NOAJANG'S PROFILE

Finishing up the items / inventory screen for my CMS at the moment, and it got me thinking about how many items the player should be able to carry with them. Feel like I'm kind of on the fence, and was looking for people's opinions on what they tend to prefer in games.

I've personally never been a huge fan of inventory micromanagement outside of survival horror, and found it kind of frustrating in games like Phantasy Star and Lunar to have to keep juggling items, especially with obligatory key items eating up the same inventory space. So I was leaning towards stacks of the same item up to a certain value. But I do kind of like the way that a smaller inventory allows you to make items more powerful and important without affecting game balance as much, and after implementing stacks of up to 99 of the same item like FF7, it just looked like way too much, especially for an RPG Maker game that is likely to be a lot shorter than the average commercially-released JRPG.

Right now I'm thinking about implementing some arbitrary lower cap (10? 20?) on item stacks like the Tales games, or potentially going with the limited inventory option, but making it a bit larger than usual and keeping key items separate. But was just curious what people tend to prefer when it comes to inventory space in RPGs.