LIGHTNINGLORD2'S PROFILE

If you worry about in-battle healing making things too unrealistic, try making a believable alternative to hit points than health:

-Halo's weapons kill you instantly on direct contact - thankfully, you have regenerating shields surrounding you that can keep you alive.
-Although medkits exist, XCOM: Enemy Unknown has much of your health come from your body armor. Taking too much damage to HP (more than your armor provides) will force the soldier to rest for days/weeks to recover. He can still hang on through the mission, though.
-Pillars of Eternity uses Stamina as HP, which is fueled by health. Finishing a fight or using healing skills converts health to stamina. Health can only be restored by resting.
-The older games of the Telepath series uses mental integrity as health - this is because they were about dueling psions. It turned back to health after the series contains non-psionic ways to deal damage (mainly, weapons)

In defense of in-battle healing, it is usually necessary because combatants deal very high damage relative to their health, which makes healing needed to keep the battle from being over in a few turns. Also, it is your only answer to damage in turn-based games usually as you can't prevent your opponent from dealing damage in most games.

Still waiting for an actually deep JRPG here - Persona 4 was good, but still...

You know what's bad in this regard? The character creation aspect some tactical RPGs have. It's not that I dislike it (I love having custom units), it's that, for an efficient team, you should never, ever make use of it. You often get both enough generics to get by the early parts and are granted story characters across the game that heavily outclass them in whatever you want.

So you got a game - a lot of things you saw made you interested, when you actually play, you can mostly even agree on the game's strong points - but, at one point (early or late), you encounter something that is so bad that you now hate the entire game, even if all the other features are good. Any experiences you had like this?

I can cite an example myself:

The World Ends With You

What I like about it

It was a very unique setting to start an rpg with, it has an interesting (though not that amazing) plot and some very cool mechanics for item drops.

What ruined it for me

The controls. Though I managed to find games that are even worse, I just couldn't play a game like that. It was really awkward to handle moving and attacking (I generally slide the stylus for tap controls for precision), they even added rythmic button presses to that! I turned the game away forever after that happened.

Just make sure your game doesn't have any unnecessary elements to it - also, I'd recommend you to plan out the story before working on the game if it's story-driven.