ooh i love this thread. i have wanted to post in it since the beginning but haven’t had time to write a good response yet. i have like practical things that i prefer in games like this, and daydreamy things that i don’t know that any game in the genre has actually accomplished in a way that satisfies me but which i think should theoretically be possible
in the first category, like a lot of people i really enjoy these games the most when there is a real sense of some kind of journey taking place. i’m not that obsessive about character development so party chat style things don’t really mean that much to me, but i do like it when they take the time to show everyone around a campfire or something like that. for some reason i always really liked it in final fantasy games when you stay in an inn and everyone would go off to sleep in their own little bed. i don’t know it’s just cute.
another even more practical thing that i appreciate is when the characters’ abilities are in synch with their personalities or character design in a way that feels interesting. nothing turns me off about an rpg more than when all of the characters are just interchangeable ciphers that you can program in whatever way is most useful for you. but i also don’t really love it when everything about the characters is totally fixed and linear like in chrono trigger. it’s nice if they can find the right balance between customizability and uniqueness. it’s why i think the espers are more interesting than materia, even though the difference is not really that big.
but the one thing that i wish more jrpgs would attempt to do is to reinvent the purpose of the town. i even made a whole thread about this a few years ago. the more of these i play, the weirder it feels that the way you ‘play’ the city parts of the games is just to run around like a maniac ransacking people’s houses and stuffing your hands into random cupboards and barrels and shit. i think having towns is a hugely important part of getting the vibe of the game right and contributing to that feeling of going on a journey.
the contrast between the war of attrition of exploring the world map/dungeon areas and reaching a town as an oasis where you spend all your money to prepare for the next stage of the journey feels super important. then atmospherically and aesthetically of course you also want to have some details that contribute to that contrast.
this is what i wrote in that other thread:
i think it’s also cool when games occasionally drop in some kind of subversion of this pattern by having the party encounter a town that has been overrun by monsters or whatever.
i realized though when i made that thread i never actually wrote about what i would try to do if i could make a game like this. i think i also wrote about this in the dragon quest thread when i was playing dq11, because in that game when you are in a city you can occasionally encounter other members of your party just hanging out, which i love. conversely, it has always bothered me in RPGS when a party full of multiple people is just like squashed inside the main character’s avatar. for totally superficial reasons i just prefer games where you can see every member of the party following behind you in a little line.
but yeah the ideal version would be that when you enter a town you actually have to delegate different members of your party to complete different tasks, and you would use their various attributes and skills to determine who would be the best at different things. like you would send the person with the highest speech/charisma skills to buy run of the mill items, but would want to send the person with the highest wisdom to go to the high end equipment shops because they’d be better at spotting rare artifacts or whatever. you could sneakily tell the thief of the party to see what they can come up with, and send someone else to gather information, etc. it would be a way of incorporating multi-character party mechanics into the experience of interacting with a city. i just realized i wrote more about this in the old dragon quest thread so if you really want to read my ramblings about how video games could be better you can check it out here