WHAT DO YOU LOVE/HATE SEEING IN A GAME?

chu-chu shouldn't have existed in the first place. also one who bares fangs at god is indeed terrific. xenogears is a shame *erects MOG shield Mk3*

ratty: get an SSD ;V you won't even be able to read 'em

Feldschlacht IV
How do the developers decide to get the player to feel the experience? They decide to rip the player out of it via the battle theme totally smashing the BGM with every random battle. It doesn't even have much to do with the random battle mechanic either, the entire reason I mention it is because other games without random battles do it as well.

god battle themes are my favorite thing but they can fuck up so much (i don't have much else to input other than "i've seen this in other games too yeah" and "i stopped playing x when i got to mt gagazet for no real reason so i can't really relate")

i can see sailerius just curling up into a ball at the thought that you dare accuse non-random battles as being somehow not perfect though. tsk tsk

random battle themes can exist, i did it in Visions & Voices, but i think it fits a LOT more when it's tied to an area or a time. for example, you get the suiko4 battle theme when you visit the island nations in suikoden 5.

author=bulmabriefs144
I hate it when a game tries to do some kind of rush playthrough system like BOF Dragon Quarter. I mean, if Ryu had some incurable disease, this would make sense. But it just struck me as cheap enough that I never even wanted the game.

He kind of did though, in the context of the game. It wasn't exactly a disease, but there was definitely a strong in-game justification for him having such a strict time limit to deal with.

Of course, just because you can justify a design decision with in-story or thematic reasons, doesn't mean it's going to be enjoyable for players. BoF Dragon Quarter was kind of interesting (I played it enough to reach the 1/4 ranking without using a guide, so it's definitely not like I ragequit or anything,) but it's kind of frustrating and tedious in how it makes you run through the same content in unaltered form repeatedly to make progress, and like Final Fantasy XIII it's stripped down in ways that make it not very RPG-ish, and so not necessarily in line with what people who bought it out of appreciation for previous games in the series are looking for.

Crystalgate
Anyway, one of my biggest beefs are when the writer tries to substitute actual writing skills by making the story grimdark and/or complicated. It has pretty much the same effect as a clumsy person trying an advanced acrobatic maneuver would have.

i will admit to having thrown out plenty of projects because i did this... and yet i still do it. sighhh. i need to learn to embrace my own "i don't know how to write or make dungeons" style and just roll with it instead of trying to force it into my stuff

I love when games prompt you to save before strong fights. I hate when they don't. Nothing's worse than losing 15 minutes of progress because you didn't realize a huge boss fight was coming up. "Something powerful lurks in this room. Are you sure you want to continue? Yes/No" is what I'd like to see before encountering a tough boss room because then I can just press No, save, and re-enter. Having a save crystal outside this door is also recommended.

NPCs are people too, Craze! But if anything, I want to see more bosses with motivation and goals and dreams, so I can know what in destroying when I take them down. Revel in guilt!!

author=CashmereCat
I love when games prompt you to save before strong fights. I hate when they don't. Nothing's worse than losing 15 minutes of progress because you didn't realize a huge boss fight was coming up. "Something powerful lurks in this room. Are you sure you want to continue? Yes/No" is what I'd like to see before encountering a tough boss room because then I can just press No, save, and re-enter. Having a save crystal outside this door is also recommended.

In my version of Ring of Udrai, the last boss literally asks you if you want to save (and saying yes brings up the save screen) and then asks if you want to fight him. xD (He even refuses to fight you unless Eric is at least level 5)
After all there's not much sense in not letting let the player save at that very moment if that was what the warning was trying to tell the player to do. If you really had intended for the player backtrack to a save point, you might as well place an autosave there instead.

I remember the Castlevania games for GBA/DS, Order of Ecclesia had a save point before every single boss, it is the first game to do that while the previous 4-5 games just had save points wherever and boss doors wherever. Weird that it took them until OoE to put save points right next to the boss doors.

However I don't think the game had a retry option for bosses which is another things game usually ought to have. Unless you want to change equipment/spells before the battle, in which case retry is terrible design since it forces the player to keep using whatever they happened to have equipped when they entered. Most of the time the player is equipped full of stuff to deal with normal enemies while being helpless against bosses, UNTIL a boss is coming up. Which is another design element that I hate.

It leads us full circle to another dilemma. "Something powerful lurks in this room. Are you sure you want to continue? Yes/No" to let the player know to change their equipment to serious mode. *facepalm*
Maybe games should be designed so that a) most skills are actually effective against bosses for a change, if not ALL skills, b) the game chooses your loadout for you, or c) the game lets you change loadout between retries, or better yet lets you change IN THE MIDDLE OF THE BATTLE.

I despise it when I walk into a boss and all my stuff is useless against it because the whole time I had equipped kiddie pretend spells, apparently, such as status effects which bosses are immune to (*cough* Kingdom Hearts Birth by Sleep) or attacks with too much windup time and therefore impossible to hit the boss with. (*cough* Kingdom Hearts Birth by Sleep) You'd think the game would let you know that "a boss is in the next room. Un-equip all skills and replace them with eight instances of Curaga? > Yes > No" Also, if something has no effect on bosses then it shouldn't be in the game. -___-

In this love/hate post, I'll post about elemental traits and what I like/don't like how it's handled in games:

Like:
-Actors with innate resistances/weaknesses. This is a simple and elegant way to ensure there's areas the actor isn't as good and others where she shines. It also makes enemy skills more meaningful than "grab this resistance gear" as you now have to plan around the shift in durabililty.
-Elemental/magical weapons. When your game is already in a fantasy setting where spells can make a continent fly and creating an alternate dimension is a recreational activity, why are your strong guys swinging around ordinary chunks of iron? Where's the swords made of lightning bolts? Spears that can summon blizzards and rainstorms? Geomancy bows that create arrows from the environment?

Dislike:
-Refusing to give out certain elements. Some elements are just kept rare for no reason and makes it unnecessarily difficult to fight enemies weak to them. The Darkness element takes this up to 11 - most of the time, nothing's weak to it, most late/endgame enemies resist/null/absorb it, it's often awkward in usage and you don't get it for >90% of the game while your enemies keep throwing it at you.
-Element stereotypes. It varies from element to element, but writers often can't help but make the character's main element their personality. Ice and Earth users are actually rather varied in personality, but Fire users are generally the fight people who don't think deeply and are easily angered. Once again, Darkness is treated badly as people who use it are either 1. evil 2. brooding anti-heroes 3. brooding anti-heroes who turn evil or 4. making a huge deal out of not being evil. Light isn't much better - it's usually the do-gooder element of hugging and puppy loving. In the games where it isn't, it takes the place as the evil element and the Darkness characters are all Type 4.

author=Kombosabo
Like:- Male main character controlled by me while all other characters are girls with huge tits

ROFL.

author=zeello
I think I've begun to realize why games do that. It's so the player can feel like they're hanging out with a bunch of cute girls. o.o

Which makes sense, since a large amount of media relies on wish fulfillment dreams.