Raise your hand if you've heard several hours worth of that song throughout your playthrough history of Final Fantasy Tactics. I know I have. Why? I spend a lot of time in the menu of FFT, and I realized that it does something that people don't realize; it's because I wanted to. The menu was a place I loved to be to manage my party, mess around with equipment, explore ability setups, and just to see what I had to work with.

RPGs are a relatively very menu intensive genre. I don't think that's a bad thing, as unless a particular RPG is more streamlined and action oriented (which is also fine), that's its place. If this is the case, you might as well make it worth the time the player is going to spend there.



I'm not advocating making it a necessity to spend a lot of time in the menu to progress through the game, but simply positive reinforcement, giving players who like to prepare and mess around and prestage options and rewards to do so. Games like Star Ocean 2, Final Fantasy V/VI Vagrant Story, the SaGa series, and a few others were games that rewarded players who liked to mess around with stats and extra stuff in their menu and generally made it a fun and kinda cool place to be. I just don't want to perpetuate the idea that a lot of the things we do in RPGs should be tedious afterthoughts.