enemy is confused, it will only attack you and not other enemies. Furthermore, melee attacks will hit the entire party at once (instead of just one character), and all-enemy attacks (like Whirl, Flare, and Psycho Blast) will only hit one character.

As for HP drain attacks in the WSC version:
* Vampire-types HP drain attacks (like the Blood/Vampic Sword and attacks like Touch) have their accuracy, when used by the player, calculated incorrectly; the chance of hitting is equal to your AGI minus the target's. Hence, if your AGI and the target's AGI are the same, you will not hit with these attacks.
* MELT (used by slimes) and DRINK have a different bug; the damage is computed just fine (uses the same formula as Cure, interestingly enough), but the party member who used the attack will not be healed. (This doesn't make these attacks completely useless, but they're still much less useful than they were originally.)
* At least the first of these bugs does not apply if an enemy is the one using the attack.

Another bug in the WSC version makes group-targeted magic attacks do much more damage than they are supposed to.

By the way, SaGa 2 (original) has a *different* confusion bug; when a confused character acts, often the wrong ability's use count will be used. This can result in ability use counts dropping below 0 and becoming infinite, and can result in martial arts attacks like Punch hitting for over 65k damage (in a game where 4-digit damage is rare); there is one particular fight where this is quite likely to happen on a casual playthrough (guest character whose only group attack is a confusion spell, and large group of enemies that will sometimes Punch while confused).

Ok and that goes for both original (gb port) and remake versions in the WSC game regarding the saw bug? Thanks.