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[mclem]

...Rebellion?

I very much doubt it. It's not completely outside the realms of possibility, though.

 

[blu]

A bunch of people's arguments for random battles is sound, but I still have to ask why this couldn't be achieved with non-random, visible enemies.

Having such a system would strike the best balance between grinding and exploration -- if you want to simply explore the world, find secrets or simply keep the story momentum going, you can try your best to sneak past unwanted encounters. Or maybe you're trying to escape a dungeon barely clinging on to life with little or no support items left.

It's just a matter of more control left to the game designers vs more choice to the player.

A random encounters system allows that:

1. Since battles are the main means for leveling up, characters will level up not slower than what the game designers planned.
2. The player will not be able (it will be very improbable) to pass through area X by sneaking around, which eases up story development, without the need for artificial 'airlocks'.

Overall, a good random-encounters game can make so that the player found themselves less frequently in situations where they'd feel out of their league. At the end of the day it can actually feel less grinding than a game where the player has to decide where and when to level up.

If you want to level up in a certain area or want to grind battles with certain enemies to get specific items/drops, you can always leave and return to that spot and have it repopulated according to the game's probability rules that dictate how often a unique enemy shows up. Is this act any more unrealistic than running into invisible encounters every few steps? I'm of the opinion that it's not. And the benefit is the better compromise between exploration, pacing, and grinding that I stated above.

See my response above - player's decision whether to level up or not is not something that trivial - people can waste hours in vain attempts to pass a boss before they come to the realisation they need to level up.

In contrast, here's an anecdote from 4WoL: each time I found some boss too tough, I knew I had to figure out the right tactics, and my party level was not the problem. As a result, my only grinding in the game came from gem hunting, and not from purposeful leveling up. Just because 4WoL has a carefully-designed random-encounters system.

Something I cannot say about any of the Tales Of, which I'm otherwise a fan of, or at least used to be until this gen. For the record, my two favorite RGPs this past gen were Valkyria Chronicles (a landmark SRPG in itself) and 4WoL - a pretty much by-the-book masterpiece of a JRPG.

 

[beril]

It's just a matter of more control left to the game designers vs more choice to the player.

A random encounters system allows that:

1. Since battles are the main means for leveling up, characters will level up not slower than what the game designers planned.
2. The player will not be able (it will be very improbable) to pass through area X by sneaking around, which eases up story development, without the need for artificial 'airlocks'.

Overall, a good random-encounters game can make so that the player found themselves less frequently in situations where they'd feel out of their league. At the end of the day it can actually feel less grinding than a game where the player has to decide where and when to level up.

I agree with this. When I played DQIX I first thought the visible enemies would be a big improvement, but as I played on I constantly felt a bit paranoid on whether I was fighting enough enemies or not. Eventually I turned OCD and had to kill very monster I saw, which meant the game had a higher encounter rate than pretty much any other Dragon Quest game for me. Plus it took a lot of the fun out of hunting metal slimes

 

[watershed]

Newish(?) screen shots, they look ridiculously good.
http://andriasang.com/comyaa/

 

[FreeMufasa]

The style reminds me of FF9.

 

[linko9]

That piano is definitely giving me FF5 vibes.

 

[DiipuSurotu]

It reminds me of SaGa Frontier 2 and Curse of Monkey Island.

 

[KarmaCow]

Did they say anything about a normal targeting system? I didn't buy 4HoL because the automated targeting.

 

[JimboJones]

This game reminds me of a game I once played

 

[PatmanBegins]

Newish(?) screen shots, they look ridiculously good.
http://andriasang.com/comyaa/

The art style continues to blow me away.

 

[spidye]

This game reminds me of a game I once played

lol. on a serious note, it looks like the good old psx rpg's