Scrappy Mechanics

[Wolf Kanno]

What is a mechanic in an FF game that you find make the game unfair or more annoying than fun?

[Karifean]

First one that came to mind is party leader death -> Game Over in FF XIII. If you design the game around it I'm sure you can make it work (though ), but FF XIII is not one such game. The game is fast paced, danger comes in very quickly, there's no Defend command or anything of the sort for emergencies or being targeted by a big attack (short of switching to Sentinel, which you won't have for huge swaths of the game), there's no real way to prioritize the party leader's HP being kept in safe thresholds. It feels like something you have to awkwardly play *around* rather than being a natural part of the combat system. Like, you can play around it, sure, but it never feels good.

[Wolf Kanno]

Agreed on FFXIII, I would add that it's equipment leveling system is so poorly done, it also becomes an annoying scrappy mechanic in the long run since bothering with it will make the game significantly easier.

I feel the only other two I remember is in classic FFII, how you have a limited inventory and key items that can't be dropped, making item management a complete chore. Likewise, FFIII's rule of dropping the party defense to zero if you tried to run away was obnoxious as well.

[Spuuky]

First one that came to mind is party leader death -> Game Over in FF XIII. If you design the game around it I'm sure you can make it work (though ), but FF XIII is not one such game. The game is fast paced, danger comes in very quickly, there's no Defend command or anything of the sort for emergencies or being targeted by a big attack (short of switching to Sentinel, which you won't have for huge swaths of the game), there's no real way to prioritize the party leader's HP being kept in safe thresholds. It feels like something you have to awkwardly play *around* rather than being a natural part of the combat system. Like, you can play around it, sure, but it never feels good.

This is a really stupid and bad mechanic. It fails the common sense test. Why would you be able to revived a downed party member, but a party member can't revived a downed you?

Going back to the very first FF, I think paralyze on hit from enemies is really not much fun. You can't do anything to prevent it, you can't cure it, it can just keep your entire team locked indefinitely, it punishes you far more when you already have a reduced team size (either to deaths or challenge runs)... it's just not very good.

[Bocomog]

FF13 is like a collection of things like this. My personal favorite is to automatize the party members.

The stated reason for this was that the combat system is too fast to control all party members. I didn't feel that way. BUT even if that were the case, you could turn down the combat speed or add a wait mode like in the old games. But instead offering the good old solutions, they simply reduced the party system to a minimum.



By the way: A lot of people complained about the the auto-battle button that you are free to use. Considering the auto-pilot here works pretty could and just saves a lot of time, I think isn't that bad. It just still shows that there is actually no use for a 5 ATBs gauge.

[Wolf Kanno]

One I've meant o mention in my FFV Let's Play was how the Optimize Equip option would give a character every cursed item since they technically had the best stats in some cases. I am always a little surprised this is never fixed in re-releases.

[Slade]

One I've meant o mention in my FFV Let's Play was how the Optimize Equip option would give a character every cursed item since they technically had the best stats in some cases. I am always a little surprised this is never fixed in re-releases.

Oh heck, I totally forgot about that! Peed me off every time I'd replay FFV back in the day. Tbh, though, I don't tend to use the optimize equip on any game these days, including my latest runs of V, so that's probably why I'd forgotten it was a thing.