SHIN MEGAMI TENSEI V: VENGEANCE
someone's gotta snip some tendons. we're moving too fast. we're warping around. the entire genre wants to drop navigational tension, mapping, attrition, and most everything else what's held it upright since 1981 in favour of. well, i'm not quite sure
combat, mostly. but only if you feel like it, cos that's gotta be opt-in too. we can't have a squad of ninjas getting first hit and turning your guys into little bones on the spot; we can't even have them turning into bones at all anymore. the people reject bones and they certainly reject having to pick them up. so really, we have to have combat, but it has to be vacuum sealed, there have to be no consequences, and we have to be able to avoid it ahead of time and during as well. we have to be able to teleport back to base, heal, teleport back, save whenever, and then make sure we whack the monster on his big fat ass to make sure WE get the first hit and WE turn them into bones instead, which is still street legal. we have to have big juiced up supermoves and simon says minigames when the screen goes Uh Oh! Mode™ and makes it obvious that the fire monster's gonna use the fire move so we can get two free turns every four or five turns like clockwork
and instead of dungeons we'll have various colours of sand and an endless supply of fire escapes to banjo kazooie around on. some busted ass buildings too. monsters will roam in packs of nine, but you won't have a real reason to fight most of them, and you thankfully won't have to. they just amble about, even on horseback or when they themselves are horses, so you can nip at their ass, toss a spyglass, and chain eight blows to the skull before even trading names. no need for trial and error when you can skip to the foregone conclusion
but sometimes you'll get dungeons too, and boy they're bad. restaurant menu mazes (positive) with automap (neutral) that fills in so generously it defeats the entire purpose of the endless right angles that lead to nothing (negative) while the lack of random encounters means you'd be under no pressure even if you did make the wrong turns it's now impossible to make (perplexing)
party building's the clearest strong point, but there's no risk/reward or any drama. essences are plentiful, outcomes are deterministic, and, much like everywhere else, you're given full control over every last variable so you can tweak it to your heart's content without pushback or compromise. people who play these things so they can craft the ultimate line-up of cock monsters and centerfolds are probably over the moon, but i'm more into rolling up with a squad of losers and chumps and pulling an upset over the world heavyweight champion. i like inheriting shit moves. i like when stuff goes wrong. dungeon crawlers are about mitigating and responding to unfortunate outcomes, and the attempt to remove every last trace of punishment, even outside of combat, isn't a good thing
tired of "quality of life"; tired of the customer always being right; tired of the idea that giving the player endless amounts of granular control makes for interesting mechanical experiences when that control goes uncontested save for a handful of outliers shunted to the furthest corners of a 40+ hour campaign. that stuff's cool, man, but i just spent three weeks loping around a bunch of dunes and could've used some of that energy three or four deserts ago
(still) not for me