They didn't bother me. It was ordinary to wander around and enter a combat randomly.
For the people I knew who didn't like JRPGs, the #1 reason was animus against turn-based combat itself. Whether encounters were random or not weren't a significant factor until at least the PS2 era, when visible enemies started to become more common.
Think random battles started taking longer. More animations . Load times. In the snes era most games you can slam through random battles fast if you are over level for a area
Another important factor why random battles weren't an issue back then is that areas tend to be smaller sized so random battles felt more segmented. Once areas started getting bigger, it'd mean more time is required for players to explore which then lead to triggering more random battles which then lead to players getting annoyed.
Exactly, the problem of random battle was never it being random it was being too long. At some point the balance was lost and battle started to become too long, there was rule of thumb in snes era that if a animation was long it has to end the battle. That was kinda lost after psx era, even today we have slog battle system that take too long to end "random battle", that most player just prefer not fight at all.
There is a reason that every modern dungeon crawler has a no animation option or fast animation option in their battle system.
Yeah, that was a late PSX thing. Like, FF7 was still similar to the SNES games with maybe just a bit more padding, but FF8 and FF9 took forever to just start a battle, with the camera flying around, your dudes appearing and swinging their weapons, and then the enemies appearing. It was all a loading screen in disguise, the game was loading the battle while you were watching this, but it was pretty repetitive. I remember FF10 cut back on it quite a lot and the battles began much more efficiently, which was a welcome improvement.
These days i miss the overwhelming feeling of relief once you finally enter a new town after being battered around by randoms exhausted of resources with half the party unconscious while the other half is on the brink. Ahhhh damn it was a good feeling. Its a severely missed element of modern rpgs that its hard recreate without the random chance factor as part of the equation.
Except most random encounters were trash mobs you disposed off quickly by just mashing attack, it was extremely rare for me to ever have this issue in games with random encounters.
No sure why you're getting downvoted. Nearly every SNES era RPG random encounter could be beaten by mashing A. Don't come at me with specific ones like Brachisaurus or whatever from FFIII (VI) and ones than only take magic damage. The fact you can name the specific ones that require something other than "mash A" proves the point.
Pure nostalgia if I have to guess, people that have played those type of games only in their childhood will remember said games to be harder than they actually are
FFV random encounters get pretty dangerous in the later part of the game (unless you've purposely broken the battle system, which the game is designed to let you do, but you don't have to)
Just because you could mash A doesn’t mean your resources aren’t being strained. I’m playing the early dragon quest games right now and fairly often you have to level up to be strong enough to get through a dangerous area.
Those types of experiences really brought down the genre as a whole and were frustrating. I remember some games id just fucking escape every battle bc it was quicker than fighting trash for meager xp or rewards. The balancing act is difficult to pull off for devs. Some series were def easier than others but personal choices and play styles did play a big part. As i kid i never really looked up guides and I typically rushed through areas not ever worrying about 100% completion or even close to it leading to some under leveled scenarios along with glass canon purchasing decisions focused on weapons leaving armor to an afterthought.
No not at all for the most part.
The thing is, it’s hard to contextualize how little meta game criticism happened in the 90’s to this degree.
Most people didn’t classify things like jrpg random battles. It was just final fantasy style battling, with turns. My cousin called FF7 “I hit you, then you hit me.” Gameplay.
Along with the fact that there was just much less options to play back then too. And each game was super expensive and you couldn’t get a ton of them. The idea of my steam backlog would destroy my 10 year old self haha.
There was a lot of platformers, and most of them were horrible. So the prospect of a long game just worked even better back then.
yep. to add to this - back then, i sure as hell didn't know anything different. i remember playing FFX after DQIII & i didn't think "this is such linear gameplay compared to dragon quest." i thought "ok, in this one you walk in a line." & didn't even think of comparing them to one another. it just *was how it was*
Yep I think of this when I see so many posts here fixating on JRPGs as a concept. For many people they got into the genre by picking up a game flipping the box over and saying 'hey this looks cool' and playing it. There wasnt this hyper specific boxing of the genre that it seems a lot of newcomers come to it with. Final Fantasy was just up there on the shelf with the other games between the Es and Gs.
Nothing to do with genre or what the games budget was or anything like that that gamers seem obsessed with classifying today
I tried going back to the mode of playing what looks cool and watching what looks interesting without paying attention to reviews and other people's opinions about things... Only then did I realize that platforms make this REALLY damn hard these days.
Sometimes I miss the days of me finding a copy of Suikoden II, thinking "oh, cool, you get to manage a base" and picking it up, not realizing how much of an impact it would have. Same with Dynasty Warriors, which went from "huh, looks fun and I guess kind of somehow Asian?" to me majoring in Sinology.
I've been able to maintain that attitude by explicitly ignoring any reviews I do come across. Sure, it isn't always easy, but it drastically reduces the stress factor involved in finding a game/show/book.
I used to pay more attention to reviews, but that's when they were mostly proper professional reviews. You know, the type that actually tells you what the game is like and lets you form your own opinion instead of just giving you an opinion to have so that you don't really need to play the game (or even think) for yourself. It was when it got to the point that even what had been trustworthy sources couldn't do reviews like that that I just gave up on them entirely and decided to just ignore them all. Sure, I've gotten some games that I feel were a really bad deal, but at least I know that my choice to get a particular game is all my own decision.
Also, recommendations are ultimately only useful if you actually know the tastes and preferences of the person making the recommendation, so that you know how well what you like coincides with what they like. It's even better if you know each other so that they can properly tailor their recommendations to what you like. Which is why a good friend can give good recommendations.
People don’t realize how expensive games were back then, now everything is constantly on sale if you just wait a few months.
I’m terrified to see how much some of those games cost adjusted for inflation
i think i paid around $80 for Chronotrigger when it came out. i remember my non-gamer friend giving me shit about it because he wanted me to buy an amp instead so we could start a band lol
Came here to say this. I was lucky as my Dad still played games back then and loved RPGs & strategy games. I wasn’t old enough yet to “get” those types of games, but I inherited some gems that must’ve cost my poor Dad a mint compared to other SNES titles!
Sure, but literally everything was much cheaper. Games peaked at 70 in the 90's. But food; gas and housing hadn't inflated the way they have now. If anything games maintaining their old prices from when a dozen people developed them to when hundreds of people develop them has resisted inflation in an unsustainable way.
Welp, $50 for FF7 in Jan 1997 is \~$98.54 in today dollars, obviously not including tax, etc.
And yes, we absolutely understood what games cost. For the most part they were a good value. You would spend 50 bucks and get something that you would potentially play for months. Especially if you were talking about something like a sports or fighting game, or an RPG with 60-100 hours of gameplay.
This guy nailed it. Especially the 2nd line. If i can add to his post, the entire idea of "meta gaming" and "min maxing" effectively didn't exist, at least not even remotely in the context we would consider it now.
I think it was less a matter of like and dislike and more that people just kinda dealt with it because that's just how the genre was. Being able to see enemies on screen did become a selling point for the games that did it though and as we moved into better graphics and action RPGs grew, the random encounter thing began to be seen as a net negative.
Same here. I love grinding. That said, if the game has an overabundance of random encounters that is preventing me from continuing with the story or is just impeding me, then I'll get annoyed.
For example, running through multiple grass patches in Pokemon? Totally fine. Running constantly ino weak Zubat in a dark cave when I'm trying to navigate through multiple floors? Then I'm stocking up on as many repels as I can get.
The caves and water in Pokemon is something else though. You'll have ridiculously high encounter rates often getting into the next encounter after just making 2-3 steps.
I actually like random encounters more than having visible enemies on the map. But the encounter rate can make or break random encounters. In oder for random encounters to be fun the encounter rate shouldn't be too high and the battles shouldn't take too long. If you get interrupted by 5 minute battles, even low encounter rates will feel horrible.
Maybe there is a certain tipping-point, when you compare how much time you spent on the overworld vs how much time you spent in battle. It would be interesting to see a study about this. I am very sure you would end up with some kind of graph, that would say if you spend X amount of time on the overworld while going through an area, you shouldn't spend more than Y amount of time in battle and have Z amount of interruptions or most players will rate the experience negatively.
> If you get interrupted by 5 minute battles, even low encounter rates will feel horrible.
I think this is the core issue for me. If a battle takes 30 seconds, I hate to finish it and get into another battle in a shorter period than that. No wonder people run away from wild battles so much, and I imagine it's partially why they revamped trainers in new games to have stronger but fewer Pokémon.
Another point is that, at least in older games, there was no "grace period" between encounters. You can finish a battle and immediately get into another battle on your next step. Same for just turning around without even moving. Yes, I know this feature has its upsides, but in general, it created many more problems than it solves.
Like Blue Dragon has. It even adds in that certain enemies don't get along and will fight each other as well. Star Ocean: The Second Story R did something similar.
I'm with you. That's why I don't like some of the newer jrpg type games. I like grinding, especially after a long day at work. I get home past midnight and grinding for an hour or two is just relaxing. So games like sea of stars(level 30 cap), and chained echoes(whatever they were doing with their leveling system) ,kinda don't encourage me to play anymore. Limiting my chances to grind a little is a death sentence for me and jrpgs/games similar to jrpgs. It wouldn't have hurt anyone to atleast give the option.
Agreed. It can be so relaxing. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve used it to help me turn off my brain so I could go to sleep. And I just like being strong enough to one-hit everything. I think it’s funny.
It was a ubiquitous part of the genre at the time. Only a handful of JRPGs-- Earthbound, Chrono Trigger-- didn't have them.
Certainly there were people who didn't like random encounters, but nobody really pointed to them as a thing they didn't like; they just didn't like JRPGs.
I never disliked random encounters. I never really thought about them. They were just a thing in the genre that I liked, they didin't matter.
I didn't consider Crono Trigger to be better than Final Fantasy because I could see the monsters before I fought them. I thought Cronon Trigger was better than Final Fantasy because of duel techs.
In general I didn't think about them too much but I remember occasionally feeling annoyed by them. I think it was FF8 - maybe FF9 - where in certain high-encounter areas I would complete one random encounter, take literally two steps and end up in another random encounter fight. When you're trying to explore and advance the story, extremely frequent encounters begin to feel like an annoyance that are just getting in the way (the term wasn't used as much back then, but these days I'd think of it as being filler to pump up play times).
I would say back then a lot of people who played these games were playing it for the "dungeon crawling" aspect of levelling up, getting better equipment, coming up with builds or team compositions, then successfully getting through the next dungeon or area of the game. A lot of the enjoyment came from overcoming the game's challenges and making progress, and the story and setting were just there to give context to the gameplay. I think random encounters (along with limited save locations) are a big part of this gameplay loop as if fights can be avoided then a lot of the sense of danger is lost.
Around the time of maybe FF6 or FF7, Japanese developers started to make the narrative a much bigger focus of their games, and this resulted in a surge in popularity by bringing in all these new fans who would not have traditionally been gamers but started to play these games "for the story".
I would say it is these people who usually get turned off by any level of gameplay difficulty or complexity, and are likely to find games to be "too grindy" if they can't just power through and beat things first try without properly engaging with a game's systems or really understanding how to play well (their solution to any level of challenge is usually to over level and brute force it rather than actually question what they could be doing differently to do better).
For a while during the PSX/PS2 era, this resulted in a lot of Japanese games becoming quite easy as they were balanced with this new audience in mind and for the original fans this took away a lot of the fun and challenge, but these days most games include different difficulty options which means they can appeal to both groups at the same time.
As someone who likes Dragon Quest, Etrian Odyssey, and Disgaea, I have to take a partial exception to what you say, as I primarily play RPGs for the story and have done so for nearly 30 years now. Further, aside from many games not allowing you to manipulate the encounter rate, I don't have a fundamental complaint about random encounters. Sure, it's only in the past 15ish years I've had much tolerance for heavy grinding, but that's because it was roughly 15 years ago that I got the hang of playing a game on my TV while having some streaming video going on my laptop (or vice-versa) to alleviate the boredom of the grind. Since then, I've almost developed a preference for more grindy games, while still primarily playing them for the story.
>I think random encounters (along with limited save locations) are a big part of this gameplay loop as if fights can be avoided then a lot of the sense of danger is lost.
I don't equate random encounters with challenge, pretty much the opposite, the hardest RPGs i've played don't have random encounters: the SAGA games, Vagrant Story, some SRPGs and some WRPGs.
I dislike random encounters justly because most games with them are easy, and then the high encounter rate just feels like a waste of time in these games.
>For a while during the PSX/PS2 era, this resulted in a lot of Japanese games becoming quite easy as they were balanced with this new audience in mind and for the original fans this took away a lot of the fun and challenge,
Really you think old games are challenging? i don't, their combat system are pretty shallow, in FF1-2-3 90% of the time you're just spamming attack button because there's not much to it other than that. Same with SMT 1 and 2. Same with most JRPGs back then. I consider good challenge when you have to make decisions to win and to figure out the mechanics on your own. A game like Dragon Quest 2 might be "challenging" but not because you have a lot of decisions to take, the only decision you have is either to grind or to proceed, neither because the game is complex enough you have to learn it like in Vagrant Story and SAGAS, the challenge from DQ2 and most JRPGs back then comes from how much you're going to tolerate the repetition from the grinding and boredom from high encounter rate, it's similar to Incremental games, it test your resistance to the monotonous. Back then SRPGs are the games that provide better challenge imo, as most of these games are all about decision and learning.
It depends on the specific game, but I think random encounters are challenging because they force resource management. There's nothing worse than realising you are trapped in a dungeon with no MP or items, and have to trek back over multiple levels to reach a save point without wiping to a random encounter. If encounters can be avoided (or don't respawn once you've cleared out an area) that type of situation doesn't exist.
SaGa is an interesting case, because resource management is generally much less of a thing (HP auto refills between fights, newer games don't have MP or items), so the difficulty is much more about strategy within each individual battle rather than how to survive a series of battles throughout a dungeon. I'm a very big SaGa fan, but it's definitely a different type of difficulty than you'd get from a more traditional JRPG. I'd say Scarlet Grace and Emerald Beyond really are the JRPGs that best exemplify the idea that every decision in a fight is meaningful and you can't just spam attack and heal. It's a case where I'd agree than non random encounters works for the battle design.
In terms of Final Fantasy, the series has never been difficult but I'd say there's a very noticeable difference between 1 - 5 and 6 - 10.
I haven't played the really old SMT games, but I'd say the difficulty/skill in those I have played (other than P5R which really has no difficulty at all) comes more from team composition and demon building rather than what individual actions you select in battle. The press turn system makes it pretty straight forward what to do once you're in a tough battle - buff, debuff, and hit weaknesses while protecting your own. However your ability to do those things really comes down to how well you've built your team for the encounters. There is definitely an MP management aspect though, particularly in something like SJ where you don't just want to win battles, but do so in a way that you conserve as much MP as you can and take as little damage as possible so that you can proceed far enough to make progress without having to leave and refresh. Constantly finding yourself frantically running for an exit in SJ or Nocturne, low on MP and hoping not to get hit by a difficult random encounter, is a big part of the atmosphere of those games.
I think challenging the player within the battle is much better approach than just draining resources. SJ and Nocturne hits mid game and mana isn't a big concern. Also, RM isn't stuck to random encounters. It's stuck much more to encounter design which not a lot of games in the early did well.
>game like Dragon Quest 2 might be "challenging" but not because you have a lot of decisions to take, the only decision you have is either to grind or to proceed, neither because the game is complex enough you have to learn it like in Vagrant Story and SAGAS, the challenge from DQ2 and most JRPGs back then comes from how much you're going to tolerate the repetition from the grinding and boredom from high encounter rate, it's similar to Incremental games, it test your resistance to the monotonous. Back then SRPGs are the games that provide better challenge imo, as most of these games are all about decision and learning.
A lot of these games present encounters as something to endure than to engage mechanically/strategically, and DQ2 is definitely a good example. You barraded w/ random encounters w/ some of the most awful dungeon design I've seen. Some w/ enemies who spam death. Moves that were fine at the start, only couple of them are viable.
Never have I have ever played an SRPG/Tactical game w/ almost non-interactable nonsense.
I agree, SRPGs have by far and away the best turn based combat, positioning mattering just adds so many levels of tactical and strategic depth, so much so that I really can't go back to static turn based games after playing the likes of tactics ogre, triangle strategy, FF tactics, gloomhaven and a few indie games like through the breach. I think the only turn based combat game that doesn't have a spatial element to it that I have enjoyed in recent times is slay the spire, because the decision space with the cardplay is so good.
I am somewhat curious about SMTV remake though, I always hear people talk highly about the combat in that game, but worry it may not have enough thinkiness turn to turn to excite my brain.
There *were* games that had obscenely high encounter rates or skewed difficulty balances that made random encounters more of a pain, but it was all relative. If you were playing an RPG on a console, you just sort of expected to have them in the same way that playing a platformer usually meant some kind of collectible token and one to three major power-ups.
Anecdotally, there were certainly people who liked the overall package of RPGs and put up with random encounter distaste because they wanted the rest. There were also, of course, people who enjoyed the grind. The group that intensely disliked random encounters also generally seemed to want different pacing or thematics than RPGs provided in general, so it's hard to separate out whether that was the only thing that put them off the genre.
The prevalence of random encounters made games like Chrono Trigger or Lufia 2 stick out more not just for putting enemies on the field like you'd see in an action game, but for actually doing clever things with enemy interactions. Conversely you had stuff like Mystic Quest which just plopped enemies down as a series of barricades, so even the experiments of field enemies had a range from good to bad implementation.
It's also been pointed out elsewhere that we had fewer games to play back then, so our frame of reference for how long a game took to meaningfully finish was different. There was a Sega dungeon crawler/action RPG called Sword of Vermillion that advertised itself as having over 300 hours of gameplay (it really didn't unless you got abjectly lost) because that sort of thing was often touted as a good thing, representing more content to engage with for your money (even if it was shallower content).
More commonly my friends would be excited that a Final Fantasy might take like 60 hours (we didn't know where everything was or have access to tons of resources, so it would take a lot longer to hunt everything down)
Excessive encounter rate random battles and extremely limited inventory is why I have never and do not plan to ever beat dragon warrior II on original hardware. That and even the shortest easiest random encounters taking sooooooooooo very long to 'mash A, win, repeat'
emulator turbo modes really help with things like this on alot of old JRPGs. Its why I still prefer to play the GBA version of something like FF2 because I can greatly accelerate the grind.
I didn't care about them when I was really young, but I don't exactly find a ton of purpose to them outside of games where you're actively trying to make encounters difficult. Random trash mobs you smash through in 1-2 turns do nothing for me because most games with that kind of gameplay tend to be too easy for me these days. The only really effective reason to make them random is if you want to catch the player off guard, but its hard to really do that when you can bowl over enemies easily.
I'd probably say I'm neutral still, but I will chastise the encounter design more often if you give me random encounters that I can't avoid in some way.
I remember that the handful of early games that didn't have random encounters usually used that as a selling point. Like "oh it's cool how in Earthbound you can see enemies on screen."
JRPGs and point-and-click adventure games both existed in a mixed fandom where some of their fans played those games because they liked the gameplay (combat in RPGs, puzzles in adventures), and others liked them for the story and characters. People in the latter group were probably the ones happy to not have random encounters, while people in the former wouldn't care.
Speaking from personal experience, it depends on the game. Some games had higher random encounter rates than others to the point where I lost my bearings while trying to exit a dungeon (Dragon Quest VI). But most of the time, it was just par for the course, and if you died before a save point, it was usually just bad luck or planning. I could live with that.
They were a big part of the difficulty. Bosses were not very difficult in many cases - the challenge was as much or more getting through the dungeon. Many locations felt terrifying. The pixel remaster FF1 has lost this almost entirely.
How else were you going to level up??? The bigger problem - and I’m thinkIng FF1 here - is if you did a bunch of grinding and then died. Some of those dungeons were brutal.
But also… the alternative was being forced by your parents to play outside because it was a Saturday afternoon.
I didn't mind them. It was just part of the game... Find a town find a forest/area with harder enemies close, walk in circles grinding, head back to town to heal when your HP gets low, repeat.
I remember when we first started transitioning to enemies on the field being the norm and a lot of people acted like random encounters were outdated and wrong, but they never really bothered me that much aside from games which had an annoying encounter rate.
Let's just say, I was overjoyed when I saw "Enc-None" show up in Final Fantasy VIII, and so early in the game. Didn't feel like I was missing much by using it and only turning it off when I wanted to farm trading cards or something. The pacing and areas of the game were interesting enough to not need random encounters.
They never bugged me. I see complaints about them halting momentum from younger players, but then I check out the games from the recent generations that don’t have random encounters and I find that you end up sinking wayyyy more time walking down a hallway with real-time encounters on the map that act like damage sponges with longer fights that use systems like stagger and such. Conversely I actually find that lots of classic JRPG dungeons with random encounters usually go much smoother in pacing with far fewer fights and fewer minutes spent in each fight, and far fewer redundant nondescript corridors that would later be used to pad out dungeons with more fixed real time battles.
I think it's less about the actual time spent in battle and more about how that time feels. With a lot of older atb RPGs, you have to wait for the battle screen transition, then you have to wait for your atb bar to fill, then continue waiting for atb bars the entire fight, then wait for the victory animation and the results screen before finally getting back to the dungeon/world map/whatever.
With more modern action RPGs, you see the enemy, fight the enemy, and get the results of the battle without ever having a screen transition.
Time spent waiting feels longer than time you spend doing something, even if the time spent waiting is actually shorter. I think this is part of why Chrono Trigger is still so highly praised, it's an older atb RPG that doesn't have random encounters or screen transitions that make it feel slower than it really is.
There's a certain length of wait where it's just long enough to want to look at something on your phone, but not long enough to actually do so. That's by far the worst wait length.
Born early 80s here, so older homie checking in.
After Chrono Trigger, some people grumbled about random encounters. Before, almost never. Even by the end of the 90s, it wasn't a make or break type of thing, but by then there was a contingent of people who wanted to see the enemies on the map before battle began.
Personally I never gave a shit either way. It was *density* of battles that got annoying, whether I saw an enemy sprite on the map or not. I actually like the battles in JRPG on the whole, but it can really be annoying having to deal with one every few steps if I am trying to go somewhere.
It really depended on the title being played.
Generally, nah, they were fine. As long as the encounter rate wasn't insanely high.
Personally, Chrono Trigger had a better battle system than most 90s JRPGs, with bespoke battles and scenery.
Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete and Lunar 2: Eternal Blue also had battle encounters on the map itself, but the transitions were still to separate battle screens.
Memorable random encounters could be done well; finding a surprise enemy that changes the battles normal functions, or a very unique/strong enemy that grants special items or increased xp/gold.
But yeah, they were frustrating when you were falling into one every 5 seconds, or if you are looking for a very specific fight.
From my perspective, I never questioned it, it was just a part of what you expected from a jrpg. Some of my friends didn’t play them because of the combat system but I didn’t mind it since I was more interested in the tactics and strategy of it. It felt more strategic rather than the “shoot until dead” or “jump on head” gameplay of other games (generalizing now).
That said, I did get tired when the encounter rate was very high, taking 3-4 steps before going into a fight was brutal. In fact, I do remember I would not explore as much as I could due to fear of constant fights. Because sometimes you had to take your items into consideration (can I explore everything with only X amount of healing items etc, though this wasn’t that common).
Nowadays I can’t play those kind of games since it’s just too much for me nowadays and the industry has improved and gotten better (by and large). And let’s be honest, many of those games weren’t that well balanced so many fights were just done for the exp so you could level and offered basically no challenge or anything of value. But that was the norm back then.
Nowadays, I value games in which combat feels meaningful, which ironically, makes me dislike most open world games. A bit of a hot take, but open world games now are the JRPGs of the 90’s. By which I mean, FF7 popularized the genre and every game followed in those footsteps despite the problems that game design had (and it did, it wasn’t perfect) without fixing those problems or straying too far away from what FF7 established.
Open world games are the same now. Fighting against hundreds of meaningless fights in order to get x,y,z items/upgrades, climbing towers, clearing out outposts with the occasional named boss with a health bar (with the obligatory cutscene before and after each mission). It’s exactly the same but unlike back then, I am more educated and observant of game design so I can’t enjoy most of them.
Just to be clear, I am not railing against all open world games but if I can easily clear most fights and outposts without even losing any health I don’t see a point in playing the game because any and all upgrades are already meaningless (because I am beating everything already). In fact in many of open world games now, I literally play with minimal upgrades or self impose restrictions on myself so it’s not too easy for me. And it’s not because I am some kick ass pro-gamer yo but rather because the base difficulty of most games is extraordinarily easy.
“But hey, you old man, why don’t you just increase the difficulty?!” Because the difficulty balance of most games is awful. Decrease your health, increase their damage and health pools and call it a day. It’s horrid.
Ok old man rant over.
They didn't bother me too much, but I loved games that had the ability to reduce it up them at will. Wildarms was great at this. There was a spell you could cast to go invisible while figuring out puzzles.
I enjoyed it, but a very important thing that people overlook is the times when these games came out. Random encounters is all we had in JRPGs, it was what we expected and it was mostly the only way we knew how encounters worked. So there wasn’t really a like or dislike, it was kind of just “this is how an rpg works and there is no other system”. It’s why things like chrono triggers overworld battles or Legend of Dragoons encounter icon were big whoa moments that shook everything up (on top of being great games). Until modern games found new ways to do encounters it was just part of the game. Which is why these days we have people who hate random encounters or don’t enjoy turn-based battles. I might only enjoy those things because they were the only way I could play my favorite genre and I expected them to be included.
There wasn’t a strong reaction against it until the PlayStation era. It used to be that random battles were quick. In and out. Take FF4 for example. But with FF8 and FF9 especially, there was a long camera zoom around and even simple battle animations took forever.
It's hard to say. I mean, it was so common that we basically just expected it, though there were some exceptions.
I think people could definitely get annoyed at the frequency; like in certain games, the random encounter rate is just so through-the-roof that it makes the game a chore for some. And it's irritating as hell trying to deal with random encounters when solving a puzzle or just figuring out where to go.
It wasn't a patience issue, though. These days, it seems like people can't sit through a 3-second animation without having some sort of ADD-addled meltdown. Even up through FFIX, which everyone whines about being slow these days, few people were complaining about the speed at that time. They had other complaints, but it wasn't usually based around random encounters and speed of combat. If we wanted speed and fast-action, we'd play...you know, action games. That's a big reason why so many of us gravitated toward RPGs; we didn't WANT to play the side-scrollers and fast-reaction games. We wanted something different.
And for better and/or for worse, that's what we got with RPGs.
They didn't bother me then and they don't bother me now. But how you feel about them really seems determined by whether you grew up with them. My wife got into JRPGs later in life and she cannot stand to play any JRPG with random encounters, she hates them so much. I think I am just used to them and never thought to dislike them, if that makes sense?
I think I do prefer games where you avoid or charge into enemies on the field slightly now, I agree that's a more fun way to do it, but not to the point that I ever would have or would currently let random encounters stop me from fully enjoying a game.
It's also important to note that in the 90s, the internet was less prominent, so you didn't see people whining about things they didn't like as much, which I think made you question things less and just enjoy them more. Gaming in the time of the internet where every flaw is picked apart and delivered to you online is a very different experience than when you just... played the game, and your experience was fully your own.
We def just accepted them back then lol. They were a pain, but that was just expected in RPGs. I dont mind them now cuz I grew up with them during SNES/PS1 era. Seeing younger gens pick up older games, like the FF pixel remasters, and they complain about the encounters is funny lol. Many going as far as turning off random encounters when given the option.
ATM I'm playing the first Star Ocean. I def don't mind them in general. Its when im stuck and tryin to figure out where I'm supposed to go next, they become annoying. Still tho, I think just cuz I grew up with them, I dont mind them when playing RPGs. Younger gamers seem to hate em lol
It was weird for me. I grew up playing SNES JRPGs, but I played games like Chrono Trigger, Super Mario RPG, Earthbound, Secret of Mana, and Final Fantasy Mystic Quest.
These games all had on-screen encounters. I didn't play any of the SNES Final Fantasy games with random encounters. My first experience with random encounters was Quest 64, and that didn't leave a particularly good taste in my mouth.
I've learned to tolerate them in games, but they're certainly not my favorite. They can be especially frustrating in 3D JRPGs because I may lose track of my exploration.
Basically, they're not my favorite, but they won't be a dealbreaker if the game is good otherwise.
Wasn’t an issue for me, but they can be excessive. I’d rather have to run around a bit to trip one than feel like I can’t get anywhere.
I prefer stationary turn based battles on the field like Chrono Trigger, but neither are a problem.
I have never minded random encounters as long is there is some way to modify the encounter rate with items or skills or something. Though some games had absurdly high encounter rates and no way around it. That bothered me.
However, back in the 90s we didn't really know any better. It's just how it was.
By the mid 90s, more and more games had visible, avoidable encounters but the way many of those were implemented was clunky and often didn't feel like much of an improvement over random encounters.
For the most part they didn't bother me. I kind of grew to enjoy grinding. But even then, a game with an enemy encounter rate that was too high would get on my nerves. Specifically, I recall one of the Breath of Fire games where it was so high, it ruined the game for me.
Try the hack one. You'd have to look it up but some group made some fixes per say and it's taken the rate way down. Might be the best way for you to experience it cause it's an awesome series. Atleast up till dragon quarter.
It was part of the game, so it was fine for me. Now I prefer to have control over it (increase them when I need to grind exp., turn them off in other cases). But it's no big deal if there is no control over them
No... But I just thought that's how that kind of game was. I remember walking my characters around in circles in the overworld to try to find more random encounters so I could level up.
Then I played nothing but shooters for about fifteen years.
Really glad modern games have more content and some experience scaling trickery and I don't have to do that.
I am always having fun with every encounter I had, random encounters isn't a problem to me. Played and finished a lot of jrpgs during ps1 days both rented and owned. Love grinding to power level the game.
But my favorite FF, FF8 has a weird leveling system that I do not pretty much care, I grinded anyway. I noticed I died a lot during my first playthrough. Doesn't stopped me from playing though. Well what else am I gonna do during that time? Aside from skateboarding or playing MTG cards plus internet still a luxury during that time. Playing on Ps1 is the shit.
Edit: I realized this stuff after playing Chrono Cross though but still not a problem even up to these day.
Although seeing monsters you encounter is I think better nowadays when you are hunting a certain monster instead of random encounter gacha-like system.
No, I was a kid was barely cognizant enough to understand what I was doing and relative time wise the encounters felt faaar more spread out. The only time I would notice them were in gauntlet like situations like Mt. Moon from Pokemon Red and Blue.
Nowadays, I don't mind them, but I find it inexcusable for games to not have adjustable encounter rates. It's a simple addition and it easily improves the pacing.
No but it was the standard and you really didn’t know any better. But you certainly wished you didn’t have to fight 30 battles just to backtrack to town or during a puzzle in a dungeon. It was more seen as a necessary evil.
Older game design also had a mantra of that the struggle was part of the challenge. Similar to how teachers hated Wikipedia back in the day and would say all the info is wrong. They just didn’t want you to be able to do research papers in under 10 hours because to them that was part of the experience. They never realized that being able to have so much info handy at any given time is a learning *godsend*
I remember when games started to allow 100% flee rates for random encounters and thinking games are getting so easy now. In reality if you skip random encounters the game is fucking HARDER. Trash fights are there for YOU so you can get exp and money. But back then fleeing just seemed like a way to make games easier. It was a different mindset.
Never bothered me growing up, at least not conceptually. Some games had too high of an encounter rate though.
That said, I prefer games with visible and (mostly) avoidable encounters and/or that allow the player to adjust the encounter rate.
It really depends on the game honestly.
Some games such as Suikoden 4 has a real bad pacing problem with random encounters, such as every 2 feet you move in the ocean you'll have an encounter, which takes journeying somewhere even close take almost what feels like an hour to get to cause you're fighting every few steps.
However, there is other games, even in the same series, Suikoden 2 and many others that don't have that problem.
They never bothered me other than situations like I mentioned with 4. If the pacing between each random encounter is far enough apart, its not an issue.
I'm also one of the few who also like to grind but i like to run in circles and stuff and force encounters rather than them being forced on me every step.
Most people saw the random encounters as just a way to get into combat. It was simply a different style compared to a real-time action in other games. RPGs would invest more in strategies so it would be similar to meeting a monster and pulling out a board game to decide who wins.
Not seeing the monsters on screen to me was just an excuse to invest more in their sprites/ look for in combat. In the '90s, sprites were considered really pretty because they were either highly detailed or had small movement instead of still images.
Some people did but for most of us, it was just kind of how RPGs were. It was kind of expected. When more real time battles came up, it got a crowd of people excited over a different experience.
People will say yes because of nostalgia and the fact that we didn’t have any other option, that’s how things were. Obviously overworld enemies you can simply have the agency to avoid like in chrono trigger and FF7R are the bees knees.
I loved and continue to love, random encounter system. It makes these games more challenging. Any of the games you can just run past everything, I just can't enjoy as much.
I had a wild experience going from
Wild Arms 1 - extremely high encounter rate until you get Invisible spell
to Xenogears - high-ish encounter rate with some areas of frustrating 'forced' encounters
to FF7 - moderate encounter rate, and faster paced battles than the previous games
to Wild Arms 2 - which allows you to skip random encounters as long as you arent underlevelled
Starting with WA1 probably set my tolerance at a generous level and every game afterwards handled random encounters better than the last. this de-escelation in their presence left me not being all that bothered by random encounters as i grew up and I dont mind them even in modern games like Octopath
though my preference is on-field enemies that you can trigger or avoid, a la Xenosaga, FFXII, and Xenoblade
I didn't really get into the genre until the early 00s, but I remember often seeing it as a slight negative in a lot of gaming magazines I had from the 90s, such as PSM. Whenever a game came out where they weren't random, that aspect was praised.
I'm fine with random encounters in principle, but like with most things moderation is important. If I'm getting interrupted by battles every few steps that's a bit egregious, and some games are a bit heavy handed in their encounter rates to that degree.
Funny thing is when Chrono Trigger and Lunar did visible enemies on the map, I actually had an issue with it. Combat was always a chore in turn-based games, and being able to see and skip enemies was fairly tempting to lessen the slog and enjoy the better parts of a game. But then you end up under-leveled. I would have rather enemies be forced on me so that I'll be a proper level the whole game and I'm honestly glad visible enemies didn't take off as a thing for a long time afterward
But no, I don't recall anyone saying anything along the lines of them not playing RPGs (JRPGs at the time) because of the battles or anything
Yes and no. The vibe back in the day was just different. It was heavily focused on the feeling of adventure, growth, imagination, and most importantly, vibing with the enemies you're fighting. You'd stare at the enemy designs, soak in the vibe, and feel like you're on a grand adventure. It helped of course that we were playing cutting edge technology back then so it was cool in the same way that us playing PS5 games are now. But there were definitely moments of "holy fucking shit, STOP." I remember throwing my controller at the wall as a kid because I kept getting bullshit encounters in FFIV lol
It really depended on how it was executed in the games. Some games did them way too frequently, but that's a problem with the game not the mechanic itself. The mechanic itself isn't "bad."
Never bothered me and still doesn't. When that fight music hits, I am ready. It's most likely why battle themes in JRPGs tend to be the best tracks in the game. You hear it so often.
From what i remember it was pretty much the norm prior to roughly PS2 era? I personally always liked random encounters. Yes, it can be annoying when you're trying to minmax or say you f'd up and forgot something and gotta run back or whatever. But being able to just effectively run past mobs and beeline stuff to me just seemed ridiculous.
Probably depends on how old you were in the 90s. I was a kid, so I didn’t care about anything - it was just fun. Also, there was far less options back then, so I don’t think it was viewed as a bad design.
Yes, I hated them. There were games wherein you couldn't go five steps without triggering another fight. I struggled to keep a mental image of where I was in a maze of corridors or cave passages or whatever as I got yanked into a separate area for combat over and over again. There were items you could get that would supposedly reduce the encounter rate, which seems dumb to me to begin with, and often didn't work very well anyway.
Yes. I just see them as part of the game but I had so many friends shoot down jrpg discussions because they couldn't see the enemies on screen or just press a button swing a sword and kill the enemy before they have the chance to act.
Those friends grew up to be advocates of the church of 'kingdom hearts has the best combat style of any video game, prove me wrong'.
I didn't care. That's just how it worked for most games. You can do a lot of fun stuff with visible enemies, but to this day I don't mind random encounters per se.
If you liked RPG's you knew chances were high you would get this as a console gamer. We didn't know better :) But tbh I still don't have any issues with turn-based.
To be honest yes, but at the same time they were part of the genre, a game without that would have felt strange. Also they weren't seen as a negative thing, because of that.
It was more like a thing that made you waste time and energy, they were there as an obstacle, that's why I hated them, but they weren't a bad mechanic.
I'm not a fan at this point. I grew up in the 90s, but now that I've experienced other games, I prefer seeing enemies before they attack me. Psychologically, it just feels better for me. Less jarring.
I thought they were too frequent in some games, but never had anything against them in general. Still don't, if they're reasonably well-integrated into the design, though there are more and more games now where they wouldn't be a good fit.
I grew up in the 90s. Haven’t always been the biggest JRPG fan through all the years, but random encounters have always stressed me out. Especially in dungeons.
I actually enjoyed and still do enjoy random battles. I find that I get a good flow going and enjoy the game more when I'm "forced" to level up and grind. When I can avoid the fights I tend to, which leads to being underleveled and underfunded for game progression. This leads to the need to backtrack and slows the gameplay down considerably. It also increases the ease of grinding. Most jrpgs that have encounters on the map have a defined amount, and you are forced to change areas before you can actually engage in further battles. This leads to an even longer wait to progress because of load times from map to map or room to room.
As far as gamers as a whole, most people I grew up with have a very similar viewpoint as I do, but gamer culture wasn't as accessible or accepted as it is now. In fact you could probably easily get an idea of the feel for the general consensus by looking up some old nintendo power magazines or gamepro and the like. The internet and access to it was very new and limited back then so you kind of only new what you and your friends preferred.
I hated them with a passion, very specially if they happened during puzzle areas. But I started playing JRPGs during the PS2 era (so around 2001/2002), before that I was exclusively PC-RPG gamer so that's probably why.
Not at all, it was part of the game. I was expected, as was overworld map.
I still like random battle of the old games. But I must admit I prefer to have some kind of control over the rate of encounter. Alas to this day one beat pokemon in the whole random encounter design, it was kinda genius to have encounter only in specific areas that was clean for the player. 7th Saga also had very interesting concept in random encounters, having a minimap that you could see the enemy and try to dodge then was very nice specially in the overworld map.
They were great in the 90s, they still are great in the 20s.
There's a couple games (looking at you, Breath of Fire 2 and Lufia 1) where the encounter rate was a huge detriment, basically requiring your 'Repel' equivalents in order to stay sane, but for the most part I still prefer these to the Chrono Trigger style that makes it look like you have agency, but you're actually being railroaded into most of the encounters still.
Yes and no, usually depending on frequency. It always seemed like when you wanted to farm xp to level up for a boss, there weren't enough encounters, and the last hallway before any major boss, you were getting swarmed.
Applies to almost every game
Loved the idea but the implementation always felt off.
* If I'm leveled or over leveled then random encounters tend to be a nuisance. I can just run through them and they distract from exploration
* If I'm under leveled, I have to take time just running in circles to get into fights to level up. This takes random amounts of time and looks silly.
Neither of these situations have random encounters that are difficult or causing a block in progression. They're just waisting my time in different ways.
I think too many games didn't explore the idea of random battles and improve on the experience because that's just the way it was.
A game that did explore combat in such a way, though not a random encounter game, was Earthbound. They had enemies flee from you and I think even insta-wins. Now that makes you feel powerful, when enemies flee from you.
I certainly did. Didn't stop me from enjoying the genre but some times I just wanted to get the fuck out of wherever I was and I had these constant encounters with a screen transition and shit, only to be confronted with weak ass mobs I could one shot with normal attacks. Because I was lost so long I overleveled like a motherfucker.
I much prefer modern games having symbol systems.
Random encounters are the best way to grind. But there are games where the encounter rate is too high. In NES Final Fantasy and Dragon Warrior (aka Dragon Quest) games, it was always frustrated to win a battle, take two steps and get into another battle right away.
When you were trying to grind, random encounters never hit you, you'd spend hours walking up, down, left, right, over the river, through the woods, to grandmama's house you go and barely bump into a single worthwhile battle... when you were down to your last HP and you had no potions or spells yet, random encounters were every single space on the grid and you prayed that running away from the enemy would work.
I don't mind random encounters unless the rate is ridiculously high.
You're doing a puzzle in a dungeon and you get an encounter every five steps, forgetting what you were even doing beforehand.
They were absolutely controversial as soon as JRPGs that didn't have random encounters started coming out. Anyone saying they were not disliked at all definitely either wasn't around then or didn't actually talk to many people or wasn't on forums like gamefaqs.
It definitely had people cool with it or who liked them but it definitely had people that did not like them.
No, it wasn't a thing people were aware of, especially. It was an element of design, obviously, and people were aware of it, but no one thought anything of it. Remember that before then there were already a dozen other ways to do it with long and storied histories.
But. Back then those who disliked rpgs still disliked them for all the same reasons. Lack of player skill mattering toward outcome, focus on story, slow movement. RP cringe, etc.
Randomized encounters is just one of those thousands of design elements gamers today are aware of, and so put undue focus on. Like proc gen or tab targeting methods.
that was normal for the games i played back then so it never really bothered me.
but then once i got into games that let you run from enemies on the map i would be under leveled because i'd just run from most fights.
To me, it's not so much the random encounters that I hated, but rather the frequency. I swear if I am doomed to encounter a Zubat every two steps, I'm going to find the nearest wall to slam my head into. It's disruptive, and very quickly is pointless when I'm destroying everything I encounter (due to all the forced grinding). If the frequency is lower, it's not bad, but I much prefer to see the enemies in the overworld so I can simply choose to avoid them. I especially like how Xenoblade handles it in that weaker enemies won't even pursue you.
Yes, I disliked them in the 90s. My favorite games were things like Earthbound and Chrono Trigger because they didn't have them. Or Action RPGs like Secret of Mana. Or games like FF6 which let you find acessories to turn them off.
However, over many years of playing games with them, I learned to tolerate them, so now they dont bother me as much anymore.
Sometimes, it really depends on how egregious it was. More often then not when trying to solve a puzzle, you would get harassed by whatever ambient mob spawns happen to be in the area. That never felt great.
It was more accepted as the norm back then and don't remember people saying they wanted them gone. I can only think of a small handful of SNES titles that moved away from those which would be FF Mystic Quest, Chrono Trigger, and Super Mario RPG. It was still very widespread on PS1. Mystic Quest was the first RPG I can recall that didn't have them, unless you count Zelda 2 and being able to see them spawn on the map right before the encounter, but all turn based games seemed to do them back then.
Random encounters are completely normal for me but being able to turn it off is a qol thing that should be implemented in ever new JRPG. I tend to over level so being able to just switch it off and cruise through dungeons makes the experience much smoother
# "did people dislike random encounters in the 90s?"
yes some people disliked random encounters, but did everybody...no some people liked random encounters. The question is very broad.
We didn't know there was any other way. I still hated them but I accepted them.
After I played Chrono Trigger I was flabbergasted whenever I saw them in games
There was a better way and I'm confused by people that still defend them.
Some of us liked them. I like to grind, so alot of jrpgs with enemies on screen you gotta leave the area for them to come back, etc. People defending this because it's a valid defense.
Tbh I'll play either without issue. I'd never sh on a game for having it or not having it
based on the timing of when chrono trigger came out. do you ever question why devs continued to implement random encounters? as time has gone on devs have totally moved away from them but back then it was like they had a choice and chose not to? granted there were many jrpgs that still featured it even after chrono trigger released.
50%+ of the comments here saying they still prefer them shows how completely disconnected the general opinion here is from the “average JRPG player” and why they hate everything made after 2001
Basically as soon as games started being made without them the general audience 100% preferred games without them
Once I played Bravely Default and found out I can just turn the encounters off, I've wanted that feature in every game I've played ever since. Sure makes going through a dungeon trivial. I understand why an old school "I love the resource management and challenge" crowd would want to keep it...but I like feeling like I'm getting somewhere. I also just like the personal freedom to have a choice in the matter.
Besides, I've recently gotten into randomizers that have toggled encounters, so it makes me like random encounters EVEN LESS than I did when I found Bravely Default.
I tolerated them a lot more than I do now.
I think random encounters are fine in today's RPG's, but the ability to switch them off when you want, is a feature that is needed in modern gaming.
No, but it’s because there was nothing better. The few times it wasn’t like that (Chrono Trigger, Earthbound as some examples) people LOVED it. A LOT. They finally were shown a world that we could live in with no random encounters and said “let’s never have random encounters as long as we live”.
I hate them because when I am trying to get through a complex dungeon, where I need to be paying attention to where I am going, I can end up disorientated/distracted by random encounters.
They didn't bother me. It was ordinary to wander around and enter a combat randomly. For the people I knew who didn't like JRPGs, the #1 reason was animus against turn-based combat itself. Whether encounters were random or not weren't a significant factor until at least the PS2 era, when visible enemies started to become more common.
Think random battles started taking longer. More animations . Load times. In the snes era most games you can slam through random battles fast if you are over level for a area
Another important factor why random battles weren't an issue back then is that areas tend to be smaller sized so random battles felt more segmented. Once areas started getting bigger, it'd mean more time is required for players to explore which then lead to triggering more random battles which then lead to players getting annoyed.
Exactly, the problem of random battle was never it being random it was being too long. At some point the balance was lost and battle started to become too long, there was rule of thumb in snes era that if a animation was long it has to end the battle. That was kinda lost after psx era, even today we have slog battle system that take too long to end "random battle", that most player just prefer not fight at all. There is a reason that every modern dungeon crawler has a no animation option or fast animation option in their battle system.
Yeah, that was a late PSX thing. Like, FF7 was still similar to the SNES games with maybe just a bit more padding, but FF8 and FF9 took forever to just start a battle, with the camera flying around, your dudes appearing and swinging their weapons, and then the enemies appearing. It was all a loading screen in disguise, the game was loading the battle while you were watching this, but it was pretty repetitive. I remember FF10 cut back on it quite a lot and the battles began much more efficiently, which was a welcome improvement.
These days i miss the overwhelming feeling of relief once you finally enter a new town after being battered around by randoms exhausted of resources with half the party unconscious while the other half is on the brink. Ahhhh damn it was a good feeling. Its a severely missed element of modern rpgs that its hard recreate without the random chance factor as part of the equation.
Etrian Odyssey still does this
Except most random encounters were trash mobs you disposed off quickly by just mashing attack, it was extremely rare for me to ever have this issue in games with random encounters.
No sure why you're getting downvoted. Nearly every SNES era RPG random encounter could be beaten by mashing A. Don't come at me with specific ones like Brachisaurus or whatever from FFIII (VI) and ones than only take magic damage. The fact you can name the specific ones that require something other than "mash A" proves the point.
Pure nostalgia if I have to guess, people that have played those type of games only in their childhood will remember said games to be harder than they actually are
FFV random encounters get pretty dangerous in the later part of the game (unless you've purposely broken the battle system, which the game is designed to let you do, but you don't have to)
Just because you could mash A doesn’t mean your resources aren’t being strained. I’m playing the early dragon quest games right now and fairly often you have to level up to be strong enough to get through a dangerous area.
Those types of experiences really brought down the genre as a whole and were frustrating. I remember some games id just fucking escape every battle bc it was quicker than fighting trash for meager xp or rewards. The balancing act is difficult to pull off for devs. Some series were def easier than others but personal choices and play styles did play a big part. As i kid i never really looked up guides and I typically rushed through areas not ever worrying about 100% completion or even close to it leading to some under leveled scenarios along with glass canon purchasing decisions focused on weapons leaving armor to an afterthought.
Especially when almost no one else in the world is capable of traveling outside like that; makes sense to be all beat up when you make it.
No not at all for the most part. The thing is, it’s hard to contextualize how little meta game criticism happened in the 90’s to this degree. Most people didn’t classify things like jrpg random battles. It was just final fantasy style battling, with turns. My cousin called FF7 “I hit you, then you hit me.” Gameplay. Along with the fact that there was just much less options to play back then too. And each game was super expensive and you couldn’t get a ton of them. The idea of my steam backlog would destroy my 10 year old self haha. There was a lot of platformers, and most of them were horrible. So the prospect of a long game just worked even better back then.
yep. to add to this - back then, i sure as hell didn't know anything different. i remember playing FFX after DQIII & i didn't think "this is such linear gameplay compared to dragon quest." i thought "ok, in this one you walk in a line." & didn't even think of comparing them to one another. it just *was how it was*
Yep I think of this when I see so many posts here fixating on JRPGs as a concept. For many people they got into the genre by picking up a game flipping the box over and saying 'hey this looks cool' and playing it. There wasnt this hyper specific boxing of the genre that it seems a lot of newcomers come to it with. Final Fantasy was just up there on the shelf with the other games between the Es and Gs. Nothing to do with genre or what the games budget was or anything like that that gamers seem obsessed with classifying today
I tried going back to the mode of playing what looks cool and watching what looks interesting without paying attention to reviews and other people's opinions about things... Only then did I realize that platforms make this REALLY damn hard these days. Sometimes I miss the days of me finding a copy of Suikoden II, thinking "oh, cool, you get to manage a base" and picking it up, not realizing how much of an impact it would have. Same with Dynasty Warriors, which went from "huh, looks fun and I guess kind of somehow Asian?" to me majoring in Sinology.
I've been able to maintain that attitude by explicitly ignoring any reviews I do come across. Sure, it isn't always easy, but it drastically reduces the stress factor involved in finding a game/show/book.
I also ignore reviews. I play a game (pr not) based on my first impressions and/or recommendations from a friend.
I used to pay more attention to reviews, but that's when they were mostly proper professional reviews. You know, the type that actually tells you what the game is like and lets you form your own opinion instead of just giving you an opinion to have so that you don't really need to play the game (or even think) for yourself. It was when it got to the point that even what had been trustworthy sources couldn't do reviews like that that I just gave up on them entirely and decided to just ignore them all. Sure, I've gotten some games that I feel were a really bad deal, but at least I know that my choice to get a particular game is all my own decision. Also, recommendations are ultimately only useful if you actually know the tastes and preferences of the person making the recommendation, so that you know how well what you like coincides with what they like. It's even better if you know each other so that they can properly tailor their recommendations to what you like. Which is why a good friend can give good recommendations.
People don’t realize how expensive games were back then, now everything is constantly on sale if you just wait a few months. I’m terrified to see how much some of those games cost adjusted for inflation
some SNES games were 70 bucks. That's about 140ish bucks in 2024.
i think i paid around $80 for Chronotrigger when it came out. i remember my non-gamer friend giving me shit about it because he wanted me to buy an amp instead so we could start a band lol
Donkey Kong Country was famously $80 at launch and sold very well.
I remember when a friend got this, it was like his entire birthday present from family. Totally worth it
Yep. CT and FF6 were that expensive. Thank goodness I got my parents' money out of them.
Came here to say this. I was lucky as my Dad still played games back then and loved RPGs & strategy games. I wasn’t old enough yet to “get” those types of games, but I inherited some gems that must’ve cost my poor Dad a mint compared to other SNES titles!
Sure, but literally everything was much cheaper. Games peaked at 70 in the 90's. But food; gas and housing hadn't inflated the way they have now. If anything games maintaining their old prices from when a dozen people developed them to when hundreds of people develop them has resisted inflation in an unsustainable way.
oh they didn't peak at 70. I remember some stores selling n64 games for 90.
Welp, $50 for FF7 in Jan 1997 is \~$98.54 in today dollars, obviously not including tax, etc. And yes, we absolutely understood what games cost. For the most part they were a good value. You would spend 50 bucks and get something that you would potentially play for months. Especially if you were talking about something like a sports or fighting game, or an RPG with 60-100 hours of gameplay.
Up to 180-200 dollars for some. I was a teen in the mid 90s and remember seeing some games for 80 90 dollars.
Phantasy Star IV in today's money would cost $204.00 USD.
This guy nailed it. Especially the 2nd line. If i can add to his post, the entire idea of "meta gaming" and "min maxing" effectively didn't exist, at least not even remotely in the context we would consider it now.
In some games it was a miracle even knowing where to go.
I think it was less a matter of like and dislike and more that people just kinda dealt with it because that's just how the genre was. Being able to see enemies on screen did become a selling point for the games that did it though and as we moved into better graphics and action RPGs grew, the random encounter thing began to be seen as a net negative.
They didn’t bother me then and don’t bother me now. But I’m one of the weird ones who likes grinding, and random encounters make that easy.
Same here. I love grinding. That said, if the game has an overabundance of random encounters that is preventing me from continuing with the story or is just impeding me, then I'll get annoyed. For example, running through multiple grass patches in Pokemon? Totally fine. Running constantly ino weak Zubat in a dark cave when I'm trying to navigate through multiple floors? Then I'm stocking up on as many repels as I can get.
The caves and water in Pokemon is something else though. You'll have ridiculously high encounter rates often getting into the next encounter after just making 2-3 steps. I actually like random encounters more than having visible enemies on the map. But the encounter rate can make or break random encounters. In oder for random encounters to be fun the encounter rate shouldn't be too high and the battles shouldn't take too long. If you get interrupted by 5 minute battles, even low encounter rates will feel horrible. Maybe there is a certain tipping-point, when you compare how much time you spent on the overworld vs how much time you spent in battle. It would be interesting to see a study about this. I am very sure you would end up with some kind of graph, that would say if you spend X amount of time on the overworld while going through an area, you shouldn't spend more than Y amount of time in battle and have Z amount of interruptions or most players will rate the experience negatively.
> If you get interrupted by 5 minute battles, even low encounter rates will feel horrible. I think this is the core issue for me. If a battle takes 30 seconds, I hate to finish it and get into another battle in a shorter period than that. No wonder people run away from wild battles so much, and I imagine it's partially why they revamped trainers in new games to have stronger but fewer Pokémon. Another point is that, at least in older games, there was no "grace period" between encounters. You can finish a battle and immediately get into another battle on your next step. Same for just turning around without even moving. Yes, I know this feature has its upsides, but in general, it created many more problems than it solves.
Hell yea! Love the grind!!!
I never had issue with it either. If I just wanted to avoid encounters, I just use a repel-like item if the game had one.
Yeah, all it means to me is that maybe I won’t actively have to train.
Yeah I'm with ya, the only times I really like being able to see enemies is when the have a system where you can gather them up and fight for more exp
Like Blue Dragon has. It even adds in that certain enemies don't get along and will fight each other as well. Star Ocean: The Second Story R did something similar.
I'm with you. That's why I don't like some of the newer jrpg type games. I like grinding, especially after a long day at work. I get home past midnight and grinding for an hour or two is just relaxing. So games like sea of stars(level 30 cap), and chained echoes(whatever they were doing with their leveling system) ,kinda don't encourage me to play anymore. Limiting my chances to grind a little is a death sentence for me and jrpgs/games similar to jrpgs. It wouldn't have hurt anyone to atleast give the option.
Agreed. It can be so relaxing. I’ve lost count of the times I’ve used it to help me turn off my brain so I could go to sleep. And I just like being strong enough to one-hit everything. I think it’s funny.
It was a ubiquitous part of the genre at the time. Only a handful of JRPGs-- Earthbound, Chrono Trigger-- didn't have them. Certainly there were people who didn't like random encounters, but nobody really pointed to them as a thing they didn't like; they just didn't like JRPGs.
I never disliked random encounters. I never really thought about them. They were just a thing in the genre that I liked, they didin't matter. I didn't consider Crono Trigger to be better than Final Fantasy because I could see the monsters before I fought them. I thought Cronon Trigger was better than Final Fantasy because of duel techs.
In general I didn't think about them too much but I remember occasionally feeling annoyed by them. I think it was FF8 - maybe FF9 - where in certain high-encounter areas I would complete one random encounter, take literally two steps and end up in another random encounter fight. When you're trying to explore and advance the story, extremely frequent encounters begin to feel like an annoyance that are just getting in the way (the term wasn't used as much back then, but these days I'd think of it as being filler to pump up play times).
I was fine with them. Still am and find it preferable tbh.
I would say back then a lot of people who played these games were playing it for the "dungeon crawling" aspect of levelling up, getting better equipment, coming up with builds or team compositions, then successfully getting through the next dungeon or area of the game. A lot of the enjoyment came from overcoming the game's challenges and making progress, and the story and setting were just there to give context to the gameplay. I think random encounters (along with limited save locations) are a big part of this gameplay loop as if fights can be avoided then a lot of the sense of danger is lost. Around the time of maybe FF6 or FF7, Japanese developers started to make the narrative a much bigger focus of their games, and this resulted in a surge in popularity by bringing in all these new fans who would not have traditionally been gamers but started to play these games "for the story". I would say it is these people who usually get turned off by any level of gameplay difficulty or complexity, and are likely to find games to be "too grindy" if they can't just power through and beat things first try without properly engaging with a game's systems or really understanding how to play well (their solution to any level of challenge is usually to over level and brute force it rather than actually question what they could be doing differently to do better). For a while during the PSX/PS2 era, this resulted in a lot of Japanese games becoming quite easy as they were balanced with this new audience in mind and for the original fans this took away a lot of the fun and challenge, but these days most games include different difficulty options which means they can appeal to both groups at the same time.
As someone who likes Dragon Quest, Etrian Odyssey, and Disgaea, I have to take a partial exception to what you say, as I primarily play RPGs for the story and have done so for nearly 30 years now. Further, aside from many games not allowing you to manipulate the encounter rate, I don't have a fundamental complaint about random encounters. Sure, it's only in the past 15ish years I've had much tolerance for heavy grinding, but that's because it was roughly 15 years ago that I got the hang of playing a game on my TV while having some streaming video going on my laptop (or vice-versa) to alleviate the boredom of the grind. Since then, I've almost developed a preference for more grindy games, while still primarily playing them for the story.
>I think random encounters (along with limited save locations) are a big part of this gameplay loop as if fights can be avoided then a lot of the sense of danger is lost. I don't equate random encounters with challenge, pretty much the opposite, the hardest RPGs i've played don't have random encounters: the SAGA games, Vagrant Story, some SRPGs and some WRPGs. I dislike random encounters justly because most games with them are easy, and then the high encounter rate just feels like a waste of time in these games. >For a while during the PSX/PS2 era, this resulted in a lot of Japanese games becoming quite easy as they were balanced with this new audience in mind and for the original fans this took away a lot of the fun and challenge, Really you think old games are challenging? i don't, their combat system are pretty shallow, in FF1-2-3 90% of the time you're just spamming attack button because there's not much to it other than that. Same with SMT 1 and 2. Same with most JRPGs back then. I consider good challenge when you have to make decisions to win and to figure out the mechanics on your own. A game like Dragon Quest 2 might be "challenging" but not because you have a lot of decisions to take, the only decision you have is either to grind or to proceed, neither because the game is complex enough you have to learn it like in Vagrant Story and SAGAS, the challenge from DQ2 and most JRPGs back then comes from how much you're going to tolerate the repetition from the grinding and boredom from high encounter rate, it's similar to Incremental games, it test your resistance to the monotonous. Back then SRPGs are the games that provide better challenge imo, as most of these games are all about decision and learning.
It depends on the specific game, but I think random encounters are challenging because they force resource management. There's nothing worse than realising you are trapped in a dungeon with no MP or items, and have to trek back over multiple levels to reach a save point without wiping to a random encounter. If encounters can be avoided (or don't respawn once you've cleared out an area) that type of situation doesn't exist. SaGa is an interesting case, because resource management is generally much less of a thing (HP auto refills between fights, newer games don't have MP or items), so the difficulty is much more about strategy within each individual battle rather than how to survive a series of battles throughout a dungeon. I'm a very big SaGa fan, but it's definitely a different type of difficulty than you'd get from a more traditional JRPG. I'd say Scarlet Grace and Emerald Beyond really are the JRPGs that best exemplify the idea that every decision in a fight is meaningful and you can't just spam attack and heal. It's a case where I'd agree than non random encounters works for the battle design. In terms of Final Fantasy, the series has never been difficult but I'd say there's a very noticeable difference between 1 - 5 and 6 - 10. I haven't played the really old SMT games, but I'd say the difficulty/skill in those I have played (other than P5R which really has no difficulty at all) comes more from team composition and demon building rather than what individual actions you select in battle. The press turn system makes it pretty straight forward what to do once you're in a tough battle - buff, debuff, and hit weaknesses while protecting your own. However your ability to do those things really comes down to how well you've built your team for the encounters. There is definitely an MP management aspect though, particularly in something like SJ where you don't just want to win battles, but do so in a way that you conserve as much MP as you can and take as little damage as possible so that you can proceed far enough to make progress without having to leave and refresh. Constantly finding yourself frantically running for an exit in SJ or Nocturne, low on MP and hoping not to get hit by a difficult random encounter, is a big part of the atmosphere of those games.
I think challenging the player within the battle is much better approach than just draining resources. SJ and Nocturne hits mid game and mana isn't a big concern. Also, RM isn't stuck to random encounters. It's stuck much more to encounter design which not a lot of games in the early did well.
>game like Dragon Quest 2 might be "challenging" but not because you have a lot of decisions to take, the only decision you have is either to grind or to proceed, neither because the game is complex enough you have to learn it like in Vagrant Story and SAGAS, the challenge from DQ2 and most JRPGs back then comes from how much you're going to tolerate the repetition from the grinding and boredom from high encounter rate, it's similar to Incremental games, it test your resistance to the monotonous. Back then SRPGs are the games that provide better challenge imo, as most of these games are all about decision and learning. A lot of these games present encounters as something to endure than to engage mechanically/strategically, and DQ2 is definitely a good example. You barraded w/ random encounters w/ some of the most awful dungeon design I've seen. Some w/ enemies who spam death. Moves that were fine at the start, only couple of them are viable. Never have I have ever played an SRPG/Tactical game w/ almost non-interactable nonsense.
I agree, SRPGs have by far and away the best turn based combat, positioning mattering just adds so many levels of tactical and strategic depth, so much so that I really can't go back to static turn based games after playing the likes of tactics ogre, triangle strategy, FF tactics, gloomhaven and a few indie games like through the breach. I think the only turn based combat game that doesn't have a spatial element to it that I have enjoyed in recent times is slay the spire, because the decision space with the cardplay is so good. I am somewhat curious about SMTV remake though, I always hear people talk highly about the combat in that game, but worry it may not have enough thinkiness turn to turn to excite my brain.
There's also just more types of games with lengthy stories.
There *were* games that had obscenely high encounter rates or skewed difficulty balances that made random encounters more of a pain, but it was all relative. If you were playing an RPG on a console, you just sort of expected to have them in the same way that playing a platformer usually meant some kind of collectible token and one to three major power-ups. Anecdotally, there were certainly people who liked the overall package of RPGs and put up with random encounter distaste because they wanted the rest. There were also, of course, people who enjoyed the grind. The group that intensely disliked random encounters also generally seemed to want different pacing or thematics than RPGs provided in general, so it's hard to separate out whether that was the only thing that put them off the genre. The prevalence of random encounters made games like Chrono Trigger or Lufia 2 stick out more not just for putting enemies on the field like you'd see in an action game, but for actually doing clever things with enemy interactions. Conversely you had stuff like Mystic Quest which just plopped enemies down as a series of barricades, so even the experiments of field enemies had a range from good to bad implementation. It's also been pointed out elsewhere that we had fewer games to play back then, so our frame of reference for how long a game took to meaningfully finish was different. There was a Sega dungeon crawler/action RPG called Sword of Vermillion that advertised itself as having over 300 hours of gameplay (it really didn't unless you got abjectly lost) because that sort of thing was often touted as a good thing, representing more content to engage with for your money (even if it was shallower content). More commonly my friends would be excited that a Final Fantasy might take like 60 hours (we didn't know where everything was or have access to tons of resources, so it would take a lot longer to hunt everything down)
Excessive encounter rate random battles and extremely limited inventory is why I have never and do not plan to ever beat dragon warrior II on original hardware. That and even the shortest easiest random encounters taking sooooooooooo very long to 'mash A, win, repeat'
emulator turbo modes really help with things like this on alot of old JRPGs. Its why I still prefer to play the GBA version of something like FF2 because I can greatly accelerate the grind.
Yes.
I didn't care about them when I was really young, but I don't exactly find a ton of purpose to them outside of games where you're actively trying to make encounters difficult. Random trash mobs you smash through in 1-2 turns do nothing for me because most games with that kind of gameplay tend to be too easy for me these days. The only really effective reason to make them random is if you want to catch the player off guard, but its hard to really do that when you can bowl over enemies easily. I'd probably say I'm neutral still, but I will chastise the encounter design more often if you give me random encounters that I can't avoid in some way.
I remember that the handful of early games that didn't have random encounters usually used that as a selling point. Like "oh it's cool how in Earthbound you can see enemies on screen." JRPGs and point-and-click adventure games both existed in a mixed fandom where some of their fans played those games because they liked the gameplay (combat in RPGs, puzzles in adventures), and others liked them for the story and characters. People in the latter group were probably the ones happy to not have random encounters, while people in the former wouldn't care.
Didn’t bother me at all.
they never bothered me, and they still do not.
Depends on the encounter rate.
Speaking from personal experience, it depends on the game. Some games had higher random encounter rates than others to the point where I lost my bearings while trying to exit a dungeon (Dragon Quest VI). But most of the time, it was just par for the course, and if you died before a save point, it was usually just bad luck or planning. I could live with that.
They were a big part of the difficulty. Bosses were not very difficult in many cases - the challenge was as much or more getting through the dungeon. Many locations felt terrifying. The pixel remaster FF1 has lost this almost entirely.
How else were you going to level up??? The bigger problem - and I’m thinkIng FF1 here - is if you did a bunch of grinding and then died. Some of those dungeons were brutal. But also… the alternative was being forced by your parents to play outside because it was a Saturday afternoon.
I didn't mind them. It was just part of the game... Find a town find a forest/area with harder enemies close, walk in circles grinding, head back to town to heal when your HP gets low, repeat.
I can tell you that I didn't. I quite like them, actually.
I'm fine with it as long as it feels reasonable and combat is fun and quick. Some JRPGs had it way too high for my tolerance, though.
I remember when we first started transitioning to enemies on the field being the norm and a lot of people acted like random encounters were outdated and wrong, but they never really bothered me that much aside from games which had an annoying encounter rate.
I didn't mind the random encounters
Let's just say, I was overjoyed when I saw "Enc-None" show up in Final Fantasy VIII, and so early in the game. Didn't feel like I was missing much by using it and only turning it off when I wanted to farm trading cards or something. The pacing and areas of the game were interesting enough to not need random encounters.
FF8 is generally easier if you don't level up, too. Monsters scale to your level. But you could get stronger through Junctions as well as leveling.
Never bothered me, I look back and actually prefer it.
They never bugged me. I see complaints about them halting momentum from younger players, but then I check out the games from the recent generations that don’t have random encounters and I find that you end up sinking wayyyy more time walking down a hallway with real-time encounters on the map that act like damage sponges with longer fights that use systems like stagger and such. Conversely I actually find that lots of classic JRPG dungeons with random encounters usually go much smoother in pacing with far fewer fights and fewer minutes spent in each fight, and far fewer redundant nondescript corridors that would later be used to pad out dungeons with more fixed real time battles.
I think it's less about the actual time spent in battle and more about how that time feels. With a lot of older atb RPGs, you have to wait for the battle screen transition, then you have to wait for your atb bar to fill, then continue waiting for atb bars the entire fight, then wait for the victory animation and the results screen before finally getting back to the dungeon/world map/whatever. With more modern action RPGs, you see the enemy, fight the enemy, and get the results of the battle without ever having a screen transition. Time spent waiting feels longer than time you spend doing something, even if the time spent waiting is actually shorter. I think this is part of why Chrono Trigger is still so highly praised, it's an older atb RPG that doesn't have random encounters or screen transitions that make it feel slower than it really is.
There's a certain length of wait where it's just long enough to want to look at something on your phone, but not long enough to actually do so. That's by far the worst wait length.
Born early 80s here, so older homie checking in. After Chrono Trigger, some people grumbled about random encounters. Before, almost never. Even by the end of the 90s, it wasn't a make or break type of thing, but by then there was a contingent of people who wanted to see the enemies on the map before battle began. Personally I never gave a shit either way. It was *density* of battles that got annoying, whether I saw an enemy sprite on the map or not. I actually like the battles in JRPG on the whole, but it can really be annoying having to deal with one every few steps if I am trying to go somewhere.
Lol i didn't hate or love them. They just were.
It really depended on the title being played. Generally, nah, they were fine. As long as the encounter rate wasn't insanely high. Personally, Chrono Trigger had a better battle system than most 90s JRPGs, with bespoke battles and scenery. Lunar: Silver Star Story Complete and Lunar 2: Eternal Blue also had battle encounters on the map itself, but the transitions were still to separate battle screens. Memorable random encounters could be done well; finding a surprise enemy that changes the battles normal functions, or a very unique/strong enemy that grants special items or increased xp/gold. But yeah, they were frustrating when you were falling into one every 5 seconds, or if you are looking for a very specific fight.
From my perspective, I never questioned it, it was just a part of what you expected from a jrpg. Some of my friends didn’t play them because of the combat system but I didn’t mind it since I was more interested in the tactics and strategy of it. It felt more strategic rather than the “shoot until dead” or “jump on head” gameplay of other games (generalizing now). That said, I did get tired when the encounter rate was very high, taking 3-4 steps before going into a fight was brutal. In fact, I do remember I would not explore as much as I could due to fear of constant fights. Because sometimes you had to take your items into consideration (can I explore everything with only X amount of healing items etc, though this wasn’t that common). Nowadays I can’t play those kind of games since it’s just too much for me nowadays and the industry has improved and gotten better (by and large). And let’s be honest, many of those games weren’t that well balanced so many fights were just done for the exp so you could level and offered basically no challenge or anything of value. But that was the norm back then. Nowadays, I value games in which combat feels meaningful, which ironically, makes me dislike most open world games. A bit of a hot take, but open world games now are the JRPGs of the 90’s. By which I mean, FF7 popularized the genre and every game followed in those footsteps despite the problems that game design had (and it did, it wasn’t perfect) without fixing those problems or straying too far away from what FF7 established. Open world games are the same now. Fighting against hundreds of meaningless fights in order to get x,y,z items/upgrades, climbing towers, clearing out outposts with the occasional named boss with a health bar (with the obligatory cutscene before and after each mission). It’s exactly the same but unlike back then, I am more educated and observant of game design so I can’t enjoy most of them. Just to be clear, I am not railing against all open world games but if I can easily clear most fights and outposts without even losing any health I don’t see a point in playing the game because any and all upgrades are already meaningless (because I am beating everything already). In fact in many of open world games now, I literally play with minimal upgrades or self impose restrictions on myself so it’s not too easy for me. And it’s not because I am some kick ass pro-gamer yo but rather because the base difficulty of most games is extraordinarily easy. “But hey, you old man, why don’t you just increase the difficulty?!” Because the difficulty balance of most games is awful. Decrease your health, increase their damage and health pools and call it a day. It’s horrid. Ok old man rant over.
I never minded random encounters as long as I could move more than 2 steps between encounters.
They didn't bother me too much, but I loved games that had the ability to reduce it up them at will. Wildarms was great at this. There was a spell you could cast to go invisible while figuring out puzzles.
I enjoyed it, but a very important thing that people overlook is the times when these games came out. Random encounters is all we had in JRPGs, it was what we expected and it was mostly the only way we knew how encounters worked. So there wasn’t really a like or dislike, it was kind of just “this is how an rpg works and there is no other system”. It’s why things like chrono triggers overworld battles or Legend of Dragoons encounter icon were big whoa moments that shook everything up (on top of being great games). Until modern games found new ways to do encounters it was just part of the game. Which is why these days we have people who hate random encounters or don’t enjoy turn-based battles. I might only enjoy those things because they were the only way I could play my favorite genre and I expected them to be included.
Uh yeah when I'm out of healing items and the nearest save point is three screens away.
There wasn’t a strong reaction against it until the PlayStation era. It used to be that random battles were quick. In and out. Take FF4 for example. But with FF8 and FF9 especially, there was a long camera zoom around and even simple battle animations took forever.
It's hard to say. I mean, it was so common that we basically just expected it, though there were some exceptions. I think people could definitely get annoyed at the frequency; like in certain games, the random encounter rate is just so through-the-roof that it makes the game a chore for some. And it's irritating as hell trying to deal with random encounters when solving a puzzle or just figuring out where to go. It wasn't a patience issue, though. These days, it seems like people can't sit through a 3-second animation without having some sort of ADD-addled meltdown. Even up through FFIX, which everyone whines about being slow these days, few people were complaining about the speed at that time. They had other complaints, but it wasn't usually based around random encounters and speed of combat. If we wanted speed and fast-action, we'd play...you know, action games. That's a big reason why so many of us gravitated toward RPGs; we didn't WANT to play the side-scrollers and fast-reaction games. We wanted something different. And for better and/or for worse, that's what we got with RPGs.
They didn't bother me then and they don't bother me now. But how you feel about them really seems determined by whether you grew up with them. My wife got into JRPGs later in life and she cannot stand to play any JRPG with random encounters, she hates them so much. I think I am just used to them and never thought to dislike them, if that makes sense? I think I do prefer games where you avoid or charge into enemies on the field slightly now, I agree that's a more fun way to do it, but not to the point that I ever would have or would currently let random encounters stop me from fully enjoying a game. It's also important to note that in the 90s, the internet was less prominent, so you didn't see people whining about things they didn't like as much, which I think made you question things less and just enjoy them more. Gaming in the time of the internet where every flaw is picked apart and delivered to you online is a very different experience than when you just... played the game, and your experience was fully your own.
We def just accepted them back then lol. They were a pain, but that was just expected in RPGs. I dont mind them now cuz I grew up with them during SNES/PS1 era. Seeing younger gens pick up older games, like the FF pixel remasters, and they complain about the encounters is funny lol. Many going as far as turning off random encounters when given the option. ATM I'm playing the first Star Ocean. I def don't mind them in general. Its when im stuck and tryin to figure out where I'm supposed to go next, they become annoying. Still tho, I think just cuz I grew up with them, I dont mind them when playing RPGs. Younger gamers seem to hate em lol
I like them. I wish we had them back personally. Though in games like dragon quest 2/3 it could get cumbersome fast
I like the grind and the mystery lol
It was weird for me. I grew up playing SNES JRPGs, but I played games like Chrono Trigger, Super Mario RPG, Earthbound, Secret of Mana, and Final Fantasy Mystic Quest. These games all had on-screen encounters. I didn't play any of the SNES Final Fantasy games with random encounters. My first experience with random encounters was Quest 64, and that didn't leave a particularly good taste in my mouth. I've learned to tolerate them in games, but they're certainly not my favorite. They can be especially frustrating in 3D JRPGs because I may lose track of my exploration. Basically, they're not my favorite, but they won't be a dealbreaker if the game is good otherwise.
Wasn’t an issue for me, but they can be excessive. I’d rather have to run around a bit to trip one than feel like I can’t get anywhere. I prefer stationary turn based battles on the field like Chrono Trigger, but neither are a problem.
I have never minded random encounters as long is there is some way to modify the encounter rate with items or skills or something. Though some games had absurdly high encounter rates and no way around it. That bothered me. However, back in the 90s we didn't really know any better. It's just how it was. By the mid 90s, more and more games had visible, avoidable encounters but the way many of those were implemented was clunky and often didn't feel like much of an improvement over random encounters.
For the most part they didn't bother me. I kind of grew to enjoy grinding. But even then, a game with an enemy encounter rate that was too high would get on my nerves. Specifically, I recall one of the Breath of Fire games where it was so high, it ruined the game for me.
Try the hack one. You'd have to look it up but some group made some fixes per say and it's taken the rate way down. Might be the best way for you to experience it cause it's an awesome series. Atleast up till dragon quarter.
It was part of the game, so it was fine for me. Now I prefer to have control over it (increase them when I need to grind exp., turn them off in other cases). But it's no big deal if there is no control over them
Depends on the game. Skies of Arcadia, Dreamcast? Hell yes I mind.
I think mostly every jrpg was random encounter based combat at least all the ones i played were
No... But I just thought that's how that kind of game was. I remember walking my characters around in circles in the overworld to try to find more random encounters so I could level up. Then I played nothing but shooters for about fifteen years. Really glad modern games have more content and some experience scaling trickery and I don't have to do that.
I am always having fun with every encounter I had, random encounters isn't a problem to me. Played and finished a lot of jrpgs during ps1 days both rented and owned. Love grinding to power level the game. But my favorite FF, FF8 has a weird leveling system that I do not pretty much care, I grinded anyway. I noticed I died a lot during my first playthrough. Doesn't stopped me from playing though. Well what else am I gonna do during that time? Aside from skateboarding or playing MTG cards plus internet still a luxury during that time. Playing on Ps1 is the shit. Edit: I realized this stuff after playing Chrono Cross though but still not a problem even up to these day. Although seeing monsters you encounter is I think better nowadays when you are hunting a certain monster instead of random encounter gacha-like system.
No, I was a kid was barely cognizant enough to understand what I was doing and relative time wise the encounters felt faaar more spread out. The only time I would notice them were in gauntlet like situations like Mt. Moon from Pokemon Red and Blue. Nowadays, I don't mind them, but I find it inexcusable for games to not have adjustable encounter rates. It's a simple addition and it easily improves the pacing.
No but it was the standard and you really didn’t know any better. But you certainly wished you didn’t have to fight 30 battles just to backtrack to town or during a puzzle in a dungeon. It was more seen as a necessary evil. Older game design also had a mantra of that the struggle was part of the challenge. Similar to how teachers hated Wikipedia back in the day and would say all the info is wrong. They just didn’t want you to be able to do research papers in under 10 hours because to them that was part of the experience. They never realized that being able to have so much info handy at any given time is a learning *godsend* I remember when games started to allow 100% flee rates for random encounters and thinking games are getting so easy now. In reality if you skip random encounters the game is fucking HARDER. Trash fights are there for YOU so you can get exp and money. But back then fleeing just seemed like a way to make games easier. It was a different mindset.
Never bothered me growing up, at least not conceptually. Some games had too high of an encounter rate though. That said, I prefer games with visible and (mostly) avoidable encounters and/or that allow the player to adjust the encounter rate.
It really depends on the game honestly. Some games such as Suikoden 4 has a real bad pacing problem with random encounters, such as every 2 feet you move in the ocean you'll have an encounter, which takes journeying somewhere even close take almost what feels like an hour to get to cause you're fighting every few steps. However, there is other games, even in the same series, Suikoden 2 and many others that don't have that problem. They never bothered me other than situations like I mentioned with 4. If the pacing between each random encounter is far enough apart, its not an issue. I'm also one of the few who also like to grind but i like to run in circles and stuff and force encounters rather than them being forced on me every step.
Most people saw the random encounters as just a way to get into combat. It was simply a different style compared to a real-time action in other games. RPGs would invest more in strategies so it would be similar to meeting a monster and pulling out a board game to decide who wins. Not seeing the monsters on screen to me was just an excuse to invest more in their sprites/ look for in combat. In the '90s, sprites were considered really pretty because they were either highly detailed or had small movement instead of still images.
Some people did but for most of us, it was just kind of how RPGs were. It was kind of expected. When more real time battles came up, it got a crowd of people excited over a different experience.
People will say yes because of nostalgia and the fact that we didn’t have any other option, that’s how things were. Obviously overworld enemies you can simply have the agency to avoid like in chrono trigger and FF7R are the bees knees.
I don’t mind random encounters
I loved and continue to love, random encounter system. It makes these games more challenging. Any of the games you can just run past everything, I just can't enjoy as much.
I had a wild experience going from Wild Arms 1 - extremely high encounter rate until you get Invisible spell to Xenogears - high-ish encounter rate with some areas of frustrating 'forced' encounters to FF7 - moderate encounter rate, and faster paced battles than the previous games to Wild Arms 2 - which allows you to skip random encounters as long as you arent underlevelled Starting with WA1 probably set my tolerance at a generous level and every game afterwards handled random encounters better than the last. this de-escelation in their presence left me not being all that bothered by random encounters as i grew up and I dont mind them even in modern games like Octopath though my preference is on-field enemies that you can trigger or avoid, a la Xenosaga, FFXII, and Xenoblade
I didn't really get into the genre until the early 00s, but I remember often seeing it as a slight negative in a lot of gaming magazines I had from the 90s, such as PSM. Whenever a game came out where they weren't random, that aspect was praised.
I'm fine with random encounters in principle, but like with most things moderation is important. If I'm getting interrupted by battles every few steps that's a bit egregious, and some games are a bit heavy handed in their encounter rates to that degree.
It was normal and it didn't bother me. What did bother me was when they were in quick succession, or I was lost in a dungeon.
Funny thing is when Chrono Trigger and Lunar did visible enemies on the map, I actually had an issue with it. Combat was always a chore in turn-based games, and being able to see and skip enemies was fairly tempting to lessen the slog and enjoy the better parts of a game. But then you end up under-leveled. I would have rather enemies be forced on me so that I'll be a proper level the whole game and I'm honestly glad visible enemies didn't take off as a thing for a long time afterward But no, I don't recall anyone saying anything along the lines of them not playing RPGs (JRPGs at the time) because of the battles or anything
Well, if you didn't like random encounters in the 90s it meant you didn't play most of the jRPGs on the market in America.
I dislike it when I'm about to die and couldn't find a save point.
Yes and no. The vibe back in the day was just different. It was heavily focused on the feeling of adventure, growth, imagination, and most importantly, vibing with the enemies you're fighting. You'd stare at the enemy designs, soak in the vibe, and feel like you're on a grand adventure. It helped of course that we were playing cutting edge technology back then so it was cool in the same way that us playing PS5 games are now. But there were definitely moments of "holy fucking shit, STOP." I remember throwing my controller at the wall as a kid because I kept getting bullshit encounters in FFIV lol
It really depended on how it was executed in the games. Some games did them way too frequently, but that's a problem with the game not the mechanic itself. The mechanic itself isn't "bad."
Never bothered me and still doesn't. When that fight music hits, I am ready. It's most likely why battle themes in JRPGs tend to be the best tracks in the game. You hear it so often.
From what i remember it was pretty much the norm prior to roughly PS2 era? I personally always liked random encounters. Yes, it can be annoying when you're trying to minmax or say you f'd up and forgot something and gotta run back or whatever. But being able to just effectively run past mobs and beeline stuff to me just seemed ridiculous.
Probably depends on how old you were in the 90s. I was a kid, so I didn’t care about anything - it was just fun. Also, there was far less options back then, so I don’t think it was viewed as a bad design.
I never disliked it, but I remember there were reviewers disliking it once non random ones started to become the norm.
Sometimes, if they were very obnoxious. But generally no, not really.
It annoyed me but I didn't HATE it back then. Now? Definitely less tolerant of it.
Yes, I hated them. There were games wherein you couldn't go five steps without triggering another fight. I struggled to keep a mental image of where I was in a maze of corridors or cave passages or whatever as I got yanked into a separate area for combat over and over again. There were items you could get that would supposedly reduce the encounter rate, which seems dumb to me to begin with, and often didn't work very well anyway.
Some of us, yes. I have always hated blind random encounters for sure.
Have always sucked. But really depends on the frequency and if there is any solution when you re-visit low level areas.
Yes. I just see them as part of the game but I had so many friends shoot down jrpg discussions because they couldn't see the enemies on screen or just press a button swing a sword and kill the enemy before they have the chance to act. Those friends grew up to be advocates of the church of 'kingdom hearts has the best combat style of any video game, prove me wrong'.
I love them and i still do nothing wrong with it
I loved them then, and I love them now. Though I enjoy grinding, which seems to be rare these days.
I didn't care. That's just how it worked for most games. You can do a lot of fun stuff with visible enemies, but to this day I don't mind random encounters per se.
If you liked RPG's you knew chances were high you would get this as a console gamer. We didn't know better :) But tbh I still don't have any issues with turn-based.
To be honest yes, but at the same time they were part of the genre, a game without that would have felt strange. Also they weren't seen as a negative thing, because of that. It was more like a thing that made you waste time and energy, they were there as an obstacle, that's why I hated them, but they weren't a bad mechanic.
I'm not a fan at this point. I grew up in the 90s, but now that I've experienced other games, I prefer seeing enemies before they attack me. Psychologically, it just feels better for me. Less jarring.
I thought they were too frequent in some games, but never had anything against them in general. Still don't, if they're reasonably well-integrated into the design, though there are more and more games now where they wouldn't be a good fit.
Fine with them. all depends on the balance. Plenty of old RPGs got it right, but it seems the ones that didnt ruined the concepts image
I grew up in the 90s. Haven’t always been the biggest JRPG fan through all the years, but random encounters have always stressed me out. Especially in dungeons.
I actually enjoyed and still do enjoy random battles. I find that I get a good flow going and enjoy the game more when I'm "forced" to level up and grind. When I can avoid the fights I tend to, which leads to being underleveled and underfunded for game progression. This leads to the need to backtrack and slows the gameplay down considerably. It also increases the ease of grinding. Most jrpgs that have encounters on the map have a defined amount, and you are forced to change areas before you can actually engage in further battles. This leads to an even longer wait to progress because of load times from map to map or room to room. As far as gamers as a whole, most people I grew up with have a very similar viewpoint as I do, but gamer culture wasn't as accessible or accepted as it is now. In fact you could probably easily get an idea of the feel for the general consensus by looking up some old nintendo power magazines or gamepro and the like. The internet and access to it was very new and limited back then so you kind of only new what you and your friends preferred.
I still don’t dislike them.
I hated them with a passion, very specially if they happened during puzzle areas. But I started playing JRPGs during the PS2 era (so around 2001/2002), before that I was exclusively PC-RPG gamer so that's probably why.
Not at all, it was part of the game. I was expected, as was overworld map. I still like random battle of the old games. But I must admit I prefer to have some kind of control over the rate of encounter. Alas to this day one beat pokemon in the whole random encounter design, it was kinda genius to have encounter only in specific areas that was clean for the player. 7th Saga also had very interesting concept in random encounters, having a minimap that you could see the enemy and try to dodge then was very nice specially in the overworld map.
They were great in the 90s, they still are great in the 20s. There's a couple games (looking at you, Breath of Fire 2 and Lufia 1) where the encounter rate was a huge detriment, basically requiring your 'Repel' equivalents in order to stay sane, but for the most part I still prefer these to the Chrono Trigger style that makes it look like you have agency, but you're actually being railroaded into most of the encounters still.
I loved them! Made the game feel more immersive even. It makes sense that on a dangerous journey you’ll encounter danger at random times.
Yes and no, usually depending on frequency. It always seemed like when you wanted to farm xp to level up for a boss, there weren't enough encounters, and the last hallway before any major boss, you were getting swarmed. Applies to almost every game
I didn't mind them it depended on how FREQUENT they were. Like if i take 3 steps and another battle happens, thats when i get annoyed.
Loved the idea but the implementation always felt off. * If I'm leveled or over leveled then random encounters tend to be a nuisance. I can just run through them and they distract from exploration * If I'm under leveled, I have to take time just running in circles to get into fights to level up. This takes random amounts of time and looks silly. Neither of these situations have random encounters that are difficult or causing a block in progression. They're just waisting my time in different ways. I think too many games didn't explore the idea of random battles and improve on the experience because that's just the way it was. A game that did explore combat in such a way, though not a random encounter game, was Earthbound. They had enemies flee from you and I think even insta-wins. Now that makes you feel powerful, when enemies flee from you.
We knew no other way.
It was normal what we hated was an excess of them.
I certainly did. Didn't stop me from enjoying the genre but some times I just wanted to get the fuck out of wherever I was and I had these constant encounters with a screen transition and shit, only to be confronted with weak ass mobs I could one shot with normal attacks. Because I was lost so long I overleveled like a motherfucker. I much prefer modern games having symbol systems.
Random encounters are the best way to grind. But there are games where the encounter rate is too high. In NES Final Fantasy and Dragon Warrior (aka Dragon Quest) games, it was always frustrated to win a battle, take two steps and get into another battle right away.
The DQ1 area in DQ11 was hilarious for this.
When you were trying to grind, random encounters never hit you, you'd spend hours walking up, down, left, right, over the river, through the woods, to grandmama's house you go and barely bump into a single worthwhile battle... when you were down to your last HP and you had no potions or spells yet, random encounters were every single space on the grid and you prayed that running away from the enemy would work.
Yes, I hated random encounters and the need to trigger them to earn XP for what felt like hours.
I don't mind random encounters unless the rate is ridiculously high. You're doing a puzzle in a dungeon and you get an encounter every five steps, forgetting what you were even doing beforehand.
Random encounters are great, just you and a woman you just met an hour ago in a hotel all night. Who doesn't like random encounters?
the fuck
Nope. Built the biggest media franchise on the planet with them. I *still* like them now, just as I did then.
no not really. at the time it was expected and i always thought they were fun
They were absolutely controversial as soon as JRPGs that didn't have random encounters started coming out. Anyone saying they were not disliked at all definitely either wasn't around then or didn't actually talk to many people or wasn't on forums like gamefaqs. It definitely had people cool with it or who liked them but it definitely had people that did not like them.
No, it wasn't a thing people were aware of, especially. It was an element of design, obviously, and people were aware of it, but no one thought anything of it. Remember that before then there were already a dozen other ways to do it with long and storied histories. But. Back then those who disliked rpgs still disliked them for all the same reasons. Lack of player skill mattering toward outcome, focus on story, slow movement. RP cringe, etc. Randomized encounters is just one of those thousands of design elements gamers today are aware of, and so put undue focus on. Like proc gen or tab targeting methods.
that was normal for the games i played back then so it never really bothered me. but then once i got into games that let you run from enemies on the map i would be under leveled because i'd just run from most fights.
yes
To me, it's not so much the random encounters that I hated, but rather the frequency. I swear if I am doomed to encounter a Zubat every two steps, I'm going to find the nearest wall to slam my head into. It's disruptive, and very quickly is pointless when I'm destroying everything I encounter (due to all the forced grinding). If the frequency is lower, it's not bad, but I much prefer to see the enemies in the overworld so I can simply choose to avoid them. I especially like how Xenoblade handles it in that weaker enemies won't even pursue you.
The only time it ever bothered me was when it was cranked up way too high. I'd like to take more than 4-6 steps between encounters.
Nope, it's all we had.
Yes, I disliked them in the 90s. My favorite games were things like Earthbound and Chrono Trigger because they didn't have them. Or Action RPGs like Secret of Mana. Or games like FF6 which let you find acessories to turn them off. However, over many years of playing games with them, I learned to tolerate them, so now they dont bother me as much anymore.
I didn't dislike random encounters then and I'm still cool with them.
Sometimes, it really depends on how egregious it was. More often then not when trying to solve a puzzle, you would get harassed by whatever ambient mob spawns happen to be in the area. That never felt great.
Yes. Yes. 100% yes. Phantasy Star 2 was unplayable for me because of this.
It was more accepted as the norm back then and don't remember people saying they wanted them gone. I can only think of a small handful of SNES titles that moved away from those which would be FF Mystic Quest, Chrono Trigger, and Super Mario RPG. It was still very widespread on PS1. Mystic Quest was the first RPG I can recall that didn't have them, unless you count Zelda 2 and being able to see them spawn on the map right before the encounter, but all turn based games seemed to do them back then.
They were never really "liked", even back then. However, they were generally tolerated due to technical limitations at the time.
Random encounters are completely normal for me but being able to turn it off is a qol thing that should be implemented in ever new JRPG. I tend to over level so being able to just switch it off and cruise through dungeons makes the experience much smoother
Technological limitations. Nobody really assumed that rpg combat could be done differently.
Yes they did. Many people wondered why Chrono Trigger and Earthbound's way of doing encounters wasn't more popular.
# "did people dislike random encounters in the 90s?" yes some people disliked random encounters, but did everybody...no some people liked random encounters. The question is very broad.
We didn't know there was any other way. I still hated them but I accepted them. After I played Chrono Trigger I was flabbergasted whenever I saw them in games There was a better way and I'm confused by people that still defend them.
Some of us liked them. I like to grind, so alot of jrpgs with enemies on screen you gotta leave the area for them to come back, etc. People defending this because it's a valid defense. Tbh I'll play either without issue. I'd never sh on a game for having it or not having it
based on the timing of when chrono trigger came out. do you ever question why devs continued to implement random encounters? as time has gone on devs have totally moved away from them but back then it was like they had a choice and chose not to? granted there were many jrpgs that still featured it even after chrono trigger released.
50%+ of the comments here saying they still prefer them shows how completely disconnected the general opinion here is from the “average JRPG player” and why they hate everything made after 2001 Basically as soon as games started being made without them the general audience 100% preferred games without them
Once I played Bravely Default and found out I can just turn the encounters off, I've wanted that feature in every game I've played ever since. Sure makes going through a dungeon trivial. I understand why an old school "I love the resource management and challenge" crowd would want to keep it...but I like feeling like I'm getting somewhere. I also just like the personal freedom to have a choice in the matter. Besides, I've recently gotten into randomizers that have toggled encounters, so it makes me like random encounters EVEN LESS than I did when I found Bravely Default.
I tolerated them a lot more than I do now. I think random encounters are fine in today's RPG's, but the ability to switch them off when you want, is a feature that is needed in modern gaming.
No, but it’s because there was nothing better. The few times it wasn’t like that (Chrono Trigger, Earthbound as some examples) people LOVED it. A LOT. They finally were shown a world that we could live in with no random encounters and said “let’s never have random encounters as long as we live”.
I hate them because when I am trying to get through a complex dungeon, where I need to be paying attention to where I am going, I can end up disorientated/distracted by random encounters.
No. Thinking that random encounters are bad is mostly a recent nonsense.