One thing that often turns up in RPG's are random encounters. You are happily walking around in a completely unoccupied area, but suddenly you are thrust into a battle with enemies that clearly weren't there. While I used to fairly enjoy this, I have since become tired of it. This includes games like Pokemon and Final Fantasy. After playing Tales of Symphonia and Baten Kaitos, I have come to love the fact that I can see the enemies before I encounter them, and if possible walk around them depending on my mood. While they are only really iconic representations of enemies it serves to let me have more choice over when and where I fight.
The main reason I dislike random battles is because of puzzle solving. When I am in a dungeon and I am trying to push switches, move blocks or find my way through a maze, I get extremely annoyed when I keep having to fight enemies, when all I want to do is complete the puzzle THEN fight enemies. This can still happen in games which have visible enemies but at least then you are aware of when you are likely to enter combat, if you dont manage to avoid it.
Of course you need to fight some enemies, otherwise you wouldn't level up and be able to fight the mandatory boss enemies, but fighting the enemies you feel like fighting usually ends up more than enough, and you can go back and kill the ones you missed later should you so desire. With random battles you don't even have a guarantee of fighting enemies, you just wiggle the control stick about until you enter a random battle.
One solution to this problem is to do as Golden Sun and Pokemon both do. Introduce very early the ability to AVOID random battles (ie. using an item or a spell). Final Fantasy does this too, but in FF7 I believe it was pretty far in before you could get the ability required. IMO random encounters these days are simply an easy way out of not having to develop a decent eneny encounter system. Random encounters are frustrating and should have left the gaming industry long ago. One can but hope that more companies take a more original approach to enemy encounters in future games.
Actually in FF7 there is no way to completely avoid random battles. The "Enemy away" materia does reduce the chance and if you carry lots of mastered ones you can reduce it a lot, but you cannot stop them completely (oh, I assume you meant FF7 rather than 'F77').
Yes I did.
Now corrected, I read it through a few times but I didn't spot that.
I actually prefer random battles to the tales of symphonia system. Well, I think it works remarkably well for levelling your character up the right amount whilst also giving you the option of more easy levelling. KOTOR didn't randomly generate many enemies but it had a level cap that you would reach if you completed all areas of the game (though only with your main character). It was however far superior in that the fights took place in the same environment as the exploration. There was no switch to a battle zone. It would just pause when it saw someone to attack so you could input fight actions (you could even turn the pausing off to make it more realistic).
Fable was possibly more sensible, like KOTOR but it randomly generated enemies in certain areas and their skill was in relation to your level. Again, you would fight them in the normal world in an action style and you could see what you were fighting.
I just don't see how the hell such a system would work in final fantasy. Late in the game you fight massive things, things the size of the screen. FF lets you run away from fights. In FFX there were no fights during the puzzle sections and a boss at some point dropped a "no encounters" weapon. Long live random battles.
I have nothing against fighting random enemies in fights, so long as I can forsee that if I walk into the blob then I will start an encounter.
It would be easy to add iconic monster models for ff, and for the larger boss enemies they could use the actual models themselves.
But random encounters when there are clearly no enemies present, is what is annoying, not the fact that the enemies themselves are random but that I cant see that there are 3 encounters between me and that door.