TRI-ACE

Yeah, map completion was sooo annoying. It's worse in Infinite Undiscovery, though! That's true hell.

And you really should get Baten Kaitos.

Do you dislike "extreme" plot-twists in general?
I love games (and movies) that end with a complete surprise.

Also I'm pretty sure that all Star Ocean games have private actions. Just that you didn't have to bother to activate the manually in 3 (they are still called PAs in the tutorials). Though as mentioned earlier I hate "side" dialogues, so I'd prefer if they just removed towns in RPGs altogether (that's why I liked FFXIII).

The skilling system is really best in Star Ocean 2, it was the most fun and you don't have to be scared of skilling wrong, because eventually you can learn everything. Maybe it's even my favorite of all times.

I don't really like crafting and for me it only matters that you can finish the game without it (which I could), so I don't really care much about that. But Star Ocean 2's crafting was actually understandable unlike other games where you need a walkthrough to even get anything remotely useful, so yeah I guess it had good crafting.

Infinite Undiscovery probably had the worst crafting ever. Well, at least in a tri-Ace game (Vagrant Story is even worse). If you even want to bother with it in IU you need so much money that you can grind several hours everytime you reach a new town, just so you can buy the materials. And you can't just skip it in a town because later town won't have the low level materials anymore and you can't craft better stuff without leveling up your skill by crafting low level stuff.

author=RyaReisender
Do you dislike "extreme" plot-twists in general?
I love games (and movies) that end with a complete surprise.

Also I'm pretty sure that all Star Ocean games have private actions. Just that you didn't have to bother to activate the manually in 3 (they are still called PAs in the tutorials). Though as mentioned earlier I hate "side" dialogues, so I'd prefer if they just removed towns in RPGs altogether (that's why I liked FFXIII).

It's not that the twist was "extreme," it was that it was a) unforeshadowed, b) didn't mesh well with the earlier tone or themes, and c) trivialized the earlier parts of the conflict. You can do "extreme" plot twists while avoiding all of these things, and doing any one of them is a serious mark against a plot twist. Doing all of them at once is just absurd.

Star Ocean 3 had "private actions," but the fact that when you enter towns, you'll find your party members wandering around, and once in a blue moon you'll be presented with a dialogue choice, doesn't equate to the private action system of the previous game. Rather than interacting one on one with your party members, your relationship values are overwhelmingly determined by choices you make in other parts of the game, even ones made when your other party members aren't there, or you haven't even met them yet. The effects of these choices on character relations are totally unintuitive, and never properly explained in the game; would you guess on your own, for instance, that your behavior in the battle simulation at the beginning of the game will affect your relationships with all the other characters in the game, even though you've only met Sophia so far?

If you hate "side dialogues," I have a hard time understanding why you'd follow RPGs in particular, especially since you've also said that you hate resource management strategy and prefer systems where characters are automatically fully healed at the end of battle. I have to wonder if maybe you're just in it for the mechanical character growth. But as far as I'm concerned, that sort of thing is meaningless when divorced from the context of an engaging story. Whether it has to be presented through "towns" is another matter, but taking away player directed exploration of the environment and organic exposition through character interaction is, in my opinion, one of the worst things you can possibly do with an RPG.

In theory, systems like Star Ocean 3's encyclopedia or Final Fantasy XIII's datalog might be a handy way to offer setting related exposition to those who enjoy it, and keep those unwieldy amounts of info away from players who don't care for that sort of thing. But in practice, this is just a really crappy way to develop a setting. It's pretty much the ultimate violation of the "show, don't tell" maxim, and replaces organic exploration of a setting with bland infodumps. It's like the difference between taking a trip to Paris, and reading Paris's wikipedia article.

You can include a much greater volume of information in an encyclopedia or something than you can integrate organically through conversation and such, but you can go a long way to developing an interesting setting using allusion rather than flat discussion of the facts, and it'll usually make for a more interesting read.

Final Fantasy XII's Clan Primer could have been a lot worse- the way it presented setting information through framing devices such as book exerpts, letters, and other snippets which suggested a more developed context, made it more interesting than if the whole thing had been a simple encyclopedia handing you information about the setting directly. But the gameplay conditions for accessing the full breadth of its content were obnoxious, its relation with the game's bazaar system was unintuitive and unfair, and there's no in-game logic that connects the actions you perform to access the information (killing monsters) with the information you receive. So it's step forward, step back relative to a flat encyclopedia presentation.

If you're creative about it, you can usually find other ways to integrate large amounts of information into a game for a player to investigate at their discretion, without making it feel too forced.

Here's an example of a mechanism I came up with some time ago. The main character has several mentors, friends and associates from his backstory who he still keeps in touch with, and the "saving the game" mechanism is actually sending letters to various figures from his life about what he's been doing in the course of the game. As you progress through the story, if you bother to pick them up, you'll occasionally receive letters back from the people he's written to, and if the player chooses to read them, they'll reveal more information about the setting and the character's backstory.

You can certainly do an engaging story without much dialogue. It's better to do a little well than a lot badly. And if a game has boring writing, then the less of it the player has to sit through, the better. But the same is true of anything else you can possibly put into a game; if it's done badly, the audience won't like it.

Some writers and artists can do a lot with a little, but expressive minimalism is a skill, not a shortcut. And in general, audiences do want to see some kind of story and characterization, not just spectacle, which is why even directors who're widely regarded as making mindless action-fests never actually make movies like "90 Minutes of a Kung Fu Guy Beating People Up Nonstop," or "2013 Best Explosions Compendium."

I can't really appeal to the logic of 'I don't like side stuff in RPGs BECAUSE WHAT IF I MISS SOME OF IT?????'

Then...play it again?

author=RyaReisender
Also, you are always scared that if you don't play to perfection that the game will become too hard?

I think it would depend on the game/situation. How hard has the game been up to the point where side-missions are available? Do the side-missions have a reward that is appropriate to the dangers involved in doing them? Stuff like that.

I don't replay every game I buy, the thought of spending 50-60 dollars on a game that I have no intention to play more than once is absolutely terrifying.

I assume you mean "do replay"?
If the game is 30+ hours long that's enough game for the money for me. And that's pretty much the case for all RPGs.