FAVORITE GAMEPLAY ELEMENT

Humor.

Games with enough personality to be legitimately funny are few and far between.

If a game actually gets me to laugh out loud, out of wit as opposed to just being hilariously bad, it earns my profound respect.

Good atmosphere is a maker/breaker for me.

Of course "atmosphere" is such a generic term. Some examples of good atmosphere:

Final Fantasy VI: There are a shitload of examples.
-The feeling of emptiness, death, and desperation after the end of the world and the island with Celes and Cid. /emo
-The epic climactic feeling of the narshe battle. (after the 3-party split)
-The liberating atmosphere of the open-ended 2nd half of the game after you get darryl's airship. Especially the music. That damn 2nd airship music inspires ridiculously fond memories.

Chrono Trigger
-AMAZING representation of post-apocalyptic life in the future.
-Best f'ing final battle sequence ever, ever, ever. Nuff' said.

Character- or class-specific battle skills.

ie- My thief character has the Steal command while my Samurai type has the SwordSlap command.
FFIV, FFV, and FFVI all do it amazingly well (and I think FFIII would too, though I haven't played it). FFVII did it to a degree, but associated it instead with swapable materia. It wasn't as fun for me to know that ANYONE can use the Steal command, so long that they have the right materia.

I enjoy class structures vs. wide-open-to-anyone dynamics. Diablo II is another fine example of that. Even with Chrono Trigger every chracter has a different set of skills.

This is actually a good topic, because it's not focused on 'epic' moments, music, humor, etc. But the core gameplay itself. I'd have to say I really liked the fighting system in Xenogears because you could make it so that your attacks didn't always look the same and you could unleash these crazy kick ass combos like in a fighting game.

Forced skill progression kinda sucks, if you mean: Jimmy learns such and such at lvl 10. I like it when theres some kind of tree involved or like you have to do some sidequests to learn and find skills for your characters.

author=Darken link=topic=109.msg1585#msg1585 date=1183674187
I'd have to say I really liked the fighting system in Xenogears because you could make it so that your attacks didn't always look the same and you could unleash these crazy kick ass combos like in a fighting game.

I loved a lot about Xenogears, but it all would have been perfect if disc 2 wasn't so damn rushed :(. The beginnings of the game had the marks of greatness, however...

Anyways, I'm not sure what specific gameplay element is my FAVORITE.. but certainly one of my favorites is training my characters up with new abilities. I like playing RPGs where I actually want to spend time grinding monsters to gain EXP, JP, etc., in order to gain fun new powers that kick even more ass. There are plenty of examples... my favorite would probably be the original FFT. I really enjoyed just fighting random battles, plus the story itself was awfully good. Although, in my opinion, they kind of nerf the difficult combat when Cid joins, but if you still want a real challenge you can just not use the guy. FF9 was also fun to do the same thing, using equipment to temporarily gain skills and then fighting lots of battles to permanently gain them.

On another note, my least favorite potential gameplay element is when totally completing the game requires more luck than skill. I'm talking about very rare item drops. It was bad enough in Earthbound when I killed dozens of evil Starmen just to get Poo's sword, but I actually stopped playing Kingdom Hearts because it was so difficult to get the items necessary to synthesize the best weapon. I don't think I'm crazy when it comes to completing games, but I do like to finish all of the side quests :).

For regular RPGs FF6's everyone's different approach worked very well in my book with one character learning magic/techniques at set levels while another required collecting certain items while others learn from enemies/battlefields and those left out on that could at least equip relics that could improve their abilities.

However I also like Fire Emblem's level progression for it's stat and level development. Characters that are similar on the surface can be quite different depending on how their stats grow. Like the Red and Green Social Knights both being similar except one gets stronger faster while the other gets quicker faster and at the end two characters with the same abilities, maneuverability, and equipment could end up being quite different.

For adventure RPGs like LoZ and SoM it's difficult to choose between finding useful items and power-ups hidden throughout the game or a skill/magic level-up progression. They're both really good and work best when implemented in these types of games.

I also liked DQ8's alchemy system that not only allows one to create newer and better arms and armors out of old ones and the occasional item and allowing them access to items that wouldn't have been gotten till much later, but it allowed the player to create needed items on the fly rather then having to go all the way back to the nearest town.

Hell there's even the R&D element from games like Megaman Legends and SRW where you need money to upgrade a weapon/mech's abilities like power, ammo, range, and ect. Allowing a player to customize as they wish.

But if I had to choose one overall type it'd probably be a 'to each their own' approach.

Originally Posted by WIP
So a question is, does ANYONE like forced ability progression? If so, why is it so prevalent?

It's less of an 'everybody likes it' and more of an 'its ease to implement' question. It's much easier to control the difficulty level of a game using a level progression system because, lets face it, the first two spells that a player would most likely learn in DQ1 would be Heal and Healmore(or Return). Also it allow designers to focus more on developing those characters' personality traits instead (generic though they may be).