Worst JRPG Cliches

I love JRPGs, and I don't know why. I can definitely see the flaws in the concept of a story-driven game. But sometimes the stories are really good or the game play is interesting enough to escape the scorn of my heart. But then there are just some things that I can't forgive, some cliches that appear in JRPGs over and over again that remain unchallenged. They are thus:

Oh, I Was Supposed to Die

Boss battles are always put in games as the challenge moments, to take all your experience and put it to good use. But sometimes, what seems like a particularly difficult challenge, ends up being a trick. It's the boss fight you were SUPPOSED to lose. Oh, well thank you game. Thank you for telling me that I was supposed to lose this fight. I only spent all of my items keeping my pathetic team alive, and it was all for nothing. Now I have to reset and die properly. Why do JRPGs even let us control these fights if we can't determine the outcome? What's worse is sometimes the fights almost look winnable until the big boss person unleashing move of ultimate destruction #27 on us and wipes everyone out in one hit. To be fair, there are some fights that are just overly difficult, but not impossible, and people use those as 'oh, I beat the game at its own... game' moments (Xenogears). But there aren't enough to warrant what should've been a cut-scene. Biggest offender: Eternal Sonata.

They Left and They Took My Stuff!

I don't know how this keeps happening in Japanese RPGs but it's annoying each and every single time it happens. You spend all this time and money to buff up the gear of a non-main character and due to the plot's own discretion, that character leaves. Oh, and they took all your stuff with them. There's nothing like seeing a character go and then checking your inventory to see all that gear mysteriously absent. I don't know if it's just stupidity on the development side or maybe there's some concept that I'm not getting, but it has to stop. I'd like to think it was only old JRPGs that did this, but no, even modern JRPGs continue this trend of torment. Latest examples I can think of are the Final Fantasy IV DS edition which has characters moving in and out of the party like there's a revolving door and often at unpredictable times, and Eternal Sonata which makes you think you're keeping all the characters till the end of the game, just to lose a few near the end. How hard is it to really just take off the gear before they leave? I've seen games do it, it's not hard to figure out.

To add insult to injury, sometimes the characters never come back; or when they do, they have completely new gear. And while I'm on the subject, stop giving us awesome characters which we can't remove their awesome gear from. There's never really a good reason, the game only gives you the 'this gear can only be worn by this person' excuse. Yeah, like no one else in the fricken group can figure out how to put on a hat. Biggest offender: Final Fantasy IV.

There's Nothing Stopping Me...

There's nothing like exploring the vast fantasy world of a game, with its surreal environments and strange inhabitants, only to find the end of it all and its an invisible wall. Or how about when you want to move from one vertical plane to the next, only to just get stuck walkign in place. Since most JRPGs don't have a jump button, and no, contextual jumping 'spots' do NOT count (FFXIII, FFX-2), they just throw up invisible walls to stop people from moving vertically across anything. Or when there's a little opening between two walls which no developer put anything there to stop you, you run into an invisible wall. It's not like JRPGs are complicated enough to need all buttons on a standard controller, so programming a jump button shouldn't be a problem. The westerners seemed to have figured it out, so what's going on in Japan? Have they not figured out that bending the knees and propelling one's self upwards is possible? That for a brief moment, humans can accelerate upwards fast enough to overcome gravity?

Even worse is when there's an open field and suddenly you just stop because there literally is no more world past that view point. It's like you just ran into some Truman Show moment where you found the edge of your little world. How hard is it to program a wall? It's not just JRPGs that do this, its most RPGs in general. Biggest offender: Final Fantasy XI.

Death and Deja Vu

So you're at the boss that's been building up the entire dungeon. Because its a JRPG, there of course has to be a dialog to reassert who is good and who is bad for some arbitrary reason. In doing so, there's a long, unskippable cut-scene. Fine, I can deal with that. But now I'm in the fight and I've just lost. Perfect, time to watch the whole thing again. I also have found that the harder the boss, the longer the cut-scene is. I guess the designers thought we'd need to be reinvigorated by the on-screen antics of the characters to get excited for the battle again, but at least give us the option to skip it. Or worse when it's just dialog and no cinematics. Now I have to mash the 'X' button to get through the conversation so I can mash the 'X' button some more to win the fight. Biggest offender: Tales of games and Eternal Sonata.

And now while I'm on THIS subject. Why can't I skip every scene in the game? Radiant Historia got it right. You can just blow past all the dialog, scenes and crap to get back to the game play, but rarely does a game even tease the notion that people might want to go through it again and not have to deal with whiny character #420 talking about how they're not good enough. Chrono Cross had an interesting solution to this problem by having a fast forward button for the entire game. Literally holding down a button will cause everything to speed up twice its normal speed which was made for the sole purpose of having people who have beaten the game more than once to go through it faster. Biggest Offender: Final Fantasy X.

Feel Like I'm Missing Something

There are many reasons to replay a game. Different endings, branching paths or maybe you just really like it. But one reason shouldn't be because you missed some item along the way and the game closes the door on that location forever. It doesn't necessarily have to be an item, it can be an ability or enemy type or some collectable that is just never available again. It wouldn't be as bad, but then JRPGs start to track this stuff with bestiaries and item collections. They're just taunting us at this point. So now that I've missed their stupid item that they placed in some unnoticeable part of the world that for some reason I can't return to, and now I have to begrudgingly play through the entire game again while I look at a guide just so this crap doesn't happen again. Biggest offender: any Tales of game.

Been There, Done That

A well-paced game keeps the action going. Getting to new dungeons, finding out more bits of the plot, becoming stronger; it's really the only thing that keeps us playing. But then, for some reason, the plot summons us back to a dungeon or level we've already been to to collect something we couldn't pick up before or talk to some idiot that wasn't there the first time. Not only do we have to back track through old territory, but we have the same random encounters we had the first time we were there. What went from a decent challenge is now a nuisance. It's like swatting away gnats that continuously pester you until you leave. Biggest offender: Star Ocean: First Departure.

I'm Just Really Emotional Right Now

Tragedy isn't uncommon in JRPGs. It's often that these moments that bring the characters to the brink of despair just to build them up again makes the game that much more memorable. And then there are times where those characters just keep whining about it for half the game. This isn't strictly a JRPG problem as it is a character problem in general. I'm talking about that youthful, whiny character that complains about every little thing along the way. I'm essentially referring to Hope from Final Fantasy XIII. Yes, your mother somehow died in a fall where as other main character just walked away from, that's sad. Now you blame Snow for everything, fine. Deal with it or murder Snow. Don't talk about it for 10 hours. It's one of the few times I'd rather hear Vanille speak. Okay, I don't really mean that. But still, maybe let the anger or despair build up internally, and let us observe for ourselves how the character is being overcome and eaten away but his own feelings of rage and sorrow instead of OH HEY LOOK I'M SAD BECAUSE SAD THINGS HAPPENED TO ME. WATCH ME KEEP BEING SAD AS I TELL OTHER CHARACTERS HOW SAD I AM ALL THE TIME. Biggest offender: Hope from Final Fantasy XIII.

HEAL ME

Bad AI is one thing. It's quite another when you are dependent on it to live. I'm talking about when the computer takes over healing duties, only to botch it up worse than the Hindenburg and everyone dies. There have been ways developed to overcome non-player controlled allies through gambits or pre-defined behavior mechanics like Dragon Age: Origin, but then there are games that are either pretentious enough or stupid enough to think that an AI is better than direct, player input. Unfortunately, the worst AI seems to come from the healer all the time. They're either busy looking at flowers while enemies trample the rest of the party to death, or they're too stupid to realize that reviving another healer will effectively double the healing potential of the group, and thus the better chance of surviving. Biggest offender: Final Fantasy XIII.

Often times, its actually the offensive AI that's dumb as box of rocks. It's rare, but I've seen it happen: the AI instead heals the party or cures a status effect instead of dealing the final blow to a boss, and then that boss wipes out the entire group in the next turn. I wish I could reach in and grab people from within my TV just for this purpose. Biggest offender: Persona 3.

You Want Me to do What?

Nothing like playing an RPG just to have completely obscure game play mechanics thrown at you from no where. I'm talking about those weird moments where the game designers forgot they were working on a role-playing game, and decided to make something else for a while. Whether it's a weird mini-game section, or a piece of another game shoe-horned in, there's almost nothing quite as jarring. Like in Crisis Core where you're forced to pursue a stealth approach to an entrance and all the game gives you is a mini map with enemy dots. Thanks game. You do realize that entire games have been developed around the concept of stealth: offering various camera control methods, ways to track the enemies, tools to help sneak from one side of the room to another, and you've replaced all that with a single mini-map. Wow. If only Hideo Kojima knew it was just that easy. It's practically insulting to the entire stealth genre. Or the moment in Final Fantasy X-2 where you have to sync up camera angles to a dance number on the Celsius or some crap like that. Just a dumb mini-game that kills you inside to do, but if you made it to that point in Final Fantasy X-2, you were probably dead inside anyways. Also, you can just mash buttons during that mini-game and get a perfect score. Nice programming. Biggest offender: Crisis Core: Final Fantasy VII.

You're Sick

It's bad enough that enemies can dish out the damage and heal themselves, but there are also those that specialize in indirect methods of dealing death. It wouldn't be an RPG without status effects. I could pretty much list every single one of them here since they're all annoying to deal with, but I'll talk about the one's that have caused me a lot of personal pain.

Confusion: when an enemy makes your character confused so they attack wildly in any direction, often, at themselves. Of course, there's a small chance they'll still attack the enemy, but they never do. It get's particularly annoying in Pokemon when you have a 50/50 shot and you hit yourself 3 times in a row. Biggest offender: Pokemon (all of them).

Stone: this one is extra annoying because you need to have other members to heal you. And when all your members are stoned, it's game over. What's worse is when petrification is an added effect to an enemy's normal attack or they just spam the move / spell / ability over and over. Biggest offender: tie between Final Fantasy II and Tales of Phantasia.

Death: difficulty and strategy go out the window with this. Death is just what it sounds like, death. You're characters are dead, deceased, they are no more, they've ceased to be, kicked the bucket, pushing up daisies, etc. Death has shown its face in various forms, some times as spells, sometimes as an enemy or sometimes as a surprise in a treasure chest but it is never welcome. Worst is when an enemy can keep using it over and over again, or when the game inflicts it upon you because you're taking too long to beat a boss (Final Fantasy XIII). Biggest offender: Final Fantasy XI for having an enemy that has death as an added effect to their normal attack.