LogFAQs > #950328100

Games where menus are readable and quick to navigate, you aren't bogged down by dozens of ultimately insignificant decisions, little downtime, no unnecessary inventory management, no bloated and terrible crafting systems, skippable cutscenes, lots of QoL features, little repetition and a good sense of "momentum", where the game never really grinds to a halt.

Xenogears is a pretty good example of maximum friction; opening the menu, screen transitions, and random battles all have around 2 seconds of loading attached to them. When the game starts loading a random encounter, you're prohibited from jumping, which can very easily fuck you over with the game's already stiff platforming. They clearly needed the time to load and knew just stopping you on the overworld for 2 seconds would be actual hell, but this solution is only marginally better. The battle system, being ATB, will necessarily have some downtime, but party members and enemies both have to move to their target, spend seconds acting out the attacks you spent half a second inputting, and move back, and this takes even longer if you use a Deathblow. The Deathblow experience system is never visible to you at any point, so unless you're using a guide, you won't even know what button combinations to use.

Battles are also incredibly long, taking 3-4 minutes on average, and even more frequent. Like, Xenogears has to have the single highest encounter rate I've ever seen in any game. When you're just trying to get through a dungeon, it's the gaming equivalent of stop-and-go traffic. If you make me feel like I'm in traffic, you've severely fucked up. It doesn't help that the dungeons themselves are mostly mazes that all look the same, and with the isometric system and constantly going into battles, you can easily get turned around and lose progress. Even worse than this is the fact that the developers thought it would be funny to put fake doors everywhere, just to make your experience even worse. Let's not forget about the text speed; even a sloth on ambien would think it's too slow, and for a game with such a massive script (300k words!), it's almost offensive that there aren't any text speed options. Faster text speeds with no option to press a button to skip the text scrolling have pissed me off, but Gears is slower while having about 10 times the word count of one particular offender (and most of that is optional!). In short, Xenogears is friction incarnate. Other friction-heavy games include Tales of Zestiria and the Pokemon Coliseum games.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, we have The Legend of Zelda: A Link Between Worlds. Link moves fast enough that I don't feel the need for a run button, and animations are extremely quick across the board, so battles (and everything else you do) are over much faster while being more engaging. The stamina meter means it's impossible to run out of your ability to solve puzzles, and it recharges quickly enough that it doesn't become a burden on its own. The menus are polished to a mirror sheen, with pins, fast travel, and Maimai tracking divided up into specific sections of the map, among others. Text boxes (dialogue and system messages) are extremely quick to mash through if you so desire. The overworld is a manageable size for Link's movement speed (you can get from one side of the map to the other in 5-10 minutes), so it never feels like a slog to get to any point on the map. Even when you die, you get to continue without losing your progress, which is much more appealing than having to load a save and having to play the last 20 minutes over again. The most downtime ALBW has is when you switch between worlds, but it happens so infrequently that it's almost completely negligible. I can't think of a more frictionless game than A Link Between Worlds. The 3DS Fire Emblems and Indivisible (at least, the overworld and bosses) also qualify for this honor.

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"I play with myself" - Darklit_Minuet, 2018